Tips and tricks for marketers to start using Notion

Welcome to our first guide: tips in Notion for marketers (from a marketer)!☄️

As soon as I joined Gretel, they told me their main data and information storage tool was Notion. I had never used it before. After a week, I thought I could do everything, but suddenly one day, I messed with the permission settings. I then asked one of my bosses, Alex, for help. He taught me amazing things to get the most out of Notion. That’s when I realized I didn’t know anything about the potential of Notion, and that probably, like me, other marketers could be suffering the same problem.

In this article, we will focus on several problems I encountered when starting to use Notion 🤯, and then I’ll give the solution for how to do it in Notion! Let's get started.

Problem 1: How to conduct an effective new hire onboarding 🚀.

We’ll start from the beginning.

The second week I was working at Gretel, we had the opportunity to hire some interns to help us investigate our market, improve the website, and so on. So, my first concern after the time it took for me to learn about Gretel, was to create an effective, efficient onboarding or user guide.

How did we do it?

We created a Database gallery view.

The gallery view is not widely used in Notion; we are more used to other database views. It does not make sense if your process has many departments or is very complex. However, if you have clearly differentiated the departments and you want to recap the basic information about who leads each department, the tasks assigned to each, the objectives, etc., it is a very simple way to have all the information in one place.

For those of us who are visual learners, this is much appreciated, since it is not at all pleasant to find yourself on the first day with sheets and sheets of written information that you will need to review several times during the first weeks 🤩!

If you prefer to use the Notion Templates, they have a “company home” template with the most important things to have in this type of document.

PROBLEM 2: How to organize your tasks 📝.

Since day 1 as a marketer, a lot of tasks have started to come in that need to be addressed. It's pretty common that while creating articles, working on social media, editing websites, performing statistical analyses, conducting research or investigations, and such, you need a tool to organize your projects, set an owner or a deadline, provide details about the project, and so on.

I used to work with Trello and Jira. These are amazing tools created specifically for managing projects, but they imply using additional tools. Since our vision is to reduce the number of tools that marketers use, I should start being the first one!

How did we do it?

We created a task board with a look and feel very similar to Trello (since it was the tool I liked the most).

We created the columns: Planning, In-Progress, Review, Completed.

Each card can have all the information you require, so you can add the owners of the card, deadline, type of activity, team working on it…

But, let's face it, this isn't Trello! You cannot automate tasks; however, you can create alerts and notifications with due dates and add comments. Admittedly, if you are really used to using all the pro features from a managing tool program, this will not meet all of your needs

Of course, it has other benefits! You can connect all the other documents easily and have them referenced without going from one tool to another.

PROBLEM 3: How to document meeting notes 🙊.

Every week we do a marketing meeting to follow up, check results with the team, and see how we are doing with our main projects. Many things come up in these meetings, as we tend to always select one or two things to share and improve, so, we need to have a document with the comments and what to do for next week.

This is something we are actually doing, but I was used to another tool, normally Dropbox, as it was more visual.

How did we do it?

Here is another database! This time it’s a table view, with the Description, date, and a preconfigured template inside each with the following: Actions to take, Takeaways, Agenda, and Other notes.

Of course, this is very simple to organize by using data and setting the oldest at the top, but it is an easy way to have a summary of the topics touched on during each meeting, organized well so that anyone in your team can check if they need to!

PROBLEM 4: How to keep your inspiration 🎼.

I never used to have an inspiration board. I used Google Drive documents and sometimes Trello cards, but as I didn’t have a proper place to organize them, I never tended to look at them again once they were written.

If you are creating content, searching for new tools, or just subscribing to different newsletters, creating an inspiration board can be a really visual way of organizing your content.

How did we do it?

We created a Gallery view. In this case, the only thing that is important is to create an order that works for all of your team members. In our case, for example, we have a place with interesting reports, Groups to follow, Mentoring ideas, Interesting websites, Competition, or Interesting podcasts.

Anyone can add a link and share it with a comment, or you can set your alerts so that you receive any further modifications to this database.

ADDITIONAL 💊: Discover the templates for marketers in Notion.

This is the final point: I always check these templates for marketers to get ideas and learn how to do better. It’s important to learn how to improve our processes.

Notion gives you tons of preconfigured templates for basic things. Furthermore, you can find Notion templates created by a variety of companies, some of which require payment.

Also, feel free to use our free templates:

• OKRs
• Target Markets
• Buyer Persona

We hope that you find all this information useful, and that you start reducing the number of apps you use to resolve each of these problems 🙌!