How to use Miro to manage content production

Miro is my go-to tool for content planning and management. In this post I’m going to show you how I use it to manage content production. I’ll also show you how I use it to plan and track the narrative for longer writing tasks, such as web pages.

What is Miro?

Miro, formally Realtime Board, was designed as a collaboration tool for product development, UX research and design, and lean or agile product teams. I first came across it when I was working as the Marketing Manager at Foolproof.

Miro describes itself as a real-time and asynchronous collaboration tool.

“Whether your teams are collocated, distributed, or fully remote, Miro provides an engaging intuitive in-person collaboration experience with multiple options for real-time asynchronous teamwork.”

To give you a better idea, here is a screenshot of a section of one of my live boards. The main part of the screen is taken up by my content plan. In the right-hand corner, you can see that this canvas contains many different sections, including content strategy, content pillars, trends map, and events calendar. 

Miro is essentially a large, infinite canvas, on which you can build individual boards. It also has many other functions, not covered by this post, such as integrations and authorship.

Why Miro is a superior content management tool

I didn’t always use Miro. Over the years I’ve tried all sort of tools and combination of tools. These have included Excel, Word, Google docs, on and offline notebooks, whiteboards, other online tools. The systems I created were ok, but the individual components always felt disconnected and messy.

Staying focused

As a solo marketing manager, you can expect to be working on multiple jobs at once. Tasks will include planning, execution and people management. You’ll need multiple files such as brand guidelines, business objectives, marketing strategy and plan, pipeline, content tracking etc.

With Miro you can store all of these production documents in the same place. This is what I love most about this tool. Staying focused is key to becoming an effective and efficient content manager. With multiple pulls on attention and time it’s easy to lose sight of long-term objectives. I like to have current, essential information to hand.

If you ever feel like you are straying from the path you can return to your original strategy without having to hunt out Word or Excel files. For example, the job displayed above includes the content strategy and a trends map. This enables me to refer back regularly and quickly to the high-level plan. 

Keeping the wider business informed

It’s also great for keeping the wider team focused on individual tasks as well as the bigger picture. You can use it for marketing planning sessions, briefing teams, or simply presenting your content strategy to the wider business.

Why Miro is good for copywriting

The number one benefit I get from this tool is being able to see the bigger picture – whenever I need it – even when working on a single task. When it comes to large, strategic copywriting jobs this is incredibly useful.

Here’s a zoomed-out screenshot of a web copy writing job I worked on.

As you can see this canvas is much larger. It includes sitemap, interesting snippets of copy from other marketing materials, tone of voice, customer problems, a narrative map, snippets of copy and ideas. Importantly it also contains all of the draft pages.

When writing copy for websites you can either store them all in one Word document and read them as a whole or store each page in its own separate file. By pasting them all into Miro I can read through the pages in a manner that mirrors the customer journey – rather than reading them in the order I pasted them in. This is key for making sure it flows, contains the right information, the tone is consistent etc.

In addition, with large jobs such as this it’s commonplace for there to be gaps during the editing and approval phases. It’s very easy to lose your thread when this happens and forget the direction in which you were taking the copy and why you made the decisions you made.

Miro means it is all tracked and recorded so you can always return to your original thinking.

I have also used Miro in a similar manner for writing lead gen whitepapers. Again, it enables me to see all of the information in one place as a whole, rather than having to skip between different files.

How much does it cost?

I’m still using the free version. It does everything I need it to do. The only issue is that you are limited to 5 editable boards and 5 team members. If you want unlimited boards it costs $40 per month.

Demo video

Here’s a short video walking you through setting up a basic content calendar. Feel free to ask questions about the tool in the comments below or hook up with me on LinkedIn.