Get more power from your marketing data
Don McGray
4 min read
Written by
Don McGray
Filed Under
Guide for marketers
Get more power from your marketing data
Before we dive in, let’s pause: Congratulations! Maybe without even realizing it, you’ve built your first database. By building your first base in Airtable, you’re on the way to building your first app, unlocking the power of the data that you—and your team—create and use every day.
There are a few more things we’d like to share with you. These are advanced tools that thousands of companies use to make key decisions and drive work forward but that shouldn’t mean they’re hard to set up or use. We’re excited to introduce you to the tools we believe will help you get the most out of your marketing data.
Let’s get started.
1. Sync your data across bases and tools
So, you’ve got your base set up and you’ve brought your team in. Other teams have heard how great Airtable is and they want to start using it as well. And those teams want to reference some of the projects and pieces of content in your base (for example, your PMM team wants to keep track of your launch blog post, so they can give the green light to their product team). In other tools, they might duplicate your data and now you’ve got a problem: You’re drowning in updates.
That’s where Airtable Sync can help: Instead of teams copying parts of your data, they can sync across bases so that when you update the status of your Projects table, they’ll see the update in their base. That way, your source of truth remains…well, truthful.
And if you want to sync your data to another tool like Salesforce or JIRA, that’s easy to do as well. That way, you can see what your team is working on in the same view as data from other teams. For example, you can see your content calendar right next to a list of milestones in JIRA, so you know where to make adjustments.
2. Automate repetitive tasks
One of the things that can really slow a marketing team down is repetitive tasks. You have to create a brief, schedule a kickoff, send the brief to the right parties, and still, manage every step of the process. Between managing the repetitive tasks, it can be hard to remember the core reason for your work: Is your work driving results?
You can use Airtable Automations to make sure that repetitive but essential tasks are off your plate. Plus, you can combine Automations with integrations to add even more power since you’re connecting your data with tools your team already uses. When a new brief comes in, Airtable can automatically create a new Slack message to alert your team that it’s time to review and approve the latest brief. Or, you can set up an email action that makes sure every team reviewer has the first version when it’s ready. You can even publish to social media with third-party tools like Hootsuite. And you can stay focused on tasks that drive the most impact.
3. Create in Airtable faster
Finally, we often see a similar pattern: Once you and your team see the power of Airtable, you want to get all your data into a base as soon as you can. But, you don’t want to go through manual creation every time. Here’s two efficient ways to continue building in Airtable: Batch upload and efficient copy and paste.
Let’s say you’ve got a table where you want to store all the ads for your paid media team. You want everything in one place so you can see a complete ad at a glance: Your goal, audience, copy, creative, and timing a single card. Uploading all those images can feel tedious, but with batch upload you can simply drag and drop a folder of images into Airtable and we’ll handle the rest.
We’ve already told you about importing, but sometimes you just need to copy and paste data. We’ve made it easy to copy and paste data from an Excel file and other spreadsheet-like tools so that with your copy and paste keyboard shortcuts and a click, you can build a base without starting from scratch.
We’ve kept this guide shorter because we know you want to get building. As you continue to build, we know you’ll find even more powerful ways to use Airtable. And this is just the beginning: We’ve only scratched the surface of automations, integrations, and syncing with Airtable. We can’t wait to see what you build!
