Here's one way to use Airtable to streamline marketing campaign management processes and enhance team collaboration at the same time.
Challenges Managing Marketing Workstreams
Managing both time-bound campaigns 🗓️ and ongoing regular deliverables 🏗️ can be tricky for marketing teams.
Day-to-day work and inbound tasks
Not everything marketing delivers will fall within a campaign! I've run into many teams using Asana or Jira projects for campaigns that end up with double-entry work to maintain a single content or social media calendar. What if you're a graphic designer, cranking out a graphic variation for a salesperson, or a product marketer making updates to public comparison sheets? What if you're in MarkOps and doing a lot of internal work, creating lists, automations, messaging, reports? Where do you log and track this kind of work that is valuable and takes time, but doesn't belong in a formal project?
Weekly/monthly leadership updates
I've ALSO run across a lot of managers spending precious time chasing team members down for weekly status reports to send to their bosses. You're probably meeting weekly with direct reports, but if you don't have a communal way to track and manage work, you'll be double-checking with them to make sure you're up to speed with everything going on.
To address these challenges, our team found a solution that worked well for us - using Airtable as a central database for managing marketing campaigns and any kind of deliverable.
Airtable to manage marketing work for start-ups, non-profits and small teams
I'd used Airtable at a previous company, so when I joined a new, small marketing team and discovered they were managing work individually, I wanted to set up a shared place to track our work that would:
- Give me visibility of what was going on across the team and what individuals were doing
- Provide a backlog for work that could be started once tasks in progress were completed
- Give us a detailed record of what we'd done - so important for a fast-moving marketing team!
- Create a complete view of what the team's doing (so when a 'drop-everything' project came our way, we could instantly show them existing work and have a conversation)
- Allow agile team members to manage their own ongoing work, handle unanticipated requests, shape their domain, add/adjust items, etc.
- Let us group work into projects or campaigns
Marketing deliverables/tasks
The first table houses all deliverables and tasks, which range from whitepapers to webinars, blog posts, CRM reports, sales collateral, internal work, social media, etc.
Think of Airtable like a spreadsheet with unlimited visual, absorbable overlays - you can organize, filter, group, sort the same entries into all sorts of views: lists, kanban, calendar, timelines. We had views for:
- Content Calendar
- Deliverable Type (Webinars, Events, Email, Internal, Collateral, etc)
- Person
- Focus Area (Lead Gen, Brand Awareness, Customer Experience, Ops/internal, etc.)
- Completed this week
- Stalled/with others for action
- Abandoned
Here's a screenshot of a view showing only IN PROGRESS items:
If you use this table for your one-on-ones and weekly team syncs, it naturally becomes a habit to keep it updated. You can create specific views to use for these check ins.
One of my favorites is a "Completed this Week" view, so you don't forget to celebrate how much has been accomplished! Marketing teams are NEVER done, and there's always MORE to do.
Marketing campaigns
The second table in the same base lists all time-bound campaigns. This gave us one view of our major projects covering lifecycle marketing, lead generation, and brand awareness - all projects focusing on marketing to audiences.
Here's a timeline view with campaigns color-coded:
- Pink = brand awareness
- Blue = lead gen
- Yellow = customer experience
- Green = customer + lead gen
This timeline provides a compelling and easily digestible overview that can be used to engage Sales, Product, Customer Experience, and Leadership team members during campaign selection and planning stages.
It also serves as a valuable reference point when urgent needs arise or when decisions need to be made about priorities.
Associating deliverables with campaigns
The two tables are connected - each campaign can link to multiple deliverables:
This allowed us to have a comprehensive view of all the tasks and deliverables associated with a campaign in one place.
Team members primarily work in the task view, where they can add their self-managed workstreams. This ensures that they have visibility into their individual tasks and responsibilities. Managers, on the other hand, can work across both tabs and use the campaign view to track the overall progress of campaigns.
With Airtable, leaders can access real-time campaign views at any time, since their built off your team's actual work items. You can provide a view-only link (OR set them up with their own paid license and train them to navigate the many available views). 😀 They can see major projects at a glance and drill down into specific details if needed. This gives leadership the high-level view they need without requiring additional reporting or double work.
Campaign project plans
Now, the campaign entries in Airtable are NOT the place to house detail-rich campaign plans, outlining key target personas, messaging and design concepts. You'll want to use a project planning document - here's a skeleton template that might be helpful, as you're working together to agree and shape up key campaigns:
I hope you found some ideas here! You can explore different views in the dummy Airtable (view only) here if you like. And if you have other ways that work for you and your team to manage the vast range of tasks and projects that you handle, please share. 💡
Best, P.
