For marketers, one of our most important jobs is to build trust and strengthen relationships with our customers through personal and engaging content. But the emergence of new channels, formats and technology have changed our customers’ expectations and created intense competition for their attention. And all of this puts pressure on marketing organizations to work with greater agility, move faster and deliver even more creative content.
But content operations are plagued with inefficiencies. Teams are preoccupied with managing the minutiae around the process instead of the content itself. And the pandemic has further exacerbated the operational grind as workloads increase and remote work reconfigures how everything gets done. Marketers today need to rethink every aspect of their playbook.
Agility creates more productive workflows
Airtable recently surveyed senior-level marketing leaders to better understand their challenges. More than 70% of the survey respondents said the volume of campaigns and content they need to deliver has increased compared to a year ago. And 38% reported their workload is up 50% or more.
Change is not limited to customer content; internal and stakeholder communications have also shifted significantly. It’s easy to relate to these changes when they’re so widespread, intense and driven by something as large-scale as a global pandemic. But marketers have learned with the introduction of every new channel, medium, geography, product or competitor that speed, iteration and adaptive capacity are key to keeping up with customer preferences and employee expectations.
Cross-functional workflows need flexibility
If agility and adaptability are key to staying relevant, then efficient and flexible processes are mandatory for execution. But marketing workflows aren’t linear or set up to work well in the cross-functional environments that exist today. Modern workflows are a complex mix of plans and assets across many teams managed by a complicated set of tools.
According to our research, the average marketing team routinely uses 23 marketing tools. The more tools marketers add to their mar-tech stacks, the more fragmented their work becomes. Data is duplicated in some places and missing in others. Teams struggle to show their true impact, and leaders don’t have the visibility they need for fast decision-making.
Marketing teams need a single place to connect their people, processes and systems, as well as a reliable source of truth for their data. And with that, they need tools that can be tailored to their unique business and way of working—instead of rigid, siloed applications that force teams to work around them.
Content and campaign production at scale
Because many businesses manage hundreds of campaigns and thousands of assets in a given year, even the slightest change can disrupt the overall operations of a team. This became painfully clear over the past year. Of the 1,700 b-to-b marketers surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute, 70% reported they adjusted their content strategies in response to the pandemic.
It’s no surprise then that the no-code movement is being embraced by marketers to bring order to this chaos. Marketers crave simple solutions and need the flexibility to refine processes over time.
Imagine if, with a few clicks, your team could integrate workflows across disparate tools, automate processes, and augment your data. And, in a world of simultaneously scaling up and scaling out, you could safely and seamlessly orchestrate workflows across internal stakeholders and external vendors, sharing controlled portions of your data as needed.
Refocus energy on innovation
Modern marketing teams cannot rely on current legacy marketing technology to achieve their goals and drive positive business outcomes. Airtable’s new marketing solution empowers marketing teams to streamline work, move quickly and continue to raise the bar on marketing programs, content and campaigns. Teams can create a single centralized source for all their marketing work, leverage critical work in one place and keep aligned on plans, even as business needs change and evolve.
Airtable offers marketers the power of a relational database, so you can scale to thousands of users, updating your data in real-time. The database gives teams a holistic view of all the data, people, and assets in one single place, reveals the complex and custom relationships between them, and delivers timely insights to drive decision-making. This helps marketers quickly adapt to changes and raise the bar on high-quality and high-velocity content.
To be competitive, marketing leaders need agile, flexible platforms that scale and bring together all the context around the critical related data their businesses need in one place.
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Archana Agrawal is the CMO of Airtable, a platform that empowers marketing teams to create custom applications to suit their specific business needs. With more than two decades of software industry experience, Archana has led data science, growth marketing, and corporate-wide analytics teams at the world’s leading software brands.
