Airtable Optimize Your Marketing Supply Chain User Guide

Airtable Optimize Your Marketing Supply Chain

Product Information:

Specifications:

• Product Name: Airtable
• Function: Marketing supply chain optimization tool
• Key Features: Efficiency, visibility, coordination, scalability

Product Usage Instructions

Introduction
The Airtable marketing supply chain tool is designed to optimize your marketing processes and enhance efficiency in content creation and distribution. Optimizing Your Marketing Supply Chain:
To optimize your marketing supply chain, follow these steps:

1. Identify inefficiencies in your current process.
2. Streamline workflows to reduce duplicate work and wasted efforts.
3. Enhance visibility and coordination among teams.
4. Implement scalable processes to accommodate growth.

Phase 1: Planning
Utilize supply chain principles during the planning phase by:

• Prioritizing impactful opportunities.
• Gaining upfront buy-in to prevent rework.
• Executing global plans effectively.

FAQ

Q: How can Airtable help reduce costs in marketing?
A: Airtable optimizes processes, reduces duplication, and improves visibility, leading to cost savings.

Q: Can Airtable be used for small marketing teams?
A: Yes, Airtable’s principles can be applied to teams of any size to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Q: Is training required to use Airtable effectively?
A: While training can be beneficial, Airtable is designed for intuitive use and provides support resources for users.

Accelerating your teams, processes, and impact with supply chain principles

Introduction

More than 50% of marketers are slashing their budget this year. The economy is precarious, every contract renewal is under serious scrutiny, and the pressure to “defend the spend” has been dialed up to 11. AI content generation has lowered the cost of creation, but it’s also raised the level of noise—your audience, which was already over-saturated with marketing messages, is even more overwhelmed and unimpressed. Competition is fierce, time and patience are at a premium, and (according to McKinsey) your CEO is probably banking on you, the marketing leader, to drive growth. Unfortunately—especially for large, complex enterprises—that’s easier said than done. But marketing leaders are finding a new approach in a discipline that values efficiency above all else: supply chain management.

The marketing supply chain

Physical supply chain management is the process of creating maximum efficiency in the flow of goods, and doing so with minimal inventory. Supply chain engineers seek to create systems in which every step of the process is necessary and adds value, and every product and by-product is used to the fullest extent. Your marketing supply chain is built on similar principles. And the ultimate outcome will resonate with marketing leaders today: high- quality production, as efficiently as possible, and at scale.

Physical supply chain vs. marketing supply chain

Symptoms of broken links in your supply chain

Slow time-to-market, due to inefficient creation

• Frustrating, unclear processes.
  Lack of alignment, visibility, and coordination burdens the production process from start to finish.

• Painful handoffs across a large number of stakeholders.
  Cross-functional processes are ad hoc and manual, leading to missed deadlines and poor-quality output— which also increases the cost of creation.

• Difficulty in scaling.

• As your team has grown, the processes you’ve relied on remain the same—creating endless operational overhead and complexity as you work to reach larger audiences.

• Fragmented, unevenly adopted tools.
  Teams waste precious time searching for information, or trying to piece it together.

Duplicate or wasted work, due to low visibility.

• Content duplication and waste. As information is siloed across systems, your organization is saddled with significant content waste, producing assets that go un-promoted, or duplicating efforts across teams or geos.
• Disconnected teams. You need to unite teams to improve your speed and adapt to market shifts, but without a cohesive operating model, your efforts fall flat.

Uninspired, unsuccessful campaigns, due to unclear or poorly measured goals.

• Inconsistent quality.
  Your team is misaligned on direction and goals, making it hard to define success, let alone achieve it.

• Lack of personalization and failure to maintain relevance.
  Stymied by slow production times and inaccessible insights, your team produces one-size-fits-all campaigns that fail to resonate.

• Low (or no) visibility into performance.

• You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and your team struggles to connect their campaigns to impact.

Phase 1

Planning

When you apply supply chain principles to your planning process, your team can accurately prioritize the most impactful opportunities, and gain upfront buy- in that mitigates thrash, rework, or poor adoption and execution of global plans.

Goal : Centralize your planning in a way that allows teams to prioritize for the greatest impact instead of duplicating efforts or planning in silos.

Strategies to implement:

• Centralize your sources of truth to drive insights-driven planning.
  Centralize context such as goals, products, audiences, campaigns.

• Standardize your core planning processes to set your team up for speed.
  Align on and document your team’s brief and intake process. Tightly define roles and responsibilities to streamline reviews.

• Use AI to mine insights from a large number of data sources.

• Leverage AI to ingest data from the web, your existing content, and other sources. Monitor relevant topics, surface trends, and provide timely suggestions to meet your specific campaign objectives.

Phase 2

Production

The more standard and repeatable your processes are, the more accurate your capacity planning—allowing your team to make firm commitments to timelines, identify and address bottlenecks, and apply automation to links in the chain. This is also an opportunity to mitigate waste.

Goal : Reduce the amount of time to bring new campaigns to market through intelligent capacity planning and efficient repurposing of assets.

Strategies to implement:

• Automate repetitive processes that are slowing down your team.
  Having standardized processes in the planning phase—briefing, for example—allows you to automate repeating steps and notifications.

• Use “atomic content” to speed up production time.
  Break your assets (or campaigns) into modular pieces that can be differently combined for different audiences and geos.

• Bring every piece of the workflow together.

• Simplify handoffs and highlight dependencies with integrated tools that sync data and workflows between cross-functional teams.

Phase 3

Distribution

Bring campaign data (like assets, calendars, and goals) together with the tools you already use (such as your CMS, marketing automation, etc.), opening up the door to automated publishing, and streamlined downstream reporting.

Goal : Get the right content to the right customers at the right time.

Strategies to implement:

• Invest in a unified production and promotion calendar,
  so teams have full visibility into what’s coming and can maximize the impact in-market of what’s being produced.

• Tag assets at scale:

• Capture assets and metadata in alignment with a shared, org-wide taxonomy. Scaled data tagging ensure assets can be repurposed and reported on.

• Automate publishing:
  Integrate your calendar and asset library with channels like social, CMS, and email to help automate your distribution and publishing. One customer, Equinox, was able to improve their content time-to-market by 4X by bulk publishing fitness classes from Airtable to their CMS.

Phase 4

Measurement

Accurate, accessible measurement feeds back into planning—so your team can inform bets with confidence and evidence. Accurate measurement allows you to make key campaign optimizations, tweak active campaigns in-market, and reallocate investments based on insights to better hit quarterly targets.

Goal : Confidently inform the next planning process with evidence-based insights.

Strategies to implement:

• Empower your team to surface and understand their metrics.
  Implement accessible tools that enable savvy marketers to immediately start understanding performance impact.

• Build retrospectives into your campaign and/or launch plans.
  Retros aren’t just for reporting on numbers—they’re a place to bubble up insights that will feed your next planning cycle.

• Bring your marketing investment to life.
  Tell the whole ROI story. A unified marketing supply chain gives you access to challenging KPIs like cost per piece of content, resourcing, budgeting, content utilization, and (finally) revenue impact.

Conclusion

In the face of a challenging economic landscape and increasing pressure to deliver results, leaders must find innovative ways to accelerate their time to market. The marketing supply chain, inspired by physical supply chain management principles, offers a powerful framework to achieve this goal. In Airtable, you can align teams around shared and trusted data, consolidate rigid martech, and connect flexible workflows. You can empower everyone in your marketing team to harness AI to move more quickly and augment workflows. And you’re able to build intuitive, AI-powered apps without losing connection or sacrificing the unique way your team collaborates and innovates. Learn more about the AI-powered marketing supply chain

About Airtable

Airtable enables teams to work the way they want while also staying aligned, allowing them to do their best work, together. With the Airtable Connected Apps PlatformTM, teams can build custom apps on top of shared data to best support their unique workflows— from managing campaigns to launching products to tracking applicants. This helps strengthen alignment across teams, boost employee productivity and efficiency at scale, and reduce costs and risks through tool consolidation.

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