Modern, flexible and collaborative, interactive content calendar tool
May 18, 2020
Modern, flexible and collaborative, interactive content calendar tool
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We are currently using Airtable within our business unit marketing department to help organize our yearly media (direct and non-direct advertising) plan - including the media schedules, creative brand assets, and UTM links tracking details. This tool is used between our company and marketing agency partner. Within our marketing department, we have approximately five users at any given time. We love that data can be easily shared across teams and edit in real-time. This is an extremely affordable solution that helped us transition from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets shared via email to a comprehensive dashboard-like tool. Sorting data by brand, division, dates, advertising creative, and media publishing outlet truly helped us streamline many processes and become efficient between company and marketing agency partner.
- Sort and manipulate data.
- Store PDF and JPEG files (advertising creative).
- Easy collaboration.
- Team friendly.
- Paid product.
- Requires training to understand capabilities.
- Lacking integration with other digital solutions.
- Efficiency.
- Digital transformation.
- Collaboration.
Airtable was the most comprehensive, economical, and easy to use in direct comparison to GatherContent, Asana, Smartsheet, and CoSchedule. The solution that sticks out to me the most is Smartsheet. Through our team's evaluation, we quickly recognized how much more flexible, modern and easy to navigate Airtable was over Smartsheet. Airtable helped us follow our existing media process while avoiding redundant tasks (i.e. needing to update multiple spreadsheets with the same information). Keeping data accurate was also important, so we needed "protected" or "locked" grids to avoid accidentally editing by team members who only view content. We found GatherContent was a tool better suited for website/blog-type content reviews and workflows. And Asana was better suited for project management. We did some testing on the format/template that best fit our needs and we came to a general format that we think will work best within Airtable.
Do you think Airtable delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Airtable's feature set?
Yes
Did Airtable live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Airtable go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Airtable again?
Yes
Airtable Feature Ratings
Using Airtable
6 - The individuals within our company who use Airtable include our marketing operations/marketing communications team for one business unit. Experience by users within the company spanning 3-11 years. Additionally, we share this tool with our marketing agency, who has an additional 7 users. Collectively 13 users actively use Airtable for our business.
3 - Airtable is very user friendly and accessible by a wide variety of individuals with varying digital experience. Furthermore, deciding to use Airtable is part of our company's effort to digitally transform our business - we shifted from paper printouts to a versatile, interactive tool to support many areas of our marketing efforts.
- Compiling data.
- Visually sharing data.
- Collaboration across the team.
- Content calendar.
- Advertising asset management.
- Use between corporate company and marketing agency.
- Advertising analytics.
- Website content updates.
- Budget tracking.
Evaluating Airtable and Competitors
Yes - In a way, we replace Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for these reasons:
- Excel spreadsheets typically can only be edited in real-time by one user.
- Excel spreadsheets corrupt when many, many users are editing, saving, and emailing - especially when users have different versions of the software.
- Exporting PDFs of data from Excel spreadsheets was difficult and often impossible to print large content calendars of information.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Although we had not used Airtable previously or consulted other users for their review, we were confident in the product features and ease of use. And the price was right - very affordable for us to try with a smaller group within our large organization. Now that we have used Airtable for five months, we have confidence.
If we had to do it again, we may have expanded our evaluation process to compare Airtable with additional products and tested with additional teams beyond marketing, such as sales. We may have placed more emphasis on the ability to integrate with additional tools we use company-wide, such as Microsoft SharePoint, TapClicks, and Adobe website products.
Airtable Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - Yes, we did implement Airtable in phases with our marketing agency partner, which included the following:
- Brainstormed a long list of "must-have" features to help the committee of researchers find Airtable.
- We then made a list of all products for consideration, which included Airtable, GatherContent, Asana, Smartsheet, and CoSchedule.
- Once Airtable was chosen, we partnered with our external marketing agency to set-up our first content calendar and provide training to our corporate marketing team.
- Our marketing agency now populates the data and shared between teams.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - Implementing Airtable was certainly a departure from using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for years. Many individuals were involved to get this project off the ground. Change management was well-handled both internally and externally, so this new tool could be used efficiently. For our external marketing agency, this is a different tool from what the agency uses for other clients. A process had to be developed and adopted by both parties.
- Backdating data.
- Identifying a template that worked best for accomplishing goals.
- Adopting change and new process.