Using Airtable for Growth Marketing

Airtable is an incredibly versatile tool for marketers, and includes pre-built marketing templates for everything from tracking content operations and campaigns, to social media planning, event planning, editorial calendars and more.

Additionally there are a number of pre-built template for growth marketing and experimentation management, including one of our own:

• Growth Experiments Template – This template is perfect for providing structure to your growth experiment process. Successful growth hacking involves applying the scientific method to your growth hacking experiments. Use the structure of this template to thoroughly track and record your experiments and establish and organize a strong growth process.

• Growth Experiments Planning and Execution Template – This template can help you brainstorm, plan, prioritize, and track execution of your growth experiments, whether you're a growth team at a startup building out a growth hacking strategy, a marketing team at a growing firm hoping to better organize a complex customer acquisition strategy, or a large team seeking to manage a multi-faceted marketing strategy ranging from traditional marketing and digital marketing techniques, to more agile, analytically-oriented growth hacking techniques.

• EVELYN: Experiment Velocity Engine Lifting Your Numbers – EVELYN is a central place to track experiments, starting at the idea stage. It stands for “Experiment Velocity Engine, Lifting Your Numbers.”

• Growth Marketing & Experimentation (growthmethod.com) – We used this base for growth marketing and experimentation prior to building Growth Method. It includes a number of core tables and pre-built filters to help growth marketing teams to track marketing objectives, run revenue experiments, engage stakeholders and build in-house expertise.

Why use Airtable for growth marketing?

Using Airtable for growth marketing is a great starting point for new or small growth teams, they have a number of pre-built templates, or you can create our own, and it is a simple low-cost solution. However, as your team grows or your needs become more advanced, you may want to explore Airtable alternatives for growth marketers that offer features like real-time analytics, automated reporting, and AI-assisted prioritisation.

Once you get to even a small number of experiments on a regular basis, things can quickly become overwhelming. A solo growth marketer could easily run 5 or more experiments every week, for example:

1. Test a new ad creative in Google Ads

2. Try a new email subject line in HubSpot

3. Experiment with a new landing page variation using Google Optimise

4. Publish 2 new SEO optimised articles

This equates to 20 experiments a month or 260 a year, and this doesn't take into account any additional idea generation and prioritisation, which is typically the bulk of any growth marketing system.

How Speero use Airtable

Don't let the spreadsheet-like feel and simple UI put you off. Airtable is incredibly flexible and used by Speero, arguably the world's most renowned growth and experimentation agency for everything from experiment dashboards to velocity tracking.

Functionally it can do everything you need, but if you, your team or your client are after a nice user experience and a polished user interface, you may want to reconsider!

How to use Airtable for growth marketing

Track your growth experiments in Airtable by creating separate tables or views depending on the complexity you require, we suggest:

1. Objectives

2. Experiments

3. Playbooks

4. Documentation

5. Team

6. System

We'll expand on each of these more below though you can also access a copy of our Airtable for Growth Marketing base.

Objectives

The objectives tab includes growth objectives in the OKR format as shown below:

• Objective

• KR1, KR2, KR3

• Type (Growth Process, Traffic, Engagement etc)

• Funnel Stage (Acquisition, Activate, Retention etc)

Experiments

The Experiment table is where ideas and experiments are stored, for ease of use we setup separate views for:

1. Submit New Opportunity

2. Awaiting Prioritisation

3. Prioritised

4. In Design

5. Analysing

6. In Progress

7. Complete

8. Playbooks

These are controlled via a 'Stage' field which is a single select drop-down.

The 'Stage' field is used to customise each view, for example, the 'Experiments In Progress' view shows content where the 'Stage' = 'Experiment In Progress'.

Additional Airtable Growth Marketing Resources

Darius Contractor (currently head of Growth at Facebook) has published his own Airtable growth marketing template which is available here bit.ly/evelyn-airtable and here https://airtable.com/shrInOxl0SL1Xmauk.

Airtable also have their own growth experiments template that you can start with and customise as needed, see the video below for additional information.

Wistia video link

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