One of the biggest challenges when managing any type of workflow is staying organized. When there are many moving pieces and several employees involved, it's easy for information to get lost or efforts to be accidentally duplicated. This is why using a tool like Airtable to improve your content management can be so valuable - and made even more valuable when you discover advanced linking of records.
There are a few things you'll want to think about before diving into linking records in your Airtable database.
First, look at all of the information you'd like to track and how it needs to connect together. It will be much easier to map your thoughts now, than trying to piece everything together as you go along.
Tip: Create a flow chart for your workflow and work through any holes or missing criteria.
AmpliPhi's Content Management Using Advanced Linking
For the interactive example below, we look at AmpliPhi's Content Calendar database in Airtable. We needed an efficient way to track Content, Campaigns and Team - and how they all relate to one another.
Let's start with the Content table. We needed to see all the basics (like status, channel, creative, due dates, etc), as well as the Creator and the Campaign it falls under. In order to link the Content data with the other tables, you can see we created a linked field.
To create a linked field, click the "+" and "Link to another record." For the Creator field, we chose Team and for the Campaign field, we chose Campaign.
Once you've linked fields, you can choose the record you'd like to link to. Watch the video to see the "Test" content added.
Next up, the Campaign table. Here we wanted to display an overview of each campaign, such as lead, creators, total number of content pieces, total number of live content pieces, creative and related content titles.
- Campaign Lead is linked to a field in the Team table.
- Creators is a rollup field, which links to the records we want to summarize (Content table) and the table field that we want to roll up (Creator). We also add an aggregation formula which rolls up the values in each linked record [ARRAYUNIQUE(values)].
- Total # of Content uses the count field to add up the number of content records per campaign.
- # of Live Content uses the same idea but we also added conditions - where the status is live.
- Campaign Creative is a lookup field, meaning it is pulling over the linked creative from the Content table. Any time you add new creative on the Content table and link it to a Campaign, it will also appear in the Campaign table.
- Content is a linked field that appears because we already linked our content in the Content table to the Campaigns table. You'll find that the "Test" data that we added in the last example is here.
Finally, the Team table. This table includes the fundamentals for each team member, such as location, role, and email. With linked fields (created in the prior steps), we can also view what Content and/or Campaigns team members are in charge of.
This is just one of the (many) ways to improve your content management using advanced linking in Airtable. What other tricks have you used to enhance workflows for your team?
Meet the Author
erin schleicher
Erin is a Client Success Manager who partners with companies to grow their professional brands. After spending over a decade working in events and marketing, Erin specializes in eCommerce and has run hundreds of campaigns using custom audiences and geographic, demographic and psychographic targeting.
Erin holds an undergraduate degree and MBA in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin and continues to grow her marketing knowledge through conferences, webinars, podcasts and networking.