Metrics for Creatives: How Airtable Measures Success Through Their Content Efforts

Margaret Jones is the Head of Content at Airtable, an easy-to-use online platform for creating and sharing relational databases.

Learn more about Margaret’s focus on improving work environments, how Airtable can help create consistent and engaging content, and what Airtable focuses on beyond standard metrics.

Listen to the Podcast version of this episode:

Guest-at-a-Glance:

Name: Margaret Jones

What She Does: Head of Content

Find Margaret on the Web: Airtable | LinkedIn

Top Takeaways:

Margaret’s Focus on Improving Work Environments

Margaret has many passions, one of which is improving work environments. However, with the pandemic, many employees are now working from home. How are you able to still continue that goal with employees not in the office?

“We have such a high expectation of what our workplace does for us, but they also have such high expectations of the work we’re doing, right?” Margaret said. “I’m really pouring a big part of myself into my job, and that’s really the key for me to be happy is bringing my whole self and to feel like I’m really engaged on a personal level. So that means my work needs to meet me halfway.”

“I am really passionate about both sides of this equation. One side: does your work have leadership training? Are you getting coached on the things you want to work on? Are you being exposed to new challenges? Are you getting really good feedback? The other side is the tech. Do you have the tools that are actually making your work possible?”

Margaret goes on to explain how working at Airtable has allowed her to take some of those passions and the idea that your work should be and feel rewarding, and really create a workplace that doesn’t create despair when you open your laptop.

How Can a Tool Like Airtable Help in Creating Consistent and Engaging Content?

Workplaces have had a lot of changes since Covid-19, and one of the biggest ones is employees working from home or not all together as a full team. For many, it becomes challenging to continue to be creative and to create the engaging content that they need to. How is Airtable trying to keep creativity flowing between teams?

“First, no matter how good your tech is, it cannot have a good idea for you. What it can do is move all of that garbage aside, all of those repetitive tasks, all that operational overhead, and all the admin work that drives you crazy,” Margaret said. “When you have a really simple, low effort, mechanical task, you will be drawn to that task before you are drawn to your big, difficult task; so you can say attention is key. Putting those tasks into a database, into an actual workflow process that can move it aside is one way that it can help you focus on your work.”

“There’s also a piece around collaboration. When we’re creating any project, we need to be plugged into the product roadmap. We need that to be really seamless for folks or else we’re just going to find ourselves constantly duplicating information and having to track things down. So Airtable has really allowed us to bring everything together and see what everyone is doing and get all that great visibility that so many tools tell you they will tell you, but don’t.”

Beyond Standard Content Metrics

“I’ve started to think about metrics beyond the ones that I feel like content usually holds itself to, you know, your basic performance metrics,” Margaret said. “These are everything from traffic and page views, search ranking, all the way to contribution to sales pipeline. I think this is where creativity can come in. Measuring your content purely by those types of performance metrics is kind of like if I measured success in life by my net worth. There are things about my life that don’t show up on that financial dashboard that are huge contributors to how good my life is.”

“Before I even put this piece of content out here, we need to ask ourselves, are we proud of it?”

“With content, there are these same set of hidden metrics. However, when you’re just starting out, you don’t necessarily have those really robust metrics,” Margaret said. “When you don’t have those metrics, you have to operate on a different level and just say, is this good? Before I even put this out here, are we proud of it?”

“Another question we ask ourselves is: does this say something that our competitors haven’t said before or be valuable to someone who’s never going to buy our product? That’s like a classic content marketing question, but starting to quantify those hard-to-quantify metrics and convert them into something you do has been a great exercise for my team,” Margaret said. “We’re actually scoring content, like, a report card before it ever sees the light of day.”

Margaret’s Top Quotes:

[19:11]

“No matter how good your tech is, it cannot have a good idea for you.”

[20:20]

“Good content doesn’t happen by itself in a silo. We need other people because they actually have something of value to add to everything that we do.”