How Airtable makes life easier for Typeform’s Content team

In a nutshell

I opened my inbox this morning and saw three new emails like this:

Over to Slack where Jo-Shan on our Customer Success team asked:

As Content Manager, I’m always looking for good writers with unique experiences to share. So I love to hear new ideas for great articles. But to be honest, managing all these requests is a pain in the ass.

So when our Product team announced they were building a Typeform-Airtable integration, it was all lightbulbs.

How we manage requests

We’ve gotten better at it over the years.

At first it was manual back-and-forth emails to start the conversation, filter through ideas, and discuss processes and distribution plans.

That usually involved copying and pasting discussions into Google Docs and Sheets, and plenty of frustrating searches through email threads.

Then we started asking for key info through a typeform—things like name, email, article summary, and links to sample writings. Check it out here, and leave us your idea if you’ve got one:

This helped us collect key info, but it still took some copy-paste to keep records ordered in one place. That place used to be Google Sheets, but it had some limits. Like not being able to add photos, attachments, or multiple tags within a single cell.

Airtable fixed all of that. It’s like a Google Sheet on steroids. Or a database for non-SQL speakers.

Now we keep track of all our content in Airtable—from landing pages to blog articles to help center how-tos. We tag every page and post with a persona, use case, primary job-to-be-done, and other keywords. More on that below.

So why not keep potential content ideas here too? That was the integration lightbulb.

In less than five minutes, I’d mapped all the questions in the guest post typeform with corresponding columns in our content Airtable. It was like watching a male seahorse give birth to 2,000 babies at once.

Well, maybe not quite that intense. But it got all our guest requests automatically sent to the same Airtable for easy tagging and sorting.

Then James, who coordinates customer inspiration stories, had a great idea:

We use the customer story typeform to collect basic info from people using typeform for all sorts of cool things—from social entrepreneurs building a startup with their allowance, to Forbes grabbing nominees for their 30 under 30.

Got a great Typeform use case to share? Let us know here:

The answers we get help start a conversation with our users. Then when we follow up, we already have their basic info so we can spend more time deep-diving into their story.

Now with the Typeform-Airtable integration, those customer stories come in through the typeform and automatically find their way to their Airtable home.

And with all our existing content and potential stories in one place, it’s easier to respond to content requests.

Hey, we need an article for…

People need content for everything. Landing pages, ad campaigns, email journeys, social media. The list is endless.

Before, we had to manually search through our site to find content, or just remember what we had that fit the request.

But Airtable makes tagging and finding easy. So now when someone needs an article with interactive content, in less than five seconds I can pull up a list including:

• a chatbot-driven tour of conversational user interfaces

• a typeform-driven interactive video  

• an interactive chat with Susan Bennett, the  original voice of Siri

If someone asks for interviews to share on social, the flick of a switch yields conversations with Hooked author Nir Eyal, Zapier founder and CEO Wade Foster, and Lance Jones of Airstory and Copy Hacker fame.

And when I get pinged for a customer story on lead generation, I can respond almost instantly with options like how Beardbrand generated over 150,000 leads and tons of backlinks with a typeform quiz.

That Beardbrand story started through the typeform, and now it’s easily discoverable in the Airtable.

And that is some Typeform-Airtable bonsai beauty.

Ready to get started?

You’ll need a PRO Typeform account with at least one typeform, and an Airtable account with at least one base.

• Head to  this Help Center article for more info on how to set up the integration, and a cheatsheet on mapping typeform questions to Airtable fields.

• Get started by copying our blog guest post submission form or our customer story submission form templates to your workspace.