marketing-ops

What this skill does

# Marketing operations

Set up and run marketing operations workflows — request intake, campaign orchestration, creative production, content calendars, brand and compliance review, events, multi-market rollout, budgets and ROI, capacity planning — adapting to the user's team shape, sub-workflow priorities, and customer audience. The skill scaffolds these workflows in Airtable; ask scope before scaffolding, because the same trigger can mean a single marketer with a 3-table base, a 30-person MOps team consolidating 70+ spreadsheets, or an agency running 200+ client bases — and the right schema depends on what the user is actually trying to coordinate.

## Who this serves and what they're solving for

Marketing operations serves several recurring personas, each with distinct top priorities:

-   **CMO / VP Marketing** — campaign performance visibility, brand consistency across channels and regions, agency oversight, budget pacing.
-   **MOps director** — request intake throughput, taxonomy hygiene, team capacity visibility, single source of truth across the stack.
-   **Creative ops / production lead** — designer queue, brief-to-asset cycle time, multi-round review and approvals.
-   **Brand / compliance manager** (regulated industries) — legal review SLA, claims accuracy, version control on approved assets.
-   **Demand-gen / content lead** — editorial cadence, channel attribution, lifecycle production.
-   **Agency producer** — multi-client visibility, billable utilization, client-portal access.

The cross-cutting pain that drives this category into Airtable: _"swivel-chair work"_ across many single-purpose tools, no central source of truth for what's running where, capacity invisible until burnout, briefs lost in inboxes, budget vs. actuals reconciled manually each quarter.

## Before scaffolding: ask scope

Marketing operations cuts across CPG, apparel, financial services, healthcare, pharma, media, telecom, automotive, energy, hospitality, music labels, agencies, education, and nonprofit — even more broadly than product-ops. The "obvious" B2B-SaaS default fits less than a third of real-world cases. Lead with three scope questions, branch from there.

1. **Team and org shape.** Solo marketer / small (under 10) / mid (10-50) / large (50+) / enterprise (multi-brand or multi-region) / agency running multiple clients. Determines schema-shape default — an in-house team of 5 and an agency with 200 clients don't want the same scaffolding.
2. **Which sub-workflow first.** _"Marketing request intake, campaign orchestration, creative production, content calendar, brand and compliance review, event planning, budget and ROI, capacity planning, or something else?"_ Most users want one of these first, not all of them.
3. **Audience shape.** _"Are you marketing to named B2B accounts, broad consumer segments, both (B2B2C), or a multi-brand portfolio?"_ Determines whether the schema needs Accounts, Cohorts / Segments, both, or sub-brand tables.

Branch when relevant — but only when relevant:

-   **Existing project / work-management tool?** (Workfront / Asana / Monday / Wrike / Smartsheet / ClickUp / Trello / Notion / Basecamp / MS Planner / none.) Many MOps setups have one. Airtable's relational layer fits marketing taxonomies (region × brand × channel × persona × funnel-stage) better than these tools' task-board schemas, and consolidating onto one platform pays off against the recurring _"swivel-chair,"_ _"too many sources of truth,"_ and _"fragmented spreadsheets"_ pain. Surface the consolidation value, then follow the user's lead — full migration, hybrid (Airtable as planning layer in front of the existing tool), or keeping the existing tool for now are all valid paths. See `references/migrations.md` for per-tool migration guidance and `references/build-shapes.md` for the hybrid shape.
-   **Existing marketing automation platform (MAP)?** (HubSpot / Marketo / Pardot / Customer.io / Iterable / Braze / Mailchimp / Klaviyo / none.) HubSpot dominates below Enterprise, Marketo dominates Enterprise. **Integrate** — these have deep email-send infrastructure, lifecycle automation, and lead-scoring engines Airtable doesn't replicate. Wire them up via sync; Airtable becomes the cross-channel campaign hub above them.
-   **Existing CRM?** (Salesforce / HubSpot CRM / Pipedrive / Zoho / Microsoft Dynamics / none.) For moderate contact volumes with no existing CRM, **Airtable can BE the lightweight marketing CRM** — typed contact fields + segments + linked-record account hierarchy + automations cover the marketing-side job. Recommend a dedicated CRM when (a) the user already has one (integrate via sync), (b) sales already runs in CRM (sync the marketing layer to it), or (c) contact volume exceeds what Airtable's relational model handles cleanly.
-   **Existing DAM?** (Bynder / Frontify / Brandfolder / Acquia / Adobe / Cloudinary / none.) **Either-or, not a default push**: if they already have one, integrate via sync or attachment links; if they don't, Airtable's Attachment fields + Assets table can serve as the DAM directly for moderate asset volumes. Don't proactively recommend a separate DAM unless the user is at very-high-asset-volume enterprise scale (millions of assets, deep approval workflows) where Bynder / Adobe genuinely earn their footprint.
-   **Multi-region / locale / sub-brand?** Load-bearing for the multi-market localization shape — mostly Enterprise-only.
-   **Microsoft or Google office stack?** Teams + Outlook + SharePoint flips Slack + Drive at Microsoft-shop enterprises (common at enterprise scale).
-   **Public-facing surface needed?** (Brand portal, partner portal, self-serve collateral generator, public campaign landing page, agency client portal.) Pushes toward the custom-app build layer.
-   **Approved-vendor LLM constraints?** (Azure OpenAI / Gemini-only / no third-party LLMs.) Real pattern; affects which AI integrations the skill can recommend.

Three lead questions plus relevant branches clarify the scaffold in one round of dialogue. Don't impose a framework before listening.

## Two modes

### Setup mode: scaffold a base

When the user asks _"set up a campaign tracker"_ / _"build me marketing ops in Airtable"_ / _"manage our creative requests"_, scaffold the schema via the MCP after scope is clear. Sequence:

1. **Scope questions** (above) — read the answers; don't skip even if the user dives straight to _"just build it."_ Five minutes of scope beats a wrong-shape rebuild.
2. **Pick a schema shape** matching team size and audience shape. Five lead shapes the skill body names inline; two niche shapes available on demand.
3. **Build the schema via MCP** — base, typed fields, linked records, formulas, rollups, sample / seed data. Spend effort on richer typed fields, well-named status `singleSelect`s with thoughtful choice colors, linked-record relationships with rollup counts. The schema is the foundation.
4. **Hand off UI configuration** for things Airtable's UI does better — views (kanban / calendar / gallery / timeline), interfaces, automations, forms, granular permissions, sync wizards. See "Build-plan output" below.
5. **Build the custom-app layer** when the user wants a branded UI, public-facing portal, self-serve collateral generator, or agency client portal. Optional; see `references/build-shapes.md`.

#### Lead schema shapes

Five shapes covering the great majority of invocations. Each adapts to B2B / consumer / mixed / agency variants (Accounts vs. Cohorts vs. Clients; per-locale vs. single-market; per-brand vs. single-brand). Full field-by-field detail in `references/schema-shapes.md`.

-   **Lightweight tracker (2-3 tables)** — Campaigns + Tasks/Deliverables + Assets, with one form intake. For solo marketers or small teams replacing spreadsheets. The dominant SMB shape. Examples in the wild: single-marketer marketing calendars, music release drivers, book publicity trackers.
-   **Solo / small (3-4 tables)** — Campaigns + Briefs + Perf