You may remember the latest product launches in marketing tools. This is especially true now, in the new era of AI, which promises to make your job and mine utterly obsolete.
But not so fast; most of these solutions are gimmicky, so let me explain. There are core tools marketers use to perform their daily jobs. Although no two jobs are alike, just as doctors learn standards to operate, marketers and professionals also use a range of tools that we use, even if we later choose to disregard them, for whatever reason.
One of these tool arsenals is the familiar spreadsheet. Today, many people choose between Microsoft Office and Google Docs, although there are other options.
Spreadsheets Marketing – A bit about the tooling
I’m not claiming that one product is better than another. You can find a spreadsheet solution that is perfect for your needs and workflows. That being said, I believe that the main options have interchangeable features that you may choose to use according to your situation. I’ll mention just three tools, but please feel free to apply what you learn here to a similar one.
Microsoft Excel:
This software tool is the industry standard in many organizations of all sizes. Marketers are familiar with it because they have used it to approve professional coursework. You may find that some or all of its features suit your present and future needs. Countless businesses use it.
Google Sheets:
Google’s spreadsheet took the world by storm by providing the features most users used most of the time. Added to this, there was an advantage of being an Internet native, so to speak, when they added collaboration capacities to the online solution. Now, you could, for free, work with colleagues, partners, and providers in a robust application that today keeps innovating, especially through its collaboration features.
Airtable:
Recently, I was researching my options to set up a CRM. It was a thorough research. I found Airtable, which is a way of setting up custom apps based on spreadsheets. The concept is not new, but the company took it to the next level, setting up this type of software as a platform to build. The good news is that it doesn’t take an excruciatingly long time to learn, and the concept of tabular data is familiar to most of its users.
The options mentioned above are a few of the top contenders. You will find other solutions built on top of these and innovative proposals. There’s no shortage of options to explore, and a great incentive is managing all of your data under one roof at a fraction of the cost of disparate providers.
Excel, the SAAS killer
Most individuals and teams need to do a job, and do it fast. That’s the main reason people buy online software: It often lets you do something specific quickly. You’re done. As time goes by, you’ll realize you may be using quite a few of these subscriptions, and the costs add up.
At this point, you may be motivated to cut costs or streamline your work. The answer is commonly simple: Excel.
You may find that many of the tools you use can be replicated on a spreadsheet, particularly with Microsoft’s offer..
My experiences: A URL launcher:
I wanted to organize my most-used bookmarks. When I had too many tabs open, the toll on my RAM was too high, and my computer was crashing, so a solution was of the essence. One of my options was to build a personal website listing these web addresses. I did go through the process, and it was really useful.
Is there a need for custom tooling?
As days went by, I was wrangling and reorganizing this HTML, and it was eating into my planning time. The solution? A simple spreadsheet that contains these URLs
Now, you may be thinking: Wasn’t the answer obvious? My answer is that in retrospect, it is, but in practice, this is an example of what marketers and business people go through. Spreadsheets are generally a Swiss Army knife for many of the needs of knowledge workers.
Now, we get a little technical
If you are already working with big data, skip this section because the datasets aren’t that big in small and even medium-sized businesses. You don’t need to be a Data scientist wrangling Python and R programming languages to get the most out of your data.
Today, Excel may be a welcome tool for gaining data insights or the main tool for obtaining this primary information.
Excel as part of a workflow.
You may be tempted to try to fit everything in your workflow into Excel. Although this is an extreme you don’t have to consider opposites; you may include spreadsheets as part of your processes, as I explore the following subsections
Export to Excel
When software speaks to other software, so to speak, they have ways to do so, in particular through how they arrange data in certain file types. With humans, it’s no different: You may find that exporting to an XLSX file (Excel filetype) is common in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and many types of applications.
Excel as a data source
You may have heard the buzz about Big Data. It refers to data sources that a single computer or server cannot process, so they must invent new ways to handle it.
Around this buzzword, you’ll find data scientists who do magic with enormous datasets. The truth is that most of the time, and in the large majority of cases, you’ll deal with small data (or what was considered normal previously), and modern spreadsheet software is more than capable of handling most of what you throw at it.
Lingua franca for data
For techies, it’s common to see forms asking you to upload Comma-Separated Values (CSV) files. Since these files often contain tabular data, they are usually prepared in Excel.
Essential updates when technologies are mature
I’d like to finish this article by claiming that learning Spreadsheet Marketing Excel is an investment that keeps on giving. For ages, new technologies have substituted certain workflows and needs where Excel previously shone, and that’s Okay. As a mature tool, you’ll find that Excel takes some time to incorporate the most important elements of these innovations, with the added benefit of integrating with existing features. But the wait is worth it; you’ll use a strong tool that may fulfill a large part of your data management needs.
