There are a couple of ideologies and processes that form the tenets of marketing. One of them is automation, and another is being able to call data & parse data without it being an ordeal.
One great place for you to experiment is with Google apps scripts, a JavaScript-based set of instructions similar to JSON in data. Apps Script can be used to automate repetitive tasks, create custom functions, import data & connect to external tools. So, you could automate reports, thank you emails, aggregate specific sets of data, etc.
Don’t let the JavaScript base scare you, it’s quite enjoyable, even if, like me, you’re not a developer. The understanding you need is not as extensive as an app or website development.
What is Apps Script?
Apps Script is a powerful tool in Google’s productivity tool belt. It is a rapid application development platform that makes it fast and easy to create business applications that integrate with Google Workspace. You are probably already using a couple of Google products, this is a major add-on you don’t want to miss out on.
A Simple Demonstration
Say you are in charge of marketing at a MarTech company and you are collating engineering tools that help marketing teams run faster and effectively. To do this, you are collecting data into a spreadsheet and want to know the best tools to help each segment of your marketing become a powerhouse.
Therefore, you want to (a) split a particular column into a highlight that tells you what a tool does at a glance. Since this is a function you’ll do almost every day when you get certain data sets, you want to automate this task.
To do this, you want to write the function, record it, then automatically run that recording every time. The way to do this is to create a macro and start a recording.
To demonstrate this, I am using a dataset from data.world named ‘Engineering as Marketing’ – here’s the link to it. This simple demo is to introduce you to Apps Script – nothing fancy or complicated. Yet.
Next, we go to the Apps Script side of things. Think of it as going to the upside-down world – an alternate universe of what we’ve just done. (Hello, fans of Stranger Things 😉)
Now that you’ve automated the script to run via the macro, then (b) you want to set up triggers so that this function can run by itself and send you notifications of new highlights.
I hope this serves as a good basic foundation for understanding Apps Script. What else would you like to automate?
