INBOX INSIGHTS, October 22, 2025: Getting Started with Workflow Automation, Multidimensional People - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Getting Started with Workflow Automation, Multidimensional People (2025-10-22) :: View in browser

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INBOX INSIGHTS: Getting Started with Workflow Automation, Multidimensional People (2025-10-22)

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Getting Started with Workflow Automation

I was at MAICON last week, and I realized there was a lot of talk about the new technology, but not a lot of talk about it from a non-technical perspective. The tech still felt out of reach and overwhelming to a lot of us. When I first heard about workflow automation tools, my brain immediately went to “that’s for developers,” and I sort of tuned out. Which is hilarious because I’m a big advocate for repeatable processes and automation.

But then I actually tried using these tools. It turns out they’re not just for people like Chris anymore.

What Are We Even Talking About?

Think of workflow automation tools like n8n and Google’s Opal as your digital assistants that never sleep, never complain, and never forget a step. They’re platforms that connect your different tools together and automatically move information between them based on rules you set up.

The game-changer? You don’t need to know how to code anymore. Both n8n and Opal now let you describe what you want in plain English, and they’ll build the workflow for you. It’s like having a really patient tech-savvy friend who actually understands what you’re trying to accomplish.

So, Which One Should You Use?

Here’s the simple breakdown:

Google Opal works exclusively within Google Workspace (for now). If your world revolves around Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Drive, this is your friend. It’s integrated, it’s relatively straightforward, and it plays nicely with all your Google tools.

n8n is the more adventurous option. It connects to hundreds of different platforms—your CRM, your social media tools, your project management software, and your email marketing platform. If you need to connect tools outside the Google ecosystem, n8n is where you want to be.

Start With Strategy (Not the Tool)

Before you dive into either platform, pause. I know the temptation is to just start clicking around and seeing what happens, but trust me—that way leads to frustration and abandoned half-built workflows.

Instead, use the Trust Insights 5P Framework to map out what you’re actually trying to accomplish:

Purpose: What’s the goal of this workflow?
People: Who’s involved and who needs the output?
Process: What are the actual steps that need to happen?
Platform: What tools need to talk to each other?
Performance: How will you know if it’s working?

This framework forces you to think through the entire project before you build anything. It helps you identify which tools need to integrate, what the actual output should look like, and who needs to receive that output. Plus, it will save you from building something that technically works but doesn’t actually solve your problem.

Simple Workflows to Get You Started

Let’s talk about some practical, immediately useful workflows that do not require a computer science degree:

For Marketing:

Monitor specific social media mentions and compile them into a weekly report
Automatically disseminate your content across multiple platforms when you publish a new blog post
Track campaign performance metrics and send a daily summary to your team

For Operations:

Create new project folders in Google Drive when a new client is added to your CRM
Send automated follow-up emails based on specific triggers (like a form submission or a missed payment)
Update your project management tool when tasks are marked as complete in another system
Compile feedback or survey responses into a formatted report and distribute it to stakeholders

The key is to start small. Pick one annoying task that you do manually at least once a week. That’s your first workflow.

How to Actually Get Started

Document your current process: Write down every single step you take manually. Be specific. “Check email” isn’t helpful. “Check [email protected] for form submissions with ‘New Lead’ in the subject line” is helpful.
Identify your trigger: What starts this process? A new email? A new row in a spreadsheet? A specific time of day?
Map your actions: What happens after the trigger? Where does the data need to go? What needs to be created or updated?
Choose your platform: If everything lives in Google Workspace, try Opal. If you need broader integrations, go with n8n.

Describe what you want: Instead of trying to build it piece by piece, start by telling the system what you’re trying to do in plain language. Let it create the initial workflow, then adjust from there.

For both of these platforms, you have the option of writing a prompt. You can use your requirements from the 5P framework to do this. Having your information organized will get you to the end result faster.

Here is a simple example: The 5P Framework in Action

Purpose

Create and distribute a weekly content performance report that shows which blog posts and social media content performed best, so the marketing team can identify trends and plan future content accordingly.

People

Who’s involved:

Marketing Manager (needs the full report for strategic decisions)
Content Writers (need to see which topics resonate)
Social Media Manager (needs engagement metrics)

Who creates it:

Currently: You, manually, for about an hour every Monday

Who receives it:

The marketing team via email
Data is also saved to a shared Google Sheet for historical tracking

Process

Here’s the step-by-step breakdown:

Every Monday at 8 a.m., the workflow triggers automatically
Pull last week’s data from Google Analytics (page views, time on page, bounce rate for blog posts)
Pull last week’s social media metrics (likes, comments, shares, reach)
Compile the data into a Google Sheet with the date range clearly labeled
Create a formatted summary showing:
- Top 5 performing blog posts
- Top 5 social media posts
- Week-over-week comparison
- Any notable outliers or trends
Generate a simple visualization (which could be as basic as conditional formatting in the sheet)
Send an email to the marketing team with the summary and a link to the full data

Platform

Tools that need to integrate:

Google Analytics (where blog performance data lives)
Social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—wherever you’re active)
Google Sheets (where the data is compiled and stored)
Gmail (for sending the weekly email)

Performance

How you’ll know it’s working:

The report arrives in your inbox every Monday by 8:30 a.m. without anyone touching it
The data matches what you’d get if you pulled it manually (verify this for the first few weeks)
Team members stop asking, “When will we get this week’s numbers?”
You’re getting back that hour every Monday to do literally anything else

Success metrics:

100% on-time delivery (if it’s not in your inbox Monday morning, something’s broken)
Data accuracy (spot-check the first month against manual pulls)
Time saved (you should reclaim about 4 hours per month)

What to monitor:

Make sure the data connections don’t break when platforms update their APIs (this happens; it’s annoying, but it’s fixable)
Check that the email isn’t going to spam folders
Verify that the Google Sheet isn’t getting too large (you might need to archive old data quarterly)

The Reality Check

Will your first workflow be perfect? Absolutely not. Will you have to tinker with it? Yes. Will you occasionally break something and have to figure out why? Probably.

But here’s what I know: every hour you spend setting up these workflows will save you multiples of that time over the coming months. Plus, once you get one working, the second one is easier. And the third one is even easier than that.

Start with one small, annoying task. Document it using the 5P Framework. Pick your platform. And just try it.

Your 4 p.m. Friday self will thank you.

How are you automating your workflows? Reply to this email or join our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about multidimensionality – not of data itself, but of people.

Last week, we had the pleasure and privilege to present multiple times at the Marketing AI Conference in Cleveland, Ohio – MAICON. Our mainstay was a half-day workshop on using generative AI for analytics, which is exactly what you would expect from both Katie and I at Trust Insights. That’s who we are, that’s what we’re known for – being able to use generative AI to do all sorts of things and to use data intelligently and for good purpose. To make stuff, to do great analysis, to understand what’s going on. That’s been the brand of Trust Insights for as long as the company’s been around. We light up dark data. That’s our tagline from the very beginning.

During the conference, the MAICON team came to us and said, we have a last-minute cancellation. Would you have anything you could do to fill in? And we said, of course, we’re always happy to help. We love helping out the MAICON team – they’re all outstanding people, outstanding event organizers. They run such a polished event that we want to see it succeed, we want to be as helpful as we can.

I took a look at the session title of the session that we were being asked to replace. It said, “From Text to Video in Seconds: How Generative AI is Transforming Content.” Now, if you’ve never organized an event before, you know that running an event is a ton of logistics, including things like signage and stuff like that. And so it occurred to me: what if we did the session as written? Instead of swapping in something more conventional, something that Trust Insights was known for, what if we did something unconventional? What if we did something that, even though we know we can and often do, we’re not known for?

It’s not well known because it’s not something that we talk about a ton, but Katie has a film background. She has a degree in filmmaking. I’ve lost track of the amount of media that I’ve created. We’ve used conventional tools for years, if not decades – Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, Logic Pro, Adobe Audition. All the media generation tools that we use to produce things like the Trust Insights Podcast and our live stream. Unlike many other agencies, we don’t farm that work out. We don’t have a dedicated podcast company producing our podcast. We don’t have a dedicated video production team producing our event videos. Experienced media producers can see this in a heartbeat, saying, well, yeah, that’s pretty clearly not produced by somebody who’s got a $50,000 studio and stuff.

But that hands-on experience of making and producing our own stuff means that we have a lot of experience in multimedia creation and production. We always have. We just don’t talk about it because it’s generally accepted that – you know, the first rule of the show is you don’t talk about the show. Nobody wants to hear what sometimes comes across as self-indulgent navel-gazing. That doesn’t mean the expertise isn’t there.

More importantly, when this session topic came up, we jumped right in and we said, yeah, we can do that. But we can do it our way. We can do it our way that is informed by data, that is informed by strict standard operating procedures, that is informed by good governance, that’s informed by all the things that are the foundation of Trust Insights – the 5P framework and everything else.

In fact, the first thing I did when we agreed to the talk was bust out the 5P framework and figure out how it applies to generative AI media production.

What is the purpose?
Who are the people involved? Who are the people making the media and who are the people consuming the media?
What is the process? How do we produce this stuff? How do we make things?
What is the platform? What are the platforms involved, and how do those platforms interact?
And of course, what is the performance? How do we know whether or not we’ve succeeded?

A framework, a foundation framework like the 5Ps, makes all this stuff straightforward. We don’t have to sit here and agonize over how do we present on a topic that we’ve never presented on before. We know exactly how to do that because the framework tells us exactly how. These are the things the audience cares about: purpose, people, process, platform, performance. From there, we use that to codify and outline the way that we’ve produced hundreds of episodes of our podcast and our live stream and our conference talks, and the ways in which we can use these tools.

That’s how we came up with a proper framework for generative AI media production:

Do your planning first, which is very close to purpose
Do your research – getting good data about the different tools and the best practices for those tools
Do outlining and storyboarding – more process, trying to figure out what is the story you want to tell, which goes back to purpose
Do your prompting in all the different tools to generate all the assets that we need. Even there, there’s detailed process about how to achieve character consistency from tool to tool and shot to shot
Edit it all together in a nonlinear editor to assemble all the products – more process and this time some platform
Release it. How do you publish this thing and get it out the door so that you’re not spending all your time in development hell? You’re actually releasing, publishing, shipping

That’s how our talk came together very quickly. We outlined the talk in probably 15 minutes, and then took an additional 2 to 3 hours over the weekend prior to MAICON to assemble the talk and all the assets. We have a process for that too. Our process now has multiple steps for producing a good conference talk and then producing great assets to give people as takeaways.

One of the things that we know about the way people think, the way people interact, the way people are overloaded today, is that you’ve got to give takeaways that they can use right away and be able to have it in bite-sized pieces. You can’t just hand monolithic piles of data over to somebody and expect them to do something with it because they’re too busy. Maybe in next week’s Data Diaries, we’ll cover what that process is, because it’s now expected from audiences that generative AI products are included with the very best talks.

That’s the story of how we ended up doing a video production session at a marketing AI conference – something far outside our expertise if you don’t know us well, but something squarely within our expertise if you do know us well and you know the foundations on which we build everything.

If you’d like some help codifying your own processes or getting more training on how to use generative AI media production tools, hit us up. You know where to find us.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our new course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

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Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

Generative AI for B2B Marketers, London, October 2025
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Social Media Marketing World, Anaheim, April 2026

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Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our workshop offering, Generative AI for Marketers.

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