In our recent Google Apps Summer School for Marketers, we got to speak with Google’s Marketing Director of G Suite, Maureen Bradford. Naturally, we decided to pick her brain about the marketing trends and approaches she pays attention to, and how Google Apps can help marketers tackle common marketing tasks. Watch the video or read on to hear Bradford’s thoughts.
Help with Complex Projects
When marketers are coordinating a really complex project, such as a rebrand of a name, it involves numerous internal stakeholders plus agencies and partners. In highly complex, collaborative projects like these, there are numerous tools within the Apps for Work suite that are very helpful.
Google Docs: Teams can use Google Docs to showcase goals, tactics and options for a marketing plan
Forms: They can use Survey tool to collect feedback on creative options
Google Drive: Share the latest up-to-date files. This can save time by ensuring an agency or any stakeholder wastes no time working on an old version of a file, or pursuing an idea that an internal team vetoed days before.
Google Hangouts: Once materials are in place, how do you ensure that a rollout is smooth and really understood by all teams? Hangouts is the video tool allows many people to be in a call at the same time, viewing a presentation or desktop that is easily shared. You can share the content for training teams about your new marketing initiative in Drive and they can access the content as they attend the call, or later. Training over video helps to educate about gestures and verbiage and semantics beyond just words.
Cutting Retail Marketing Costs
Using a retailer as an example, Bradford explains how the large organization in Canada used to ship poster boards to place in store windows all over Canada. Every time a price or marketing message changed, the company would have to pay to print and overnight ship all new posters. Needless to say, this added quite a bit of cost to marketing efforts.
With Google Apps, the retailer began just uploading their updated creative assets to Google Drive, which allowed each store to print the posters out locally. This move saved the retailer millions of dollars in the first quarter alone. Additionally, knowing that the information in Google Drive was the most up-to-date version aided confidence in the creative. (Related: 5 Real Life Examples of How Google is Transforming Retail Technology)
How Google Itself Coordinates Presentations
At Google, an all-hands meeting can include hundreds of people. To help ensure a fluid, interactive presentation, they use Google Slides with the Forms tool. Google Forms can be pointed to insert gathered feedback data directly into a Google Sheet, which can be filtered and analyzed later. You can learn more about the process here. Attendees can ask questions in the presentations itself and in Forms.
Emerging Marketing Trends to Watch
When asked what marketing trends are most intriguing to her today, Bradford responds, “Being able to do better measurement of marketing activities through the sales funnel, as well as how they connect to each other. There are great email marketing automation tools out there that focus well in CRMs. It is so much better to see where to allocate budget dollars because of this better attribution.” She continues, “Additionally, the concept that no brand is an island and companies like Google have to rely on the help of their partners--so how do they help partners to be a helpful extension and complementary elements to what Google is doing.”
