The Clyde to your Bonnie. The Ginger Rogers to your Fred
Astaire. The Doc Holliday to your Wyatt Earp.
A good partner can save your skin, or make you look better
than you are on your own. Sometimes you know a good partnership immediately
when you happen upon it. Other times, a partnership will sneak up on you to the
point that you don’t even realize that you’ve partnered up. Whichever way you
look at it, Google has become every marketer’s partner. With so many tools—some
used more than others—marketers are able to do their jobs better, more
effectively, and more precisely than ever before.
Analytics
There’s nothing quite so complete, quite so intricate, or
quite so free as Google’s Analytics tool. Most marketers adopted this a while
ago, but there’s really no better tool to help you analyze and utilize the
numbers of people visiting web pages or blog posts.
Docs
Google essentially revolutionized the way multiple people
could work on a single document when they launched Google Docs. You can have
multiple people at one time working on a single document—be it a spreadsheet,
word processing document, or what have you—without stepping on one another’s
toes. Plus, everyone will always have the most up-to-date version in their
Google Drive.
Adwords
Google even made advertising on the Internet easy
and—gasp!—user friendly. The ads that show up at the top of a Google search?
Those are technically paid ads, but there’s something cool about them: you only
pay for results, and you can set a daily budget. That means you don’t ever overpay, and you don’t have to
worry about wasted money if you aren’t getting hits. And speaking of, if you
aren’t getting hits: no problem, because you can change the copy in your ad
whenever you want to.
Places
There might be no better advertising tool a company can use
today than Google Places. Listing your business on Places means getting found
on search results, a listing on Maps (which is invaluable on its own), and
Google+. The more you’re found, the more likely you are to have people come
visit—both online and in person.
Verified Author
Also referred to as Google Authorship, this service connects
you to the content you publish online. That includes things like your company
blog, yes, but also any thought leadership pieces you publish on high traffic
sites like HuffPo or Inc., those will link to you as well. Authorship helps you
build clout online, and when your article appears in a search, your smiling
face and name will be right there by it.
