Being a digital marketer, you’ll be excited to know that a handful of free Google Workspace apps are all you need for successful networking and promotion.
You'll mostly find that digital marketing tools and services are expensive for promotional campaigns. If you’re exploring a career option in this field or want to provide affordable solutions to your freelance clients, you’ll only need a few Google apps.
You can even run effective online promotional campaigns for free. Here's how to get started with digital marketing with Google's familiar apps.
1. Promote Your Brand via Email
The Gmail app from Google Workspace is an ideal tool for brand building at no or low cost. To begin with, you need to format your emails in a way so that they look professional and trustworthy.
Your trust-building journey via Gmail begins with adding a crisp and meaningful email subject that’ll explain the email’s perspective within 10 words. Choose words for the email subject carefully, and only include the most relevant and useful ones.
Also, your email should feature a logo, your photograph, alternative email addresses, social media profiles, the business address, website, and a contact number for work-related communications. You can include these in the signature section of your email.
2. Plan Effective Digital Marketing Campaigns
Google apps like Calendar, Drive, and Sites are the perfect tools for convenient, effortless, and streamlined digital marketing campaign management. You can create a Google Drive shared folder for brochures, social media posts, infographics, and Instagram videos.
Give required access to your team members like edit, view, or comment so that the responsible resource can access the content as per their roles in the project.
You can plan social media posts on the Calendar app and synchronize these with a team member for publishing the content.
Since social media promotional campaigns mostly contain brief content, you need to create a Google Sites page to redirect your audience to the detailed campaign board. Here, you can elaborate on the promotional drive using YouTube videos, blogs, and images.
Since Sites is a responsive platform, your audience will always experience pleasant browsing sessions regardless of their device.
3. Run DIY Email Marketing for Free
Gmail app easily integrates with advanced email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Omnisend, etc. Therefore, you can use your Gmail for newsletter or marketing email distribution to keep all data in one tool and avoid swapping through different apps.
Alternatively, visit the Google Workspace Marketplace to install useful apps that automate email marketing tasks like bulk emailing, email analytics, email tracking, and so on. These apps enable you to become your own digital marketer without any learning curve.
4. Stand Out With a High-Ranking Website
Google offers an array of digital marketing tools for website content optimization. Therefore, as a digital marketer, you can offer professional content optimization services to your clients without investing in paid tools.
On the contrary, you can stand out from the crowd and reach the target audience with minimal or no investment if you’re managing your own website. The following is a list of a few tools and their primary usage:
- The Lighthouse tool lets you audit any website URL for performance, SEO, accessibility, and best practices.
- Find My Audience tool enables you to discover thousands of global audiences for your YouTube channel and eventually for the related website.
- Test My Site tests your mobile-friendly website for performance in a 4G connection, website health, and offers optimization recommendations.
5. Increase Reach to Local Audiences
Use Google Sites and Google My Business strategically to increase a website’s reach to the local community for free. Start with a Google Sites website that’ll contain related content like blog posts, promotional videos, products, services, promotional slides, etc.
You can easily import content from YouTube, Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets into the Sites without much effort. Now make your website publicly reachable by linking it to Google Search through Google My Business.
Google My Business allows you to add contact numbers, locations on Google Maps, and public reviews so that your website comes up easily when your target audiences search for related products or services.
6. Display Services and Their Achievements
It’s time to show off your products, services, achievements, and future developments conveniently using simple tools from Google Workspace. Create a Sites page with dedicated sections for services that you offer, how they performed for your past clients, and so on.
Now, create products/services slideshows on Slides using original images, videos, and written content. Then upload this on the Sites page through simple linking. You can go a step ahead and create authentic videos as well.
For performance and analytics, you can create visualizations on Sheets and link them to the Sites website where you want to display the data. You can also carry out such marketing optimization for your clients if you’re working on digital marketing projects.
7. Embed DIY Advertisements
Since Google Sites lets you import almost any content from Google Workspace, it’s the ideal platform for promotional advertisements. Whether you’re a digital marketer or owner of a website, you can save money by utilizing your creativity to develop DIY ads.
Utilize the Image carousel feature of Sites to showcase flash sales, promotions, and special offers via graphical content. You can also add call-to-action buttons like Book a Service, Buy a Product, Subscribe to Email Newsletter, and so on.
You might also want to create videos of your products and services to upload them on your Sites page to increase the audience’s interest in your offerings.
8. Gather Feedback/Inquiries From Users
Personalized client inquiries and feedback are equally important to website optimization and analytics. You can get bespoke data on customers’ expectations by adding a feedback or service inquiry form on your Google Sites.
Google Forms will automatically store users’ responses in a dedicated Google Sheets file. You can let users submit forms for up to three months and then analyze the data to find a pattern. Then, implement those user expectations to increase your website’s and brand’s authority.
For services or product inquiries, regularly check the respective spreadsheet so that you can get back to the user sooner than later.
Excel Your Digital Marketing Skills With Google Workspace
By following the above-mentioned methods of digital marketing approach by utilizing Google apps that are mostly free, you can get started quickly as a solo online marketer.
Also, these tools and their use cases are the ideal examples if you want to learn and master your digital marketing tactics. Moreover, with greater efforts at a team level, you can even accomplish commercial-level success for your freelance clients.