4 Ways You Can Use Google Drive For Sales & Marketing

Google Drive is a set of powerful tools your company can use for innovative marketing tactics, collaboration, and easy training.

If you are just entering the world of marketing or are starting your own business, there is a good chance you have already encountered Google Drive. Google Drive is the set of tools provided free by Google including Docs, Sheets, Slides, Maps, Calendar, Gmail, and more. When you are starting a business, these are great tools to have on your side. But, if you aren’t quite sure how to use the tools, you will probably run into a few issues as you try to market your business using Google Drive. That’s why we’re here to help you go over the basic tips for executing a marketing strategy and managing your team using Google Drive. We’re going to be going over all of the most important tips you need to know and showing you how you can monitor the benefits of your marketing efforts. If you are interested in learning more about using Google Drive for marketing purposes, keep reading!

1. Reach Out to Sales Prospects Using Gmail for Mass Emails

Mass emails are one of the most cost effective sales strategies—but you will probably need a gmail mass email service to reap the full benefits

A great place to get started when it comes to Google Drive and Google products in general is Gmail. For a lot of businesses, Gmail is used as the standard email server so you have likely encountered this interface before. One of the reasons that Gmail is so widely used is because companies can get branded email domains using Gmail Suite. This means that businesses can use a personalized domain name instead of using “@gmail.com.” The problem for most novice salespeople is that they aren’t able to take advantage of the full functionality of Gmail in order to maximize their reach.

One of the best ways to meet and win over your potential customers is by sending out mass cold emails. Cold emails are a type of sales email that are sent out to individuals you haven’t contacted before. In most cases, you can reach out to these individuals by creating an address list from publicly available information posted online. A good place to look for addresses is on social media sites such as Facebook and Linkedin.

To get started using Gmail for mass email sales outreach, we highly recommend downloading a Gmail plugin to help you draft, send, get insights on your email campaigns and exceed Gmail’s sending limits. Gmail has a daily limit of messages you can send—usually around 500 emails. Using a mass email service, you can exceed this limit without having your address penalized.

When you’ve downloaded your plugin to assist, you can start by designing a sales email that grabs the reader’s attention and conveys your brand. After you’re satisfied with your design, you can start your mail merge. Using Google docs or Google Sheets, you can import the addresses you’ve collected and use them to create personalized elements in your messages. Personalization is one of the best ways to ensure that your target audience will click on and respond to your message. 

The psychology behind sending out personalized emails is really simple—people are more likely to respond to messages that look like they are specifically addressed to them. Using your Gmail mass email service, you can import your addresses and personalize your campaigns in one simple step. Then, once your messages are sent, your Gmail mass email plugin will be able to give you reports on how well your campaign is performing.

2. Use Google Drive for Remote Collaboration

Now more than ever, it is important to make sure that you can collaborate with your team no matter where you are in the world

One of the best features about Google Drive—apart from the features that come with Gmail and associated plugins—is the ability to collaborate from anywhere with a steady internet connection. If you are starting a business or you have just started a marketing position, there is a good chance that there are people you need to collaborate with outside of your city or town. That’s where Google Drive comes in handy. Let’s say that you are trying to draft a sales pitch to win over a new client, but you want to run it by one of your stakeholders before the actual meeting. All you need to do to share your work with anyone anywhere in the world is your collaborator’s email address. To share the document, simply hit the share button in the top right hand corner of your screen. Then, you can input your collaborator’s email address and designate the amount of access they will need to approve your sales pitch. It is possible that they just need to take a look at it and give their approval. In that case, you can set the permission to view only. If you are sending the document over to your collaborator to edit, you can give them access to edit as well. Another great aspect of using Google Drive is the “suggested edits” feature. The suggested edits feature lets you know who is making the edits and lets collaborators approve or deny the suggestions. Using suggested edits you can always make sure that you have the most up-to-date version of the document instead of sifting through several different versions searching for the most recent version. Should you reject any of the suggestions, the document returns to its previous version without any changes. It is also possible to go back and look at the different version histories, so you don’t have to save the document every time a change is made.

Overall, these capabilities separate Google Drive from other word processing or spreadsheet applications in shareability. If you find that you are frequently working with people remotely, it is highly recommended that you use Google Drive for collaboration.

3. Easily Share Assets and Training Materials

Beyond sharing documents and spreadsheets, you can remotely train new team members and give them all of the necessary assets

Another excellent remote work-related advantage of using Google Drive is for training and onboarding. It can be difficult for employees to get a feel of a company when they’re working remotely. If you are in charge of hiring new salespeople or marketing staff for your team, there is no better way to conduct training and get them the resources they need than using Google Drive. You can cover the basics using Google Slides to come up with a slideshow of all of the most important information new employees need to know about working with your company. From the slideshow, you can link documents and resources for further reading or give step by step instructions for training modules. 

Once the new employees are up to date on their responsibilities and company policies, you can also use Google Drive to help them get started. Easily share company assets like logos, client branding guides, RFPs, and other necessary documents that your new employees will need to get started. Drive also comes in handy when it comes to sending information via email. If a training document or an infographic is too large of a file to send via email, then Gmail will automatically send the information in a Drive file. That way, you don’t have to spend extra time worrying about the size of your documents or photos before sharing information with new employees.

Once your new employees have completed all of the necessary steps, they can start contributing to your company now that they have all of the necessary information and tools to get started. No matter where your company is located, you can give your employees comprehensive training using Google Drive.

4. Use a Team Calendar to Schedule All of Your Sales & Marketing Tasks

Sales and marketing require a high level of output, so it is important make sure you have everything scheduled ahead of time

When it comes to marketing and sales, almost everything is time sensitive. Take marketing emails for example—there is an ideal time to send and receive emails every day, so you need to make sure the messages are drafted and ready to go by that time. The same is true for social media posts. Often social media posts are seasonal or reference current events, so if they aren’t posted on the right date it could look like a mistake. To make sure all of your deliverables are being sent out on time, you can create a team calendar using Google Drive. 

Creating a team calendar is an important part of managing both individual deadlines and team tasks. Using the settings on in Google Calendar, you can designate which calendars you view to get an idea of all of the tasks for the week. In the same web page, you can view the marketing and sales schedule for individuals and for your own tasks. By checking the boxes in the left hand corner, you can easily view anyone’s schedule. By creating a team calendar, you are ensuring that every member of the team and any outside collaborators are on the same page. Especially if you are working with remote employees, it is important that every team member has a big picture idea of your sales and marketing strategies and the deadlines required to meet your goals.

If you haven’t previously used Google Drive for marketing and sales purposes, this is your sign to give it a try! Many users find that working with Google Drive makes their previously complicated tasks easier than ever. This is especially true for collaborative projects where several different people need to work on documents at once. Not to mention, you can try every feature included with Google Drive completely for free. There is a cost to upgrade to use professionally that can range anywhere from $6 per month to $18 per month depending on the size of your company.