Tips and Tools for Using Google Docs for Online Marketing

Google Docs is a free to use, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and data storage service offered by Google. It can be used for personal tracking or working within your company. Today we are going to tell you how you can use Google Docs to better capitalize on your marketing strategy and make your business grow!

We will be linking to some very in-depth articles that’ll take you even further. Google Docs has many advantages over traditional business tools. It’s completely free to use and is accessible from any device with an Internet connection.

Documents and presentations can easily be shared and edited by multiple people. Here are some creative uses we’ve seen for Google Docs in the online marketing world. We’ve got tips and tricks for using Google Docs for everything from invoicing to scraping to social media analytics.

Online Marketing

Competitive Research

When you are deciding which keywords you want to focus on for your online marketing plan, one of the best ways to go about this is to use Google Docs. This involves pulling data into a Doc that includes which keywords your competitors are going after. A detailed summary on how to set this up can be found at SEOmoz.com.

Site Evaluations

This evaluation uses the importXML() function in Google Spreadsheets that allow the user to make spreadsheets that checks a web page for different on-page factors that affect SEO. To find an in-depth guide on how to do this, check out this link.

Manage Link Building/Media Buying

An easy way to use this tip is to create your own custom template to organize what links you have gotten and what ones you are waiting for. Include headings such as “Responded” “Keyword” or “Price.” Get creative with the best ways to do this for your own company.

Collaborate in Real Time (For Brainstorming)

This one will be beneficial for working in groups at your workplace. If the team is working on the same project, opening up the Google Doc and collaborating at the same time is the best way to get it done! Use this to bounce ideas off of each other, too.

Web Scraping

The times when you find a great list on the Internet and then copy and paste it bit by bit are in the past. This is where web scraping comes in. It involves three basic function: ImportFeed, ImportHTML, and ImportXML.

Check out this great guide and video for more information on the specifics of this.

Online Survey

The powers of sharing and live updating the Google Doc comes into play again. Creating a survey on Google Docs and sharing it will create instant results that you can watch before your eyes.

People can log their answers and thoughts to your questions right in the same document. Use this for internal communication or send a custom survey to your Facebook fans, your Twitter followers or whoever else’s responses you think you could benefit from.

Google Script Triggers

Triggers are resources that allow you to detect and respond to different events (events – an action that happens when the state of an object changes.) Tracking these events with triggers is great for your strategy because it gives you the option to see when the event changes in any way.

Your in-depth guide to triggers can be found here.

Use for Optical Character Recognition

The feature allows you to upload images or PDF files and then converts the file into a Google document. This option is wonderful if you have a print out of text that you want on your site. Here is a little more detail about OCR.

Business Management

Template for Marketing Management

Googling “Marketing Management Template for Google Docs” will bring up a wide array of different models that are perfect for Marketing Managers. The topics these templates cover include goal and task completion, due dates, and person of contact. It’s a great way to keep you organized.

Template for Task Management

Task Management templates are similar to Marketing Manager templates, just not as in-depth. They usually are limited to projects/tasks and due dates. Think of it as a checklist that you can edit and have others access to see what everyone needs to get done.

Template for Invoicing

Ever find yourself stuck in the situation where you can’t stop what you’re doing to get that invoice in the mail? Well with Google Docs you can type up the invoice and just email it to them right from your desk. Just make sure you save your own copy so the receiver doesn’t change any of the numbers!

Analytics

Pull Data from Google

Pulling real-time data from Google Analytics into your Google Doc allows you to easily see and track changes in the page views, search visits, or other internet marketing criteria, all in one document that can be exporting into Excel or into a website.

Bring SEOmoz Data to Google Docs

Getting the data from SEOmoz into a Google Doc can bring many benefits for your marketing campaign. Anything from link building and competitive analysis can be accomplished more efficiently by importing this data.

Do this by using the SEOmoz API.

Pull Data from “Research” Tool

The research tool makes your life easier by adding information from the web to your personal documents. This is good for Internet marketers because you can be greeted with mass amounts of data about places, personal results, and articles, all of which you can use to benefit your campaign.

Social Media

Track Social Media

Again, using APIs you are able to pull that valuable social media data into an easy to understand Google Doc.

This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your social media sites.

Create a Call Out

Call Outs are simple questionnaires that can be created with Google Docs, and can be crucial in your community building effort. Creating this call out is as simple as creating a new document, giving it a title that will catch people attention, and then enter the questions you want to ask as individual entries in your Google Doc.

This is similar to the Online Survey, but focuses more on community building. Photos by David, ScottandSarah, MDGovPics, IM Secrets, DrewLeavy