By nature, online marketing plans are multi-faceted. Your credit union can have any number of objectives attracting new members, increasing wallet-share among existing members, re-branding post-merger, promoting the latest products, announcing new kiosks, etc. but creating an online marketing campaign that addresses all of these goals as efficiently as possible can be a challenge. Fortunately, the powers that be at Google have recognized this issue and provided a robust suite of tools geared towards creating a tailored marketing plan that meets the specific needs of your organization.
Google’s Think Insights is the result almost 15 years worth of collected and analyzed online user data. Case studies, statistics, and actionable next steps are broken down by industry and marketing objective. For those situations where one employee is expected to run a full online marketing campaign, often in addition to other responsibilities, Google has provided a fairly simple roadmap to creating a campaign, including free webinars covering a range of topics and other options to ensure that your marketing time is being spent efficiently.
The most impressive part of this entire portal is the planning tools section, which is specifically designed to help you assess your campaign status and potential next steps.
My favorite resources include:
- A Mobile ROI Calculator: What exactly is the ROI on your mobile platform? Are apps, online usage, and cross-platform web initiatives actually worth the effort? Use this step by step calculator to find out.
- The Real-Time Insights Finder: By the time an online study is published, it’s already out of date. This real-time tool makes it possible to see what members are searching for online, right now.
- Google Surveys: Interested in taking a general market survey? This option allows you to create surveys, specify your target demographics, and let Google do the rest. Unlike the other tools, Google Surveys actually costs roughly 10 cents per response, but it’s a small price to pay when you consider the market.
If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, what’s in it for Google? Why are they going out of their way to make your lives easier? Well, for one, they definitely guide readers towards using their paid advertising tools. The Google advertising platform including AdWords, Adsense, Google Mobile Ads, and YouTube ads is an a la carte menu of affordable advertising options. However, the main prize in all of this is data, more specifically, yours.
In case you haven’t noticed, big data is all the rage right now. We covered this topic in depth a couple of weeks ago on this very site. And in the case of online marketing, the ability to collect and analyze user data is what turned Google into much more than a simple software company.
Every time you build a new site and opt to use Google Analytics, you’re basically trading all of the data about your website, your company, and your marketing goals to Google in exchange for some nifty free graphs and metrics that make your job a lot easier. Every time you launch an Adwords campaign, devote one of your multi-talented employees to social media, or decide to target members through a series of specially designed landing pages on your site, Google uses this activity to learn more about your business and where you should appear to users.
While this may seem downright Orwellian, the fact remains that someone on every marketing team is responsible for the online marketing strategy of your credit union. Most likely this person has an extremely full plate, and Google Think Insights might make his or her day that much more efficient and productive.