Raising the profile of an unheralded division.
CHALLENGE
Much of Google’s revenue success has been built on the back of its popular AdWords product. This has challenged the company’s other product divisions to prove they can be as successful – often with a lot fewer marketing dollars to throw around.
This was certainly the case for Google’s enterprise division, which had a disconnected yet powerful array of search products to help both large and small businesses. The challenge Google brought to my team at Loomis Group was to unify these products thematically, increase their brand awareness, and drive real leads to their sales force.
WORK
One thing that’s important to understand about Google is how much they love data. The company’s culture revels in it, believes in it, succeeds because of it, and also likes to be creative with it.
To address the enterprise space, they had three search products:
- Google Search Appliance – a physical piece of hardware they install for large companies. Provides company-wide keyword search to find any piece of information across servers, Intranet and databases.
- Google Site Search – a cloud-based service that puts Google keyword search to work on entire consumer-facing websites.
- Google Commerce Search – a cloud-based product search solution to help big and small online merchants.
While we knew data would be key to our unifying idea – and Google had oceans of data showing how fast each product returned relevant search results – we also knew we’d need to make sure the customer would be moved by it.
Brainstorming sessions with my team of web and motion graphics designers yielded several promising ideas, but none so compelling as the simple understanding of the old ‘time is money’ adage. When a company’s lost or unproductive time costs them real money, it may feel as if time is the enemy. But because Google’s enterprise search products return relevant information so quickly, time is actually a friend. ‘Time is on your side’ became the unifying theme that brought all of the search products together and gave the products a story beyond the stats.
From a design perspective, we encouraged Google to evolve its style. We worked with the company’s team to develop a hyper-real, color-saturated look and feel that maintained Google’s trademark minimalism while giving visual distinction to the product line. And we developed new Google icons for each of the three enterprise search products.
Our campaign went into market with a unified voice across a multi-page microsite, suite of animated banners, and a selection of direct mail, motion graphics video, and even tchotchkes to delight the techie audience.
RESULTS
The results of the campaign were significant:
- Three different products unified into a single, memorable and engaging brand identity with legs.
- Thousands of impressions generated from tech decision makers and business owners, increasing their awareness that Google was a player in the enterprise space.
- Leads into the sales funnel doubled, with banner ad click-through rates of twice the industry average. In the case of the Google Site Search product, sales increased 15% in a single quarter.
The positive results of this campaign helped Loomis Group secure projects with Google Apps, Google Maps and YouTube product lines, thus deepening an important client-agency relationship and broadening a key agency revenue stream.