Lesser-Known Google Products to Help Your Business Grow

We use Google search, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube every day, if not a few times a day. But Google has a vast number of tools that can help businesses with their market strategy and educate them on product pricing, hiring process, and brand building.

• Google Primer

Google has created many applications and services aimed at helping small businesses grow. One of these products is Google Primer. It offers 5-minutes interactive lessons on marketing and business skills to business owners, startups, and even job seekers. Some of the topics that are covered in the short lessons are how to make your products stand out, how to make more people follow you on social media, brand building, customer engagement, business planning, email marketing, and many more.

• Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool designed to help organizations manage their online presence. The main two reasons why you should get a Google My Business account is the exposure and the ability to interact with customers. Engagement with customers can boost your business’ credibility and popularity. Probably one of the very few negative things about using Google My Business is that it doesn�t allow business owners to delete bad reviews. Reviews have been helpful for both customers and businesses but there is a drawback � people with ill intent or competitors, who might even not have visited your place, can leave a bad review and ruin your reputation. In regards to this, Facebook has allowed reviews to be deleted, while Google only allows flagging reviews that are inappropriate. Despite not being able to delete bad reviews, Google My Business allows you to respond to the reviews.

• Google Ad Grants

This tool is not meant to be used by for-profit businesses. If you are working for a nonprofit organization, Google Ad Grants can help you deliver your message to the public. It is basically an AdWords for nonprofit organizations. If you qualify, every month you will be getting free AdWords advertising worth $10,000. There are some restrictions and it is worth noting that government organizations, hospitals, medical groups, and academic institutions are not eligible for those grants.

• Google Fonts

It is surprising how difficult it can get to find a font that is both free to use commercially and it is also appealing. For anyone who has ever stumbled upon this problem, Google Fonts is your solution. All fonts are released under open source licenses. It is an extremely useful tool for bloggers and website developers as it allows them to choose between nearly 1,000 font families.

• Google Surveys

Google Surveys are not used only by marketers. This product can be very useful for small businesses in order for them to get consumer insights, it is useful for bloggers, influencers, non-profit organizations, and many others. The success of any business depends on the understanding of the customers� needs. Google Surveys gives the opportunity to get an insight into questions like how should you price your products, which logo seems more appealing, is the working hours of your business convenient to your customers, and so on. Google Surveys is not a free product, and the survey creators should expect to pay between $0.10 to $3.00 per response.

• Google Trends

This product is a powerful tool for anyone who is researching the market. Google Trends analyzes the popular search queries and let you compare them by categories, countries, shows you interest over time, compares the popularity of keywords or terms, gives you related topics and queries. This is one of the most powerful tools for any business to identify new markets.

• Google Jigsaw�

As Google describes it, Jigsaw is an idea incubator that forecasts and confronts emerging trends and creates future-defining research and technology. Jigsaw can offer a lot to publishers and bloggers. It is trying to find solutions to protect free speech, to prevent cyber attacks and access to information. One of the many projects that the platform is hosting is Project Shield. It offers free anti-DDOS (anti-distributed denial-of-service) service. One of the many news outlets that use Google Jigsaw is the New York Times. With the help of Project Perspective, the New York Times was able to faster identify toxic comments.

• Google Patents�

Patents is a Google product that is fairly unknown to the general public. Unless you needed to find a patent, or you had to patent something yourself, it is quite possible that you have never heard of this service. More than 87 million patents can be found here, ranging from patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office to the European Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, and Canadian, Russian, UK, and other countries� patent offices. With the help of Google Patents, you can find out if your invention is unique.