Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) primary source of revenue comes from its advertising partners that want to reach the most relevant consumers at the right place and right time with just the right message. Google Marketing Platform is the product that Google’s largest advertisers use to measure the impact of their campaigns, which help drive over $150 billion annually for the tech company. By making digital advertising simple and effective for its discerning users, which include marketing leaders and practitioners at the largest companies in the US, Google Marketing Platform is one of the world’s most valuable products.
In 2017, Prose approached Google about assisting with its content marketing campaigns. Back then, Google Marketing Platform was known as the Google Analytics 360 Suite. It included the same solutions that Google Marketing Platform does today, but under this different overall product name—solutions such as Campaign Manager 360 (for managing digital media campaigns), Display & Video 360 (for display ads), Search Ads 360 (for managing search campaigns), Tag Manager 360, and Analytics 360. Used together, these powerful tools help large advertisers uncover valuable insights about their campaigns and decide how to best allocate their marketing efforts and budgets.
The content marketing team’s initial goal was to find a solution that could help it create the large volume of content required to market these products to its global audience. They were looking for an agency that could provide talented creatives who were deeply knowledgeable about digital advertising, content marketing, branding, and communications. By consistently publishing engaging, insightful, and easy-to-understand blog posts, ghostwritten executive bylined articles, infographics, white papers and e-books, case studies, social posts, and other executive communications, their goal was to build thought leadership, educate their audience about how their products contribute to business growth, simplify and articulate complex product information to make it understandable for their target audience, and drive sales by sharing news about rapidly launching new features.
After bidding for and winning Google’s business for an initial retainer, Prose assembled a team of top-tier content marketing strategists, senior copywriters, and creative directors to build the assets that would power Google’s campaigns. This team included a number of former Googlers—including Prose’s own ex-Google founder, Justin Belmont—who, naturally, had an in-depth understanding of these products and the digital advertising industry.
The team at Prose then went through an initial training period to learn about how Google’s products work, the company’s preferred style, voice, and tone as outlined in a comprehensive brand guidelines deck, and workshops with in-house content specialists. For assignments in which the topic area was especially niche, Prose ran video interview sessions with individual product experts and stakeholders to better understand how to communicate their benefits.
To help businesses understand the power of Google’s ad-tech solutions, the strategy was to create content focused around the idea that high-quality data works better when it’s not siloed across different teams, and when you use a set of integrated tools all under one hood that can combine to drive real business results. These messages all fit under the product’s core promise, which is to help businesses achieve “Faster, smarter marketing.”
Prose quickly caught on to Google’s preferences and started producing a large volume of content at scale. With each successful campaign and project, from in-depth white papers based on research reports from third-party firms such as BCG and Bain to quick product announcements to opinion pieces published in HBR and Think with Google, Prose continued to build trust within the company at large, gaining introductions to more and more Googlers who needed help with content marketing.
By the end of the initial contract period, Prose had met a number of different teams, including Ad Manager (which powers advertising for publishers), AdMob (which powers advertising for mobile app developers), Maps, Cloud, and more. All of these internal orgs started working with Prose to help with additional campaigns, and Prose became the go-to content marketing resource across many of Google’s most critical products. It was clear that Prose just “got it,” and fit in well with Google’s proactive, fast-paced, action-oriented culture.
To service these additional needs, Prose expanded its team of creatives to help create even more content for Google, making sure to find content specialists with just the right background who could create stories that would be highly relevant to Google’s target B2B2C customers. Google then trusted Prose’s team to join calls with its own clients and learn more about how they were running their campaigns on Google, which helped further educate creatives about how these products work.
A year after the partnership began, Google tapped Prose to help rebrand Google Analytics 360 Suite into Google Marketing Platform, which is still the product’s name today. This rebrand involved updating hundreds of existing content assets with new insights, and branding, advising on which content assets to leave behind entirely, and creating marquis content assets and stories that would launch the new brand under a short timeline. To accomplish this large task, Prose worked with other Google agencies to directly upload new content and updates to Google’s site, which helped supplement their resources and complete the project faster. Prose also provided translation and localization services to help Google reach customers in APAC, EMEA, and Latin America.
Working with Prose has significantly improved Google Marketing Platform's content strategy, and saved the team time, money, and resources that it can allocate to other important priorities. Prose also helped usher in the new Google Marketing Platform brand, which continues to be one of the company’s highest-performing teams, providing exceptional ROI to its many customers. These successes have been documented in the many success stories that Prose has helped to craft, which are published on the company’s site.
As far as Google’s own ROI from working with Prose, the results have been significant. While NDAs prohibit sharing many specifics, as an example for one advertising-related content campaign, Google invested $100,000 for Prose to create a series of assets which went on to generate over $100,000,000 for Google — a whopping 100,000% return.
Google has also seen benefits in time saved. By relying on Prose to focus on creating world-class content, its product marketers, content managers, and campaign managers can focus on selling their products and building new, more effective “big-picture” narratives that keep pace with the rapidly evolving priorities of this industry.
Through today, in 2023, Prose continues to be proud to work with Google Marketing Platform and its many related teams. We hope to remain a trusted partner for many years to come.