Google Drive: The Ultimate Planning Powerhouse

The magic solution to all of your organizational nightmares is right at your fingertips: Google Drive.

Google Drive is a free, cloud-based storage system, complete with documents, presentations and spreadsheets that are easy to share with anyone on any platform. You’ve probably heard of – and might have used – Google Drive before, but are you aware of everything it can do to help you plan, coordinate and share amongst your team, as well as others outside your organization? At Pyxl, we use it quite a bit, and we’ve come up with five reasons Google Drive is the ultimate planning powerhouse that will accelerate your marketing efforts. 

Two heads are better than one

There’s nothing better than collaborating with a co-worker to create truly awesome content; and there’s nothing worse than ending up with three, four, five or more versions of the same document. Using Google Drive, it’s easy for multiple people to share and edit a document without confusing the final version with one of the drafts. It’s also easy to track changes and see who last edited the document.

Work smarter, not harder

Raise your hand if you have ever written the perfect tweet, only to discover that it’s five characters too long.

Prevent this tragedy from ever happening again by using the length (=LEN) formula in Google Sheets to tell you how many characters are in a cell. From tweets to ads, this simple formula might be a marketer’s best friend.

But, it doesn’t stop there. You can also use Google Sheets for reporting and easily track performance over time. Use formulas to add, subtract, multiply and divide, which will allow you to calculate everything from monthly total impressions, leads and “likes” on social to percent changes from quarter to quarter and many other metrics.

Another one of our favorite formulas is “concatenate.” This formula allows you to combine multiple cells into one. One way we use this formula is to combine text cells with a cell that houses a URL, which we’re then able to easily copy and paste into HubSpot’s social scheduling tool (or Hootsuite, or the like).

Access anytime, anywhere

Has a great idea ever come to you in the middle of the night when you’re nowhere near your computer? Since Google Drive is a cloud-based service, there’s no need to leave the comfort of your fluffy blankets and pillows when inspiration strikes in the middle of the night. Just grab your phone or tablet and open the Google Drive app to quickly record your idea and go back to sleep. The same is true when inspiration strikes at the coffee shop, gym or while you’re waiting in line at the dreaded DMV.

Sharing is caring

Google makes it easy to edit and change sharing permissions so you always know who has (and who doesn’t have) access to documents. You can share with anyone within your company, make documents private just for you or send a “view only” version to others outside your company for their reference.

What’s the best part about Google Drive? You can also quickly and easily duplicate templates with your formulas already built in. Why take the time to reinvent the wheel when you’ve already got the perfect template?

Take advantage of Google Drive for your computer

Similar to Dropbox, Google Drive for your computer allows you to easily organize and access files without having to open another tab in your browser and dig through the web version of Google Drive. 

At Pyxl, we use Google Drive for everything from creating social media calendars to keeping track of our PPC budgets. How do you use Google Drive to plan and keep track of your marketing activities? Tell us in the comments below!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022