Customer Engagement Strategies: Analyzing Google Apps SaaS Marketing

This report analyzes the marketing strategies for Google Apps SaaS, focusing on customer engagement techniques. It begins with an overview of Google Apps SaaS, highlighting its impact on office software usage and its various editions. The report then explores several strategies to engage potential customers on a new product page, including using eye-catching content, images, and videos. The student implemented a PDCA cycle to experiment with these strategies and found that using beautiful images with catchy captions was the most effective approach. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of this strategy for attracting more potential customers to the product page. References to relevant research papers support the analysis and findings.

Assessing and Evaluating Strategies
Student’s name
Institution Affiliation(s)

Google Apps SaaS
Google Apps SaaS has a major impact on the usage of Office software. Google Apps as a
service is hosted by Google for business purposes. The communication and collaboration feature
of Google Apps SaaS makes it applicable by any size of a business. Web-based service of
Google Apps SaaS provides its user's tools that ensure collaboration on documents and
spreadsheets. The documents can be shared and modified. The libraries for the reference
materials can be built. Google provides this service in three different forms (Duffett, 2015). The
standard edition is free and has fewer features. It can be used for both normal users as well as
businesses purposes. The educational version contains all the available features but is available
for the colleges and institutions. The condition for being a part of this is that the institute should
use for educational purposes, sharing and research. The premium edition of Google Apps is
available at the cost of $50 per user account per annum. This edition provides all features that are
present in Google Apps. Charging money for its product is something very unique in the case of
Google (Rodrigues, Ruivo, & Oliveira, 2014). From the beginning, Google has generated
revenue through advertising tools.
Almost all of the software right from the searching tool in the late 90s of the last century
to till date have been made available by Google free of cost. Even Google Apps launched in
August 2006 providing services like webmail, calendaring, VoIP, word processing, spreadsheets
has been free of cost. Only the premium edition launched this year with target market ranging
from small business establishment to major banking and insurance sector corporation is being
charged. But if we compare the price Google is charging for providing this service with the cost
of MS Office; we will find Google Apps is much cheaper and can be accessed from more than
one peripheral (Tsai, Bai, & Huang, 2014).

Strategies
Below are strategies that can help me getting potential customers to engage with my new product
page.
a) Using eye-catching content - Facebook provides features like larger text for shorter
messages. Also, there is an option to put text on a colored background which can help
reach target customers in a more vibrant manner (Dehghani & Tumer, 2015).
b) Use of images - Use of beautiful images can highlight the product's creative side. Social
media marketing experts assert that use of image post can drive 2.3 times more customer
engagement (Singh, Sharma, Kumar, & Yadav, 2016).
c) Use of Facebook Live and videos - videos can be used to catch user attention and should
always be easy to comprehend and should always have captions. Also, use sneak peeks
into company events, product launches and behind the scenes for your customers
(Duffett, 2015).

Experiment - PDCA Cycle
Figure 1: PDCA Cycle for customer engagement (Source: Singh et al., 2016)
Results
Studying the results shows that the use of a beautiful image post attracts more customers
to my new product page compared to the other two strategies. Therefore, for my new products
page, I will implement the use of beautiful image posts that have catchy captions on them. This
way I can be sure to attract more potential customers to my page.

References
Dehghani, M., & Tumer, M. (2015). A research on effectiveness of Facebook advertising on
enhancing purchase intention of consumers. Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 597–
600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.03.051
Duffett, R. G. (2015). Facebook advertising’s influence on intention-to-purchase and purchase
amongst Millennials. Internet Research, 25(4), 498–526. https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-01-
2014-0020
Rodrigues, J., Ruivo, P., & Oliveira, T. (2014). Software as a Service Value and Firm
Performance - A literature Review Synthesis in Small and Medium Enterprises. Procedia
Technology, 16, 206–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.protcy.2014.10.085
Singh, A., Sharma, S., Kumar, S. R., & Yadav, S. A. (2016). Overview of PaaS and SaaS and its
application in cloud computing. 2016 International Conference on Innovation and
Challenges in Cyber Security (ICICCS-INBUSH), 172–176.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICICCS.2016.7542322
Tsai, W., Bai, X., & Huang, Y. (2014). Software-as-a-service (SaaS): perspectives and
challenges. Science China Information Sciences, 57(5), 1–15.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-013-5050-z