Helping America’s small businesses get on the map with Google
We worked with Google for Small Business to expand their Let’s Put our Cities on the Map campaign, helping millions of small businesses increase their visibility online.
Let’s Put our Cities on the Map
Google Small Business (SMB) provides tools and resources to help small businesses stand out online, reach more customers, and work more efficiently. By filling out a simple form, small businesses can claim their profile and provide hours, contact info, and more. Claiming and completing a business profile provides more visibility within search results and puts an icon on Google Maps, helping businesses to be discovered by more people.
Not many small businesses knew about this at the time. The SMB team launched a campaign in 2015 to help businesses learn about the tools that Google had to help them succeed: Let’s Put our Cities on the Map.
The team at Nelson Cash had helped to establish the campaign by generating nearly 30,000 unique logos and websites to match, one for each city in America. The focus of the campaign was on community support, something so essential to the success of small businesses. Tailoring the website to each city in America with a city-specific logo and local content city gave the campaign a personal touch and felt welcoming and approachable to business owners.
We built upon this to help the team at Google reach and connect with more small businesses through the creation of an e-commerce platform to obtain workshop materials, web and direct mail campaigns, and development of the Google Small Business social community.
A streamlined tool to get customized materials in the hands of workshop hosts
The Let’s Put our Cities on the Map campaign had a strong on-the-ground effort in hosting workshops in cities across the country. Workshops helped to educate small business owners and bring awareness to the tools Google had to help them succeed. But our client needed a solution to help get workshop materials in the hands of the partners and community leaders that would be setting up these events.
I led the design of a responsive e-commerce platform where workshop hosts could obtain workshop kits and order refills of individual items as needed. Remember those nearly 30,000 unique logos? Well, we also needed to provide users the ability to customize these items to display their city’s logo.
Partners would log in to gain access to a free storefront to obtain workshop materials. By requiring the user to choose between a custom or general kit up front, we focused the user on the the available choices throughout the remaining steps. When placing a customized order for city-specific materials, we were able to pull in the exact city logo and display it on the products, providing the user with an exact representation of the workshop materials to come.
Ongoing website feature development and digital campaigns
The multi-year campaign required us to adapt and build onto the initial website to provide ways for users to find and sign up for workshops, highlight seasonal campaigns, and expand available information and resources.
A playful direct-mail campaign to surprise and delight
Even though this was a largely digital effort, we were also tasked with creating a fun, memorable direct mail piece that would entice small business owners to learn more. I led the design of an interactive certificate and accompanying sticker sheet that invites the recipient to have a little fun in creating a celebratory award for their own business. The program branding is kept to a minimum, pulling in city-specific logos and data to help bring awareness to how other businesses in their community are using Google’s tools to help them succeed.
The result
We helped millions of small businesses increase their visibility on Google and reach countless new customers
When the campaign launched in 2015, Google Maps was pretty sparse—there weren’t many icons on the map that represented small businesses. And, searching for your favorite local restaurant on Google often didn’t display a complete business profile to the right of your search results.
Though we don’t have the exact numbers, the campaign was a huge success. Today, it’s rare to find a business on Google without a claimed profile. When you search Google and Google Maps, you’re almost always presented with a complete profile, hours, location, and more. Along with the team at Google Small Business, we helped millions of small businesses put themselves on the map.