JUDIT JAMES

  Public Relations has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has grown and matured as an industry, yes. But the most striking moves have come in how we work. The changes have been less disruptive than those in advertising, but the rise of digital and social media has given way to a new world of digital PR. And the rules and tools have changed accordingly. So, what’s different, and how can we take advantage of the changes? The goals of a typical digital PR program are similar to those of traditional PR with distinct tools and targets. We still prize earned media stories and we work to create branded content. But the most frequent targets are digital media outlets with high domain authority―top outlets like  Refinery 29  or  Business Insider . We push for links to a company or product website as a matter of routine. Content has changed, too. In fact, the unofficial birth of digital PR was probably in late 2011 or early 2012, when  Google changed its algori...

When I started reading up about social ROI, I found it so confusing, I wondered how other business owners were managing to understand it. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t do great with numbers or formulae. But in the process of creating their guides on ROI for social media, I found that most experts had substituted simplicity and comprehension for thoroughness and over-complication. That was when I decided to make sense of this topic for you and I.  In this article, I simplify the steps to measuring your social media ROI. But First, Why Social Media ROI Matters As  Lewis Carroll  (and later, George Harrison) so famously stated, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” If you’re running a social media campaign without taking the time to use an analytics tool to assess if you’re getting the results you want to achieve, then you really don’t know where you’re going. Social ROI matters because it tells you where you are, where you want...

Every experienced marketer will tell you that data-driven marketing involves a slew of software solutions that offer advanced analytics designed to both automate and optimize processes. Thankfully, Martech (marketing technology) has come a long way in the past 10 years. Marketing teams are in a much better place to optimize strategies, reach their key performance indicator (KPI) targets, and showcase marketing efforts. However, when it comes time to showing off the results your marketing programs have been getting, all the software in the world won’t help if you can’t extract and interpret the data. There needs to be some degree of data literacy involved, after all, without a fundamental understanding of data, it's difficult to increase conversion rate. Your social media, PR, and digital marketing teams undoubtedly need to pull and deliver progress reports for the higher-ups. You may have a data geek to manage the process or your team may need to learn to do it themselves. Either w...

Marketing teams spend a lot of time and money crafting and promoting content to persuade prospects to begin their customer journey. But succeeding in getting customers to take a predestined path is still hit or miss if you don't follow the right method. After reading this excerpt about the six distinct characteristics of content marketing persuasion you’ll be more equipped to map unpredictable customer journeys.  Content marketing that persuades a prospect to take additional action along the customer journey has six distinctive characteristics: 1. Liking Consumers and businesses alike wish to engage with organizations that they admire. Furthermore, we've come to expect no less than stellar customer experiences from those companies. Millennials and Gen Z are often referred to as 'generation 'woke' due to their passion for social rights initiatives, it therefore brings a little surprise that social media demands that marketing teams become more transparent when engagi...

  Whether you are just getting started or you are well acquainted with the do’s and don’ts of social media marketing, it pays to take a fresh look at some of the most common mistakes businesses make online to ensure you are not making them too. Here are 10 social media management mistakes I see happen most often — and what to do instead. #1 You’re Being Overly Promotional On Social Media Posting content that focuses solely on your own offering is a sure-fire way to turn people off. Sprout Social  surveyed more than 1,000 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users to determine what annoys them about brands on social, what drives them to unfollow and which industries are on the right side of the line. Respondents indicated that the most annoying thing brands do on social is over-promote. Do this instead:  Follow the  80/20 rule : 80 percent non-promotional content and 20 percent posts with calls to action. Experiment with posting quality content from others. To quickly find...