Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You don’t have to wait months or years to get high rankings in Google. Through Google News, you can instantly shoot up to page 1 of Google.

Now Google already gives you a set of guidelines, but here is what I found is effective:

1. You have to write news worthy content – if you are struggling to find news content you can go to Google Trends or any popular news site to see what’s hot.

2. Create a Google News Sitemap – through the Yoast SEO plugin you can create a sitemap. This way when you have news worthy content they will pick it up faster.

3. Your URL structure has to be unique – if you don’t have news related keywords within your URL you are less likely to rank. By having specific keywords you will shoot up to the top for news related queries.

In addition to that, follow the guidelines Google News gives and you will be fine.

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing channels in advertising, with our research estimating that $1 billion was spent on Instagram influencers alone in 2017. With brand dollars pouring into the space, social media influencers, whether established or aspiring, are vying for brand sponsorship deals.

I founded Mediakix, a dedicated influencer marketing agency, in 2011. In the years since, I have witnessed a rise in these deceptive practices and wanted to draw awareness to the issue. These practices span the gamut of unscrupulousness and range from gaming Instagram’s algorithm with “pods” to purchasing fake followers and engagement to creating entirely fake personas and accounts.

It’s difficult but not impossible to know whether an influencer has purchased fake followers and engagement. About a year ago, we were evaluating several accounts for potential campaigns and noted that one woman in particular had more than doubled her followers in less than a week.

While rapid follower growth isn’t the only indicator of whether an influencer paid for followers, it does raise a red flag, especially if nearly every Instagram post is sponsored. We checked her rate afterwards and it had nearly tripled due to her boosted (fake) following....

The incredible growth of this social media universe can be largely attributed to the success of Facebook, which has recently hit two billion active users globally. But, of course, there are many other platforms that have helped to build the foundation as well – names like YouTube, Messenger, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram all create a powerful base for new apps and add-ons to plug into.

As of today, entrepreneurs have been able to use this foundation to build out new branches to the social media universe that are both exciting and diverse. The apps in these niches help to facilitate workplace collaboration, live events, dating, networking, user reviews, location-based marketing, livestreaming, expert Q&As, and many other functions – and the ecosystem continues to expand and multiply by the day....

One of the most commonly asked questions for digital marketers is: how can I grow my email list? When so much of a marketing campaign’s success hinges on your ability to capture a prospect’s email and nurture them to sale, how can you get more potential customers into the sales funnel?

Simply asking people for their email address won’t provide stellar results. Understandably so. Why should they willingly give up personal information without receiving anything in return? Instead, marketers are increasingly turning to lead magnets as part of their inbound and content marketing strategy.

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a valuable offer that you provide to your prospects in exchange for contact information such as name and email. The best way to promote that offer is with a landing page. Therefore, a lead magnet landing page encourages a reciprocal relationship between a company and prospect. They provide their personal information in exchange for what is behind the form.

There are plenty of lead magnet ideas to draw inspiration from on the web, and it’s important to note they do not have to be a content download (PDF file or otherwise). We’ve compiled 15 lead magnet examples that demonstrate the various ways marketers use gated offers to maximize leads and drive sales....

It was winter in New York City and Asaf Jacobi’s Harley-Davidson dealership was selling one or two motorcycles a week. It wasn’t enough.

Jacobi went for a long walk in Riverside Park and happened to bump into Or Shani, CEO of an AI firm, Adgorithms. After discussing Jacobi’s sales woes, Shani, suggested he try out Albert, Adgorithm’s AI-driven marketing platform. It works across digital channels, like Facebook and Google, to measure, and then autonomously optimize, the outcomes of marketing campaigns.

Jacobi decided he’d give Albert a one-weekend audition.That weekend Jacobi sold 15 motorcycles. It was almost twice his all-time summer weekend sales record of eight....

Chic packaging. A mysterious name. Millennial pink. Those factors all scream prestige beauty products.

And that’s exactly what Suave, the bargain drugstore hair brand owned by Unilever, was going for when it went undercover and pretended to be a new luxury hair care brand, dubbed “evaus.” (That’s “Suave” spelled backwards.)

In a clever marketing stunt, Suave sent beauty influencers packages of evaus, claiming it was a new hair care line. Then, it captured their reactions on camera upon revealing they were actually using Suave.

The campaign received wide press coverage in both lifestyle publications like Teen Vogue, Glamour, and New York Magazine’s The Cut, as well as in industry sources, like Fast Company and Ad Age. Plus, hundreds of people across social media posted about the campaign.

It’s an example of a successful marketing campaign rooted in content. Here, we break down the key elements of how Suave effectively used content to launch it, and then extend the messaging afterwards....

Keyword intent represents the user’s purpose for the search. It’s what the user is likely to do when searching for a particular phrase. Or, to be more precise, it’s what we think the user is likely to do, since we cannot always be sure.

Intent is undoubtedly the most important concept when it comes to keyword research. It helps you meet the users’ needs better and match your content and landing pages to their intentions. Analyzing keywords by intent is thus your first step when diagnosing conversion issues when it comes to search referrals....

Do you want to automate your content curation? All you have to do is follow the steps below.

Step #1: Follow people within your industry on Twitter – once you follow people in your industry you will see what’s hot. This way you don’t have to browse the web and search around for what’s hot.Step

#2: Use Pocket – this will allow you to favorite and save what you have found on Twitter that you like. That way, as you are reading you can save what you like.Step

#3: Schedule out the content using Buffer – you can connect Pocket to your favorite social media scheduling tool and then schedule out all of the content you like.The content will then get pushed out on your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social site you use....

Learn to grow a specialized audience on Facebook by including interests that are related to your products in your ad targeting.

It’s time we talked about how you’re using social media. That’s right, this is an intervention.

We’re concerned about what you’re doing, and more importantly what you’re not doing. Your lack of adoption of new channels. Your total disrespect of mobile first users. Your reluctance to try video. Your fear of spending money on social ads. Your results. We’re concerned.

We bring up these concerns out of love for you and modern marketing. You see, social media marketing has changed, but most social media marketers haven’t. A modern social strategy is light-years away from the definition we used in 2012 and it’s time to adapt. Adapt to a mobile first, video obsessed audience. Adapt to new tactics that take advantage of new tools. Adapt how we measure success and what we’re trying to achieve.

This isn’t a matter of making tweaks, we need to start over.

Ads used to just be ads. They were signs on the side of the road, or in our browsers. They were something that could be ignored. Visually loud, sure, but they weren’t a fundamental part of our conversations, relationships, or entertainment.

But on the internet today, ads aren’t just part of the content or interface, they are the content and the interface. From what photos you see on Facebook, to the music you listen to on Spotify, to the videos you watch on Snapchat–it’s all served by algorithms that have quantified your response well enough to exploit your tastes, showing you things that you will almost certainly click on.

By using these apps and services, we’re feeding the companies that control them immense amounts of data that, in turn, tailors the medium to fit our tastes. The difference between an ad and a piece of content, these days, is becoming technical. It’s an insight that echoes throughout Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report, which she and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers published yesterday afternoon.

The report, which is heavily anticipated every year, contains hundreds of slides breaking down digital culture and business–everything from emerging markets in China to the rise of unboxing culture. But the trend that stuck out most to us this year? That the internet is now playing every user in one giant game we cannot escape. Here’s how....