Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.

Before launching the digital audit it’s important to establish basic criteria with respect to rating status, structure and performance. To help guide next steps set up a simple decision filter that will aid in prioritizing your findings. One simple way to do this is to assign a color coding systems as follows...

Social media monitoring has become a mainstream practice across almost every industry. Marketers evaluate web chatter in real time to create dynamic and timely social media content that adds to or sparks a conversation with new and existing followers.

It makes sense that brands would focus on data-inspired social media strategies: Pitney Bowes noted that 25 percent of surveyed respondents will put social insights to work in the near future, and a report from J.D. Power and Associates discovered that 87 percent of social users buy from brands they engage with positively online.

Social media monitoring can significantly enhance companies’ internet marketing campaigns, and brands that want to take their efforts to the next level should consider sharing audience-responsive content in real time. Take a page from McDonald’s content marketing menu.

Recently, eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson interviewed McDonald’s Director of Social Media Rick Wion about how the global fast-food brand adapts to the changing social media marketing world. Williamson discovered that McDonald’s uses social analytics to reach real-time marketing goals. Wion noted that the fast food company constantly tests and learns as it goes, putting together different marketing messages and evaluating responses before taking the next step. In essence, McDonald’s creates a choose-your-own adventure-like campaign and delivers ready-made content to take advantage of social chatter and trending topics....