Nicole Franco

I attribute my success to the incredible mentors I've had throughout my career, especially strong women who were willing to teach me and show patience as I learned. My very first mentor Dana, along with Kristen and Domenica, have all played huge roles in my growth. I also believe that being willing to open yourself up to learning has been critical. I always say that you need to be teachable and recognize that you don't know everything. It's so important to listen to people who have years of experience in different fields. The resilience and willingness to teach that my mentors showed me, combined with my own openness to learning and experimenting, is really what has driven my success. I owe pretty much all of my career to these women who guided me.

The best career advice I've received is to be teachable and stay open to learning. This means being willing to listen to feedback, absorb what's happening around you, and learn from mentors and others who have experience. I've also learned the importance of not being afraid to try different things and explore various aspects of your industry before settling into what you really love. When you enter a room, you want to be like a sponge, absorbing everything. This openness to experimentation and willingness to step into different areas has been invaluable in helping me find my path and grow in my career.

I would say be teachable, 100%. While it's important for women to have a voice and provide their opinions, there's also a lot to be said for recognizing that you don't know everything when you're starting out. When you enter a room, you want to be like a sponge, absorbing everything around you. Listen to what's going on, pay attention to your mentors and the new things happening in your industry, and then take that knowledge and package it to present your ideas. I would also say don't be afraid to try different things and explore. If you're a young woman exploring marketing in general, there is so much you could do - brand, social, digital PR, SEO, content marketing. Go through and find your niche with what you really like to do, and don't be afraid to step into different puddles. I'm very grateful that I stepped away from my company for a bit to see what else was out there. That exploration helped me find what I truly love. So take advantage of those opportunities to learn and experiment.

The biggest challenge right now is keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of SEO and digital PR. Things are consistently changing every single day, especially with AI, and the team has to have the grit to keep up just as fast. SEO and digital PR looked really different 5 years ago and 10 years ago, so it's about continuously adapting to what's happening. But this challenge also presents incredible opportunities. I'm really excited about the integration we're going to see within marketing teams. We used to keep digital PR and SEO siloed, even from each other, but now we're seeing brand mixing with social, mixing with SEO, mixing with digital PR, and I think they all go hand in hand. I'm particularly excited about exploring how brands show up in LLMs and new platforms - not just Google anymore, but ChatGPT, Gemini, and other places where people search during the buyer journey. We're also expanding into podcasts, product seeding, expert commentary, and thought leadership. The opportunity is to integrate all these different aspects of marketing together and see how they work in this new, AI-driven landscape.

Integrity and transparency are at the core of what I do. I think there's so much going on in people's personal lives and within work, and I just feel like you always want to be 100% with clients and 100% with your team. These are really big things that I believe we should keep at the core of what we do on a day-to-day basis, especially in my personal relationships too. Being honest and transparent in all my interactions is super important to me, and I think that's the number one value I hold.