2022 Ranking of America’s Most JUST Companies

Project Overview

Every year JUST Capital releases their annual ranking of America’s Most Just Companies. It is by and large the organization’s biggest moment of the year, with dozens of America’s largest companies promoting their inclusion, and in 2023 we had just switched our media partner from Forbes to CNBC, who had vastly different timelines and requirements for coverage, and we had a major Nasdaq event in that we needed help finding engaged C-Suite leaders for.

With those additions, our aim was to vastly outperform our success metrics from previous years, while using the content from this new partnership to give us a longer tail, and more chances to interact with companies in the months afterwards and get them involved in our Nasdaq event.

Here’s how we did it:

Step 1: Creating the Promotional and Storytelling Materials for the JUST 100

Our aim was to make it as easy as possible for the leading companies (JUST 100) to promote their inclusion in the list. For 2022, I created a full suite of materials, including: videos and image assets for web and social, social media copy, a press release template, award seal files, and more. In addition, I gave them editable files for all of our assets, because we’ve found companies prefer to integrate everything into their own branding.

On top of what I gave the companies, I created an entirely different set of copy and assets for our influencers and partners, as well as specialized copy/resources for our C-suite leadership and our JUST channels.

While expansive, making sure we had a wide variety of assets tailor-made for specific companies and organizations was integral to our strategy. You can see some of the assets below, as well as how some companies incorporated them into their own branding.

Step 2: Getting the Right Stories to CNBC

To make the most out of our new partnership with CNBC, I worked with the data team to suss out the stories, trends, and companies that we thought deserved highlighting from the network.

While CNBC was always going to cover the launch of the Rankings (along with a specific list of insights they wanted to use for other stories), we wanted to produce as many stories and interviews as possible to raise the profile of them even further.

We delivered an entire document to them of companies and angles, which led to CNBC published a whopping SIXTEEN news items during launch week, including interviews with many JUST 100 CEOs, trends evident in the Rankings, and so on. You can see a quick snapshot of them on the right, and visit the site (which now houses the articles from newer Rankings as well).

Lastly, I worked with the marketing team to create prep materials and talking points for our founder, Paul Tudor Jones, as well as our CEO Martin Whittaker, for each of their respective interviews on the full Rankings.

Step 3: Tracking Our Success

All of this pre-planning was great, but it meant nothing if I didn’t make sure every bit of social, digital, and press promotion was tagged, captured, and clipped as it came out. For this, I set up a a robust tracking system in Sprinklr, and created some of our first integrations into Salesforce (which we had only recently bought a subscription for several months ago) to accurately track which companies promoted themselves heavily, and help us identify leads for our other upcoming initiatives.

In addition, we collected quotes from CNBC exec interviews, press releases that companies put out, and from CEO social posts to use within our marketing materials for the next cycle.

Results

We blew out our numbers across the board.

• On top line numbers, 81 of the JUST 100 companies promoted their inclusion, up from 67 the year before.

• Promotions per company hit 4.2, with a majority of companies at least doing two social posts, a press release, and one additional piece of promotion (CEO shout-out, website banner, etc). Many others did far, far more.

• 14 CEOS publicly promoted their rankings inclusion on their personal channels.

• 64k people visited the Rankings during launch month, our highest ever, accounting for 407k page views, our highest of any month in our history.

• 74% of this traffic was directed from company promotions and CNBC, proving just how vital our plans were.

• We started deeper conversations with the 15 most highly promotional companies, eventually getting C-suite leaders from 7 of them to come and speak at our Nasdaq event.