Inbound Marketing Agency Blog

The following is a guest post by Patrick Hess – As a marketing consultant whose primary role is to advise clients on the best mix of marketing solutions to promote their products or services, I decided to hire myself for a project that hits close to home. In fact, the project lives in my home and calls me Dad. Spencer Kane, my 15 year old son, is a teen pop singer/songwriter who is starting to make an impact in the independent music industry.  

Lately there have been some heated conversations among online marketing experts about the terminology used to describe what they do as online marketers. In a particularly lively discussion on Google+, Jeremy Derringer, a.k.a. @PapaSlingshot, posed the question "SEO vs Inbound Marketing vs Earned Media... What say you?" With answers from luminaries like Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz), Dharmesh Shaw (HubSpot) and our own Chad Pollitt, the discussion revolved around which term best describes and is most appropriate for the work we do for our clients and for marketing our own businesses. Jeremy and others say that "SEO", as it has evolved over the years was once and still is the best term to describe the strategy and tactics of getting found online via search engines, online ads, social media and curated blogs. Others, such as Dharmesh and Chad, maintain that "inbound marketing" has developed as a more appropriate term. I'm going to argue that they're all wrong. What we are all doing (at least in principal) is generating sales leads.

I recently attended the webinar How to Master B2B Social Media Marketing with @KippBodnar and @JeffreyLCohen from Hubspot. Lots of great thought provoking information shared, including their “10-4-1” rule for social media posts in a B2B environment. This rule describes the number of times a business should promote their own content on social media platforms, in relationship to the number used from other sources. 

Remember Family Feud? Probably the last quiz show I ever watched, but I loved the format of filling in the blanks. As inbound marketers, we get a lot of questions about posting frequency. How often should you - blog, tweet, post on Facebook and other social media sites? What kind of success can you expect from your current commitment to creating great content? Survey said...

Thanks to everyone who joined the Kuno Creative inbound marketing team to learn why inbound marketing is the new SEO, how Google has changed search engine optimization forever and the new role of social media in search marketing. The event was a huge success and boasted a record number of registrants for a Kuno webinar.

Are the “Likes” on your Facebook Page plateauing? Even if you’re mixing up the content and finding new ways to encourage sharing, it’s still possible to experience slow growth. Why? Because there are 800 million active users on Facebook, sharing 4 billion ‘things’ per day. That’s a lot of ‘things’ that can drown out your Page’s content. While posting great content is still the most effective way to keep your community engaged, your Page can still use a leg up through Sponsored Stories advertisements.

Perhaps Roger Goodell might consider downloading our Twitter Marketing Cheat Sheet the next time he considers social media use during an NFL game. 

Over the years Kuno has published blog posts, guides and whitepapers documenting black hat inbound marketing tactics and why they should be avoided. One that we’ve failed to mention is called article spinning. This is a tactic by which the perpetrator attempts to take an already existing piece of content and rewrites it in a way to fool the search engines into thinking it is original content. This can be done manually or, in egregious cases, automated with software.

Hello there, inbound marketing friend. What does one do during the "purgatory" Sunday before the Super Bowl? Hmmm, well you can monitor #ProBowl for the first ever in-game NFL tweets (yes, I realize it's a fake game). You can get up to speed on the hottest Super Bowl ads, or, the inbound marketing striver in you can up your inbound marketing mojo by reviewing what people were reading on the Kuno blog this week:

There's a football game that takes place in between Super Bowl ads? 

Really? You mean, in between barking dogs, Ferris Bueller and vampires, I still have to eat chips and salsa and feign interest in exotic defensive schemes?