There's no question: This week's biggest news in inbound marketing comes courtesy of social giant Facebook. Mere weeks after unveiling Graph Search, Facebook announced the biggest change to News Feed in its seven-year history. HubSpot predicts it's a change that will have serious implications on how fans engage with brands on Facebook and what content these brands need to be posting for Facebook marketing success.
We'll let you know our thoughts on the new News Feed in the coming weeks. (You can join the waiting list for the new News Feed here.) Until then, check out a few of this week's top stories from the Brand & Capture blog.
As Thomas Edison once said, "Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something." This sentiment applies perfectly to lead scoring. Why? Because we don't always know exactly how to create rules for lead qualification that will reliably move warm leads to the sales team and leave the rest for lead nurturing. This isn't a perfect science, and it takes time and testing to get it right. See how to get started.
Inbound Marketers can utilize blogger outreach to help achieve a number of objectives. Want to position your company’s CEO as an industry thought leader? Contact a mainstream media blog and offer him as an expert source on emerging industry news. Want to increase sales of a particular product? Offer relevant bloggers a free product sample to review. It sounds easy enough, but many professionals still get it wrong. That’s why we did our research and want to share with you a few blogger outreach best practices all inbound marketers should follow.
In digital marketing, we often talk about mapping our content marketing efforts to coincide with our sales funnel and developing educational top-of-the-funnel content. But sometimes we need to take one step back and look at our content marketing from an even more basic perspective: developing content to coincide with the adult human brain. Because when you penetrate the minds of your buyers, you can reach them not only on a consumer level but, more importantly, on a human level. See what we mean here.
Becoming a thought leader is the ultimate goal of many inbound marketers nowadays. After all, who doesn't want to be recognized as (and profit from) being one of the foremost authorities in this booming industry? Unfortunately (and despite an abundance of companies proclaiming they can take you to the thought leadership motherland), there's really no fool-proof plan to becoming a thought leader. However, there are several steps most experts agree can get you on the right path to establishing yourself as an inbound marketing thought leader. See a few of those steps here.
Kuno Vice President John McTigue has worked from his home office for 15. It's a good thing, too, because I hear the commute from his Texas abode to Kuno's Ohio office is dreadful. John says he sometimes misses the camaraderie and the impromptu creativity one can get from an office environment, but on the other hand, he knows just how noisy and distracting an office can be. Just weeks after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's across-the-board denial of work-at-home privileges, John discusses when working at home makes sense (and when it doesn't). See it here.
Thanks for stopping by, inbound marketers! We'll see you back here tomorrow!
Photo Credit: Mashable
Known as Hawkeye for her near superhuman copy editing abilities, Lisa Gulasy applies her unique experiences in agency and journalism to manage strategy and day-to-day engagement of client social media profiles and assist in researching and writing blogs, press releases and advanced content. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
