Almost Summer. Working on your tan? Then read these relaxing marketing articles and learn something new.

I'm not sure if June qualifies as summer or not. Some people classify summer as July and August, but that seems a little short.

However you think about it, June is definitely the month to be outside as much as possible enjoying the sunshine and warm weather.

Are you on the beach working on your tan? Then read this month's relaxing must-read marketing articles:

• Blogging a Comeback: How We Rebooted Our B2B Blog From 3K to 50K+ Organic Monthly Pageviews (and Growing) [100% Must Read], ClearVoice
• Invisible asymptotes, Remains of the Day
• Reality check: Americans are tuning out of TV, Axios
• Does anyone care about your new product? (Doing market research with Google’s Keyword Tool), Andrew Chen
• Memes That Kill: The Future Of Information Warfare, CB Insights

If you have a few marketing priorities that aren't getting enough attention, message me and we'll schedule a free consultation.

#TBT: Government Marketing in an Age of Social Media

I've started to do some "Throw Back Thursday" (#TBT) type updates of old posts. This is a fun concept from Instagram and Facebook, and I thought I'd try it here.

This is one of my first blog posts back in 2007. Pretty terrible, no headline, etc.

Clearly, the impact of social media has changed from those early days.

...I recently moderated a panel discussion at a AMA-DC event in downtown DC entitled "Government Marketing in an Age of Social Media". The panelists (Jay McCargo, Toni Lee Rudnicki and Mark Root) were in general agreement that there has been minimal impact of "social media" among government marketers. However, all three agreed that web 2.0 marketing techniques will become more acceptable in time among the government contracting community.

This article in GCN backs this theory up: Web 2.0: Second verse, different than the first

Spring has Sprung...Finally.

After the winter we have had, I'm heading outside to rebuild my Vitamin D stores.In the meantime, here are this month's five must-read marketing articles:

• The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, Andrew Chen
• Why Winners Keep Winning. (hint: cumulative advantage), Nick Maggiulli
• This Is The Most Valuable Commodity of the 21st Century, Inc.
• Six Important Points About the State of B2B Content Marketing [Infographic], MarketingProfs
• Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote [100% Must Read], Strategery

If you have a few marketing priorities that aren't getting enough attention, email me and we'll schedule a quick call to review Honeycomb's capabilities.

Must-Read Marketing Articles for Your Spring Time Pleasure

April Showers Mean More Must-Read Marketing Articles!Spring seems to have finally arrived.

Regular baseball games are being played and the NBA playoffs have started.

Am I going to pass along some great articles about how to make your marketing better, faster and more measurable?

You bet I am.

Take a few seconds and check out these excellent readings:

• How Winners Really Differentiate, Andy Raskin
• How To Systematically Reduce The Risk & Uncertainty Of New Ideas, Strategyzer
• A Marketing Budget Example that Covers All Bases and Ensures ROI, Adhere
• 101 Sales Email Templates You Can Use Today To Close More Deals, Reddit Marketing
• Humanity’s remarkable economic history, CapX

If you have a few marketing priorities that aren't getting enough attention, email me and we'll schedule a quick call to review Honeycomb's capabilities.

March Marketing Madness 2018

Got your brackets filled out?

Should be an entertaining month of basketball with upsets, Cinderellas and, maybe, Virginia not winning it all.

A few years ago, Honeycomb client Ostrato asked us to create a fun video to celebrate the NCAA Tournament.

Click the image to watch...



After that video production, we helped Ostrato execute a "startup pivot" and rebranded the company as ParkMyCloud, which has been super successful, leading to high numbers of new clients and a new round of funding.

While you are watching your favorite teams and updating your brackets, take a few seconds and check out these articles:

1. Unilever CMO Keith Weed: Three things all marketers can do to eliminate ad fraud, Marketing Week
2. 7 Mistakes You’ll Make in Marketing Performance, MarTech
3. Five Big Business Trends to Watch in 2018, Fortune
4. Google Tag Manager Checklist – 68 Ways To Prepare A Website, Reddit Marketing
5. Startups are cheaper to build, but more expensive to grow – here’s why, Andrew Chen

If you have a few marketing priorities that aren't getting enough attention, email me and we'll schedule a quick call to review Honeycomb's capabilities.

Fall is my favorite time of year.

Football.

Lower humidity.

Normal, comfortable temperatures.

Product launches and new clients.


“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

— Albert Camus


All good things.

So, take a quick break from your busy fall schedule and check out these must-read marketing articles:

• Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage, Medium
• 5 Hardest Things in Conversion Optimization, CXL
• 23 Free Blogging Tools That Will Make You a Better Blogger, Jeff Bullas
• Uber's New CEO, Ben Thompson
• The Ultimate Guide to Making Smart Decisions, Farnham Street

Dog Days of Marketing?

This month's Straight to the Point post will be short, as I'm sure most of you want skip over this part and click on links to five awesome marketing articles.

What caught my eye in the past month? 

• Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage, Medium 
• Study: Thursdays are best for email engagement, FierceCMO 
• 10 Brilliant Examples of How to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang, Pollock 
• Hooks: An Intro on How to Manufacture Desire, Nir and Far 
• The Daily Routines of Famous Artists and Scholars, The Big Picture 

If you have a question about marketing, the clients we work with, or the services that Honeycomb Consulting provides, just contact me here.

Why Read This Post?

For the past 10-15 years, marketing has been undergoing a series of shifting changes in strategy, tactics, feel and tone.

As you know, the basics of human communication are eternal, but the methods by which we, the professional marketers, reach customers are constantly being tested, improved or discarded.

Keeping up to speed on the latest techniques is a challenge for all of us. The whole reason I started my newsletter, "Straight to the Point" six plus years ago, was to share the articles I felt were important for my fellow marketers and non-marketing business leaders to read.

Here are a few that caught my eye this week:

1. The Best Ways to Market Your Business on LinkedIn [Infographic], Social Media Today 
2. Cognitive Bias Survival Guide: Manage the Mind to Make Better Decisions, Geek Wrapped 
3. 10 Brilliant Examples of How to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang, Pollock 
4. Identifying top analytics talent in a competitive environment, Marketing Land 
5. Words on Words: Books That Will Improve Your Writing, Gregory Ciotti 

If you have a question about marketing, the clients we work with, or the services that Honeycomb provides, just email me at jeff@honeycomb-consulting.com.

New Honeycomb Website!

As last, we finally updated and refreshed the Honeycomb Consulting website. Please take a look and share your thoughts and feedback. Greatly appreciated!

My first marketing projects back in the 1990s were hand coding and designing websites. The technologies available today make that process much easier, quicker and cheaper.

Here are a few client websites we've worked on over the last few years, in various capacities:

• RedSeal- https://redseal.net 
• ParkMyCloud- http://www.parkmycloud.com/ 
• Scarab- http://www.wearscarab.com/ 
• Priveo- http://www.priveo.me

After checking out the new corporate site (www.honeycomb-consulting.com), spend a few minutes perusing these must read articles:

1. 20 of the Best Website Homepage Design Examples, HubSpot 
2. 10 Brilliant Examples of How to Open Your Next Blog Post With a Bang, Michael Pollack 
3. CMO audit series, Part 3: Media channels (it’s not what you think), MarTech Today 
4. 263 Self-Driving Car Startups to Watch, Comet Labs 
5. How the Bitcoin protocol actually works, DDI

Drop me a line if you want to hear about our latest marketing projects or discuss your upcoming marketing priorities in the second half of the year.

Spring Has Sprung...Finally

Sometimes it is hard to concentrate when the sun stays out longer and weather gets warmer.

Take a few minutes and check out these must read articles:

1. 7 of the Best Mother's Day Ads We've Ever Seen, HubSpot
2. Intel, Mobileye, and Smiling Curves, Stratechery
3. 7 steps to help you prepare for a marketing cloud/email service provider transition, MarTech Today
4. This Sales Plan Moves the Needle on Every Success Metric, First Round Review
5. The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything, The Atlantic

April Showers Mean More Must-Read Marketing Articles

Spring seems to have finally arrived.

Regular baseball games are being played and the NBA playoffs have started.

Am I going to pass along some great articles about how to make your marketing better, faster and more measurable?

You bet I am.

Take a few seconds and check out these excellent readings:

1. 68% of consumers prefer brands to communicate via email, Fierce CMO
2. How Google Analytics ruined marketing, Tech Crunch
3. 19 content marketing ideas that aren’t blog posts, 500 Startups
4. Pivot Survival Tactics from Kabam's 3 Near-Death Triumphs, First Round Review
5. Words on Words: Books That Will Improve Your Writing, Gregory Ciotti

If you have a question about marketing, the clients we work with, or the services that Honeycomb provides, just send me an email.

Happy Holidays!

Getting closer and closer to 2017, and everyone starts to think about the year ahead.

Most of Honeycomb's clients have been planning and budgeting for months.

As far marketing predictions go, mine is easy: the more context there is, the higher the ROI.

The effectiveness of a generally oriented blog post or email is not-so-slowly dying. Being as relevant as possible to a prospect's, or customer's, current situation, even psychology, is becoming more and more important. Tracking opens and clicks are important, but measuring daily or weekly active users to ensure consistent engagement until conversion. Instead of just bringing you to this blog post, we should optimize it so that you engage, subscribe, share, and keep opening it up.

In the meantime, grab a cup of hot coffee and check out these must-read 2017 marketing predictions from other marketing experts:

1. 6 Marketing Trends for 2017, Chief Marketer
2. 5 Content Marketing Predictions for 2017, Convince and Convert
3. 2017 Marketing Predictions You Won't Have Read Elsewhere, Marketing Tech News
4. 6 Marketing Trends for 2017, Chief Marketer
5. 60+ Content Marketing Predictions for a Successful 2017 [E-Book], Content Marketing Institute
6. 7 Email Marketing Predictions for 2017, Campaign Monitor

November Marketing Links

Heading into the last 45 days of the year, I'm starting to see more and more prediction articles for marketing in 2017.

While they are all important to read and take note of, let's not forget how many election day predictions we read...and we know how accurate they turned out.

Maybe next month I'll pass along a few predictions of my own.

As per usual, take a quick break from your busy fall schedule and check out these must-read marketing articles:

1. The importance of emotional mapping in B2B marketing, Fierce CMO
2. Inbound Marketing Effectiveness Report, Act-On
3. Maximizing User Adoption by Understanding Behavioral Economics for Startups, Startup Management
4. 27 SaaS Products for the Marketing Department, David Cummings
5. Infographic: Cognitive Bias Codex (How many biases do you have?), Ritholtz

Busy Weekend Reads

The weekend is a time for rest, right? Maybe that was the case long ago, back in the 20th century. Everyone knows that Saturdays and Sundays can be busier than regular weekdays. Change is only constant.

That rings doubly true when I look back and think about the wide variety of clients that we've worked with recently.

Here are a few examples:

• publicly traded government contractor
• cybersecurity analytics platform
• consumer focused social discovery mobile app startup
• B2B enterprise software developer
• cloud computing cost reduction tool
• video messaging mobile app
• Wireless Distributed Antenna Systems engineering company

Whew. That a bunch of wildly different companies. I guess that's what keeps us passionate and excited each day- so many great teams building cool and interesting technologies.

Take a quick break from your busy weekend and read these five must-read marketing articles:

1. The 8 Players in the Programmatic Ecosystem, Brian Sim
2. Here are the Scripts for Sales Success — Emails, Calls and Demos That Close Deals, First Round Review
3. Product/Market Fit: What it really means, How to Measure it, and Where to find it, Eric Jorgenson
4. CMO Council: Marketers struggling to personalize, create real-time interactionsFierce CMO
5. 15 documentaries on Netflix that will make you smarter about businessr Business Insider

Want to learn more about Honeycomb and how we are helping our clients address their strategic and tactical marketing priorities? Drop me a line.