Fall of the Wall between Sales and Marketing?

The relationship between sales and marketing is fraught with distrust and misunderstanding. Sales people are reluctant to share any information about their sales activity and funnel, while marketers are blindly messaging market segments without direct feedback from sales teams and their prospects.

This situation may be changing.

The deployment of powerful cloud based tools to sales teams, like Salesforce, and to marketing teams, like Hubspot, have allowed companies to break down these silos and foster trust and communication.

The opportunity now is to build a transparent data-based funnel from lead to close to referral and track how, where and when your sales and marketing dollars are working...and not.

Want to learn more about how Honeycomb works with our clients to build this kind of sales and marketing infrastructure? Email me to learn more.

What caught my eye in the past month?

1. How to Write Engaging B2B Headlines: Analysis of 10 Million Articles Shared on LinkedIn, BuzzSumo
2. How to Write Marketing Blogs Your Clients Will Actually Read, Jeff Bullas
3. 5 Psychological Principles of High Converting Websites, KissMetrics
4. B2B marketing budget planning tips, FierceCMO
5. Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain, The New York Times

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.

March Marketing Madness- Got your brackets filled out?

Got your brackets filled out?

Should be an entertaining month of basketball with upsets, Cinderellas and, maybe, Villanova winning it all.

A few years ago, Honeycomb client Ostrato just put out 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.

In fact, ParkMyCloud is a finalist for DC Inno's DC Tech Madness bracket style startup competition. You can vote for them here and check out all of the other successful DC startups.

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

1. The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything, The Atlantic (Good background on “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”)
2. 7 Email Marketing Predictions for 2017, Campaign Monitor
3. 5 Content Marketing Predictions for 2017, Convince and Convert
4. The Best Time to Send Emails (Here’s What Studies Show), Optin Monster
5. 40 Things Every Startup Should Do To Scale Up, Inc42

May Reading

Suffering from vitamin D deficiency due to lack of sun? We should get some sun soon.

In the meantime, here are some interesting articles to check out.

1. Email Marketing Tips: 33 Industry Experts Share Their Best Strategies and Tactics, Drip
2. Study: IT, finance departments most influential in B2B purchases , Fierce CMO
3. The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read, Moz
4. 10 of the most effective growth hacks The Next Web
5. Discover the Optimal Ad Copy for Every Keyword and Time of Day, SEM Rush

Want to learn more about Honeycomb and how we are helping our clients address their strategic and tactical marketing priorities? Visit www.honeycomb-consulting.com now.

The Gap is Shinking Between Mobile and Desktop CTO Rates

Another good chart from Marketing Charts shows the gap between mobile and Desktop click to open rates is shrinking.

Read the whole article here: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/mobile-email-engagement-grows-58460/

VentureBeat Report on Email Marketing Providers

This is an interesting report on the confusing world of marketing email providers.

VentureBeat sizes up email marketing providers

Quote:

Small- and mid-sized companies now can afford many of the bells and whistles that have driven enterprise-level email marketing programs, according to researchers at VentureBeat. The trick now is to find the platform that is the right fit. 

"The rich features of typical enterprise solutions are moving downstream and becoming more available for marketers at much lower price points, depending how big your customer list is," Jon Cifuentes, a research analyst at VentureBeat, told FierceCMO. "There's a lot of confusion in the market here in general." 

VentureBeat released a guide this week to help purchasers of email marketing technology navigate the changing marketplace. The report profiles providers such as Adestra, Constant Contact, Hubspot and Mailjet, who reported concentrations of B2B clients. 

That's a good place for B2B software buyers to start, Cifuentes said. But VentureBeat researchers found that only half of the more than 1,000 marketers who participated in their online survey indicated that the features of their chosen software met their objectives. 

"In general, there's extreme feature parity in a set of tools that, at their core, are used to send many of the hundreds of emails the average consumer or business user receives a day," researchers wrote. "Vendors check the box on one feature after another, but organizations who are buying these tools tend to be left underwhelmed in new and key areas like mobile device accessibility, analytics and segmentation." 

Buyer analysis, much like email marketing strategy, has become complex. An estimated $3 billion in investor funding moved into the industry in 2014 alone, according to the report, making it "near impossible to keep up" with change.

Companies that are integrating email marketing systems and tagging on additional services where needed—without losing a grasp on the data from these services—are moving in the right direction, according to the report.

For B2B marketing technology buyers, this is the trend, Cifuentes said. "B2B is moving more towards the all-in-one, full-featured marketing automation suites to power their email for the marketing use cases better suited for B2B, like lead nurturing. An individual line of business in an enterprise will then tack on MailChimp to do their newsletters."

Email Marketing Providers

Is your email marketing as successful as you would like?

Is your email marketing as successful as you would like? Probably not, eh? We all know that great content and constant testing are keys to success, but what does that really mean?

This interview with noted author Jonah Berger offers some suggestions. Read here: Jonah Berger's 6 STEPPS for Success Applied to Email Marketing

So what are the six steps?

1. Social Currency 
2. Triggers 
3. Emotion 
4. Public 
5. Practical Value 
6. Stories

Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails?

Why? Well, because it still works, duh...

Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails - McKinsey & Company

E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined. 

That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily, and the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher.

Top Five Marketing Posts for November

It's Movember! Although I am not growing out a mustache, I am, however, getting a great deal of amusement out of my friends attempts to grow theirs. You all know who you are...lol

As always, here are a few marketing related articles that I thought I would share with you...

(Oh, and congratulations to President Obama. Now, do the grand bargain with Congress, so we all can move on and get to work.)

8 Social Media Numbers that Will Rock Your Business, by Eric Schurenberg, Inc

Here is a good line: “Personal data is the oil of the digital age”


25 Best Blogs 2012, by Time

Great list! I added seven of these to my RSS reader.


Email Marketing: 6 tactics on combining content and email strategies, by David Kirkpatrick, MarketingProfs

They are:

1. Understand that content is a vital part of email marketing 
2. Make the blog the hub of all content 
3. Use internal resources to create content 
4. Mine incoming email for content 
5. Mine outgoing email for content 
6. Repurpose content

5 Lessons From the Best Example of Content Marketing Ever?, by Jay Baer, Convince and Convert

A very good case study on a McDonald's content marketing program.


Content Plays Critical Role Throughout Tech-Buying Cycle, by MarketingProfs