Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), are options you might hear thrown around often in the marketing world as viable tools to garner attention and conversions from your audience, but many aren’t totally sure what they even mean much less which one or if the combination of the two makes sense for their company. Let’s clear up what SEO and SEM are and how they’re used to help your company grow.

Defining your brand isn’t a new concept, but now more than ever, many companies understand the importance of using their brand to connect with potential buyers on an emotional level. Therefore, it’s paramount to not only define your brand but to live it out. And branding isn’t just for larger companies with a jumbo marketing budget - it’s a crucial component to small businesses and startups. In fact, these companies should rely on leveraging their branding even more than larger more-established companies in order to stand out from the noise.

Social media is changing for businesses, and if you don’t know how to navigate those changes, it could be frustrating and costly. The larger social media platforms (like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram) are constantly updating their algorithms to allow users to see more friends and family content and less business content. Twitter is on its own journey to clean up its feed and remove bots and fake accounts, which sounds nice and is for many, but a significant drop in followers overnight can hurt your Twitter business profile.

We frequently stress the importance of alignment between the sales and marketing departments within an organization. Their synergy is a critical component to the success of a company. Unfortunately, though, Hubspot says a mere 22% of companies feel like their sales and marketing departments are jiving. This isn’t good for the company, and it isn’t good for the customer.

Knowing the struggle many have, we felt we could all benefit from diving in a bit deeper to the subject. There are many ways marketing techniques benefit the sales process, but let’s look at the benefits of marketing automation.

The marketing industry is ever-changing and our team is constantly learning and educating ourselves on how to stay ahead of the curve. We enjoy having this little “spot” on the internet to share with you the latest findings and helpful takeaways you can apply to your business. As we close the books on 2018, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at which blog posts from the past year you read and engaged with the most. So dig in to the recap and see what you may have missed…

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, we can’t help but reflect on how grateful we are for partnerships we’ve built with our clients. We extend a big thanks to our clients that have trusted us with improving their digital footprint. We take great pride in the opportunity to help companies grow. But the relationships we’ve built with our clients extend beyond the research, reports, and campaigns…

Well, we blinked and 2019 is a few short months away. Can you relate? As you’re entering Q4, you most likely have your 2019 budget, business and marketing plans on the brain. Feeling overwhelmed with how to set your 2019 marketing strategy and don’t know where to start? We’ve got some things for you to consider. We’ve dug into the research and compiled a list of the top digital marketing trends for 2019 and where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.   

Recently, our team attended Digital Summit Tampa to gain insights from industry leaders across several industries and expertise. From B2C to B2B, large companies and small companies from all over the country, the event resulted in great information and perspective we are eager to share and implement.

One of the first rules we tell our clients is don’t spend money on large advertising campaigns until you have a good digital foundation in place. In addition, you want the right tools in place for the ability to learn from analytics and align your efforts with your business goals and KPIs.

Although an appearance on Shark Tank certainly helped skyrocket Honeyfund’s success, and each entrepreneur’s journey is unique, the challenges faced while growing the tech company aren’t unlike many others. Here are some common challenges entrepreneurs face and how Honeyfund has overcome them to achieve success and continue to grow 12 years later.