Last week, September 5th, was my last day at HubSpot after almost five years at this amazing company. 

It was a sad day as I'll miss all the incredible people I've met. I've learned so much at HubSpot. I'm beyond grateful for my experience at the company but the time had come to move on from Ireland and find another home for myself. And now that home is Amsterdam with a new job at Cisco. 

This is not going to be my first international move. It's now been 10 years since I left my home country Bulgaria at the age of 19 and went to study International Business in Germany. With a scholarship two years later, I also spent a year and a half in the UK before returning to Germany to graduate and get my first job.

Then came HubSpot. They found me on LinkedIn and reached out because of my fluency in German, agency experience and ability to create content thanks to this blog. 

I still remember the day(s) when I had difficulty packing my 250 kg of clothes and shoes to move from Germany to Ireland and join an 80-people team in HubSpot’s Dublin office.

It’s been a fantastic journey to see how far DubSpot has grown in just five short years as the office is now almost 700 people in addition to 100 or so people in Berlin and Paris. 

When I close such a big chapter of my life, I tend to reflect on it and I want to share with you my key learnings from my time at HubSpot.

The Content Marketing Institute released a new study into content marketing services for agencies. The research looked into: 

• How many agencies have embraced content marketing as a service offering?
• How long have they been offering content marketing services?
• What types of services do they offer?
• What are their biggest challenges when working with clients? 

I went through it and I want to share with you the key findings that stood out to me about the growth and development of content marketing services by agencies. 

I've spent over seven years working in an agency or consulting agencies on how to grow their businesses and content marketing has become a top income source and service provided so a lot of the results don't surprise me, however, they certainly speak of the increasing trend where agency disciplines are merging. It's becoming harder and harder to differentiate between the marketing, PR and advertising agency as they all offer or can offer the same content marketing services. 

Now to the research. Let's start with some facts.

Do you remember the days when Twitter had just come out and people were trying to figure out how to use it for business?

I do. In fact, I became fascinated with social media for business. I was still a student but I could already see the massive shifts happening in the communications world.

Even though I studied International Business, my passion for comms made me follow big names such as Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott who were pioneers in how to do PR the modern way.

And so I decided to pursue a career in PR. I read every book on PR that I could get my hands on, I interned in PR and I worked part-time in a PR agency during my final year at university.

I tried to learn everything I could.

I did everything - I wrote press releases, I pitched national and regional media through email and cold calls, I worked with bloggers, I managed social media channels.

It was great. I learned a lot.

But I could see that even though I worked so hard and my agency team did too, we were basically just slaves in the eyes of the client. They didn’t consider us strategic advisers. We were just implementers and every time we tried to convince the client to do something new, it was close to impossible.

We recently covered the different project management approaches, however, I thought it might be helpful to ensure that we have the fundamentals of project management discussed as well. 

As I was thinking about how to best do this, I didn't want to write a heavy 3,000-word piece so I decided to yet again use infographics as they're so easy to consume.

Today, we'll cover: 

• what is project management
• the 5 key project management process groups (or phases)
• and 8 important project management processes 

As you can see, I've become very passionate about project management. Next week, I'm taking the exam with the PMI to become a certified project management professional so you can expect a lot more on the topic over the coming weeks and months. 

Now let's get started. 

What is Project Management [Infographic]

When I was in my first year at university, I fell in love with marketing and communications and specifically, PR.

This was unusual as I was doing a BA in International Business and most students with such a degree tend to choose finance or consulting as a career.

But authors like Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott helped me make my choice.

I decided to follow their footsteps and set myself a goal: One day, I will publish a book about PR with Wiley.

Little did I know that eight years later, I'd achieve my goal.

How did I do it? By starting a blog in that first year of university.

As I didn't study PR, a blog was the best way to develop writing skills that are so crucial for PR. Also, social media and SEO are another set of skills you need so that you can spread the word about your blog and have a readership.

But what was crucial was that I didn't give up. It was hard, it was time-consuming to do on top of all of your responsibilities but 7+ years later, I still keep publishing content once a week.

It's discipline and persistence that are required for remarkable content.