Republished book review by Matt Bergman from Amazon. (Thanks, Matt!)

Iliyana Stareva has written what I’d call, with a considerable degree of confidence, the most important, actionable and forward-looking PR book of the past ten years. That’s true, I believe, for the following reasons, which I’ll circle back to and discuss in a bit more detail:

1. The author sets a detailed course for the future of PR that aligns with the thinking and capabilities of the relatively few genuinely progressive agencies, as well as with the needs of forward-looking clients.
2. The book beautifully, seamlessly and comprehensively integrates the inbound approach – which is unquestionably going to be the overarching structure that informs the future of marketing (AI and automation technology, by the way, are much more conducive to an inbound approach than to an outbound one).
3. Ms. Stareva addresses head on what has frankly been the negligence of the PR industry in exhibiting little in the way of creative or scientific thinking in terms of measuring value.

When I was doing some research on influencer marketing a few months ago, I came across a lot of nice infographics but the one that stood out was actually a gifographic. 

I hadn't heard the name before but it's pretty cool. 

It's just an infographic as we know them but with gifs and it makes it much more fun. 

So today, we'll look at one such gifographic (perhaps you can think about creating some for your business too) that covers some interesting influencer marketing strategies. 

It's called influencer marketing strategies but to me, they are more tactics that you can use once you have your overall influencer marketing strategy that defines why you're doing this, what your goals are, what the impact to your brand would be and how much you'd want to spend on all activities. 

Then you can choose some of the below ideas to make sure you hit the above goals based on what you want to do and what you have at your disposal. 

Now, let's take a look at those tactics.

A couple of months ago, I covered customer experience and the Cisco racetrack - or lifecycle across the customer journey that's extremely important for companies to be able to drive customer success.

Today, I want to show you one more model that's become more and more popular if you work in SaaS or Customer Success.

This model is called L.A.E.R. and stands for Land, Adopt, Expand and Renew. 

Each of these phases has a different focus and they are not just about customer success as in post-sales but also the intersect with sales pre-purchase and for the renewal stage.

At the end of the day, the model aims to ensure that when a customer buys a product or a service, they truly realise the value of the purchase and achieve the business outcomes or goals they were expecting to get to by buying this product or solution.

As a business, it's on you to deliver on that promise after the sale which will lead to customer happiness and loyalty. 

Let's take a look at the L.A.E.R. model.

What is the L.A.E.R. Model for Customer Success

The most important document when you're at the very start of a new project is the project charter.

This is what we will look at today as part of my series on project management fundamentals - if you missed previous posts, we've so far covered the differences between projects and operations as well as those between projects, programmes and portfolios, the DARCI model for stakeholder engagement and how to run an effective project kick-off meeting. 

Now, let's get into our topic for today.

What's a project charter? 

The project charter is the formal, relatively short document that describes the most important thing about your project - its objectives, benefits to be achieved, the scope incl. key deliverables and timelines, the people to be involved, KPIs for the project and any known/expected risks. 

According to PMBOK, the project charter officially authorises the project and as such, you can begin working on it as it gives you the authority to do so as the project manager.

This is a guest post by Edyta Kowal.

The temptation to deliver as many leads as possible can be very strong on the part of marketing teams. But at the same time damaging. After all, it’s all about inspiring the customer to visit the store and make a purchase, and not just browse around and leave empty-handed without even exchanging a single word with the sales assistant.

One marketing buzz term we’ve all been hearing over and over again is optimisation. We optimise costs, methods, and procedures to save time and money. Then why is it so easy to fall into the trap of only looking at the number of leads and not their quality? After all, busted budgets, Sales resources, and even brand image are at stake.

Let me talk to you about my top strategies for generating leads in SaaS (and not only). 

5 Proven Strategies for Generating Leads in SaaS

#1. Define who you are speaking to