As some of you know, I'm starting my own business together with my mum. 

It's an e-commerce startup for arts and crafts and we'll be launching the website next week. 

As part of the process, I've been developing the website (by the way, Shopify is amazing for e-commerce!) and planning all PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) activities with a particular focus on social media. 

And because I work at HubSpot – the pioneers of inbound marketing – and consult my clients day in and day out on best practices for inbound, I'm truly preaching what I teach with my own business. 

While preparing my buyer personas, their buyer's journey and working through the content plan for them, I needed a template or a tool that would work for me. 

I couldn't find anything suitable so I ended up creating my own simple Google Sheet that with just one view visualises all the important parts of this planning and follows the correct way of doing content creation for inbound. It also helps with your keywords strategy. 

This template for buyer persona, buyer's journey and content campaign plan development is what I want to give to you today. 

With the global adoption of digital, a lot has been said about the PR industry. Unfortunately, not always positive.

Take, for example, keeping up with social media and online channels to develop appropriate skills and offer the type of services that clients nowadays need has been a painful challenge. Not to mention then measurement which has been PR's biggest problem since its very existence.  

So how does PR stay relevant? 

To figure this out, we need to first analyse our current reality. 

When we think about the past two decades, there are two key things brands and their PR people need to consider:

• Our consumer and purchasing behaviours have changed, massively.
• If you don’t have an online presence, you don’t exist.

Let’s start with the first one.

This is a guest post by Martina Stričak from Point Visible. 

Can you believe it, it's 2017 and content is still the king? Some things never change!

You know what they say – if something is good, why change it? No matter how much marketers are trying to find other ways to promote services or products, it all always comes down to creating great content.

As time goes by and different things become popular and less popular, content marketing is going through changes as well, but it's always here.

Over the last few years, a vast majority of marketers, both B2B and B2C, stated that content marketing is a major part of their general marketing strategy and budget for the upcoming year. In fact, for 2017, ¾ of marketers said they will invest more in content marketing than in 2016. There has to be something in it, right?

Well, there definitely is. With increased number of various apps and extensions that are made to block „traditional“ online ads (like banners and pop ups), content marketing has become a go-to way of promoting a product or a service.

2017 or not, the agency-client war still persists. 

Agencies want to be responsible for more, marketers don't trust them to let them. 

That's the major finding in a recent study done in the US but I think it's quite relevant for the rest of the world as well.  

Marketers at clients complain that agencies lack technical and data-savvy teams who can work on their accounts and that too many agencies still haven't transitioned from old media to new, lacking the expertise clients need in the digital age. 

Agencies, on the other hand, say that clients are unwilling to become true partners by taking work in-house that really should be done by the agency team and so showing a disrespectful unwillingness to commit to quality work. 

If you look at the comments below, you'll see how the language both parties use is rather judgemental and certainly doesn't show that they see the other counterpart as a partner: 

By 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic.

I can't say that I'm surprised. 

Visual content was the biggest marketing trend for me for 2016. There were a lot of people and businesses jumping on it, particularly on the use of video or social networks that support videos and cool visuals such as Snapchat and Instagram. 

We've heard a lot about video during INBOUND16 as well where visuals and video were prominent more or less in every talk. 

Venngage went a step further and gathered the insights from marketing people about visual trends and put the results into a handy infographic that I want to show you today. (Disclaimer: I took part in the survey too.)

Here are some of the most interesting findings: