Thanks to Kareem Mostafa from TribeTactics for this fantastic guest post! 

I wish I had Brian Solis's new book when we were running our startup, because it echoed a lot of learning that showed a drastic increase in our revenue - if only we knew it earlier, and it is:

People stopped buying products a long time ago. They now buy experiences.

In this piece, I will walk you through four touch points you can optimize for a delightful experience that will effortlessly generate positive word of mouth for your brand. 

Respecting Their Experience

Our first startup was in the restaurant marketing space. We helped restaurants increase revenue and brand awareness on their off-nights without running any discounts. Before we succeeded, we had to go through some restaurant soul-searching, namely interviewing people who dine out often to ask them what their motivation was behind dining out.

One of our most direct questions was "What is the number one reason you choose to dine out?" I thought this was just one of those "placeholder" questions we had to put when we, of course, knew that the reason was the great food that they would get in restaurants.

Turns out food came in second.

It’s been four years since I’ve started this blog.

I never even dreamed of the many things that I would learn, achieve and get to do purely thanks to this blog that I once started just as an experiment.

I’m glad that I didn’t give up on it and continued investing my free time in learning, writing and sharing all that with you.

As the New Year is now upon us, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned while blogging in 2015 – a year of so much change, new experiences and aspirations.

Blogging at iliyanastareva.com – Fourth Year in Review:

There are three main learnings from 2015 from my blog and I’ll dive into each one of them below:

• Inbound marketing really works, even for a small site and blog whose traffic has now almost tripled in just one year of doing inbound marketing.
• PR students are actively searching for help online, whether for their dissertations or how to find a job.
• Evergreen content is the name of the game – it’s the best performing content that continues to bring traffic and conversions even if you don’t do much with it (but you should).

2016 is just three days away. It’s time not only for reflections and predictions but also for making resolutions – personal and professional.

For startups, too, this is the perfect timing to plan well for the New Year and focus on trying new things. After all, being agile is “in their blood”.

This is why I was so thrilled when I was invited to speak about my new inbound PR concept at a startup marketing meetup in Sofia last week.

Even though it was almost Christmas, we had a great turnout and I was happy to see so many people there interested in learning something new, attentively listening during my presentation, and then asking a lot of questions and introducing themselves to me to chat personally.  

Because of the timing – right before the end of the year – many of these entrepreneurs were there to find out what to focus on in 2016 and how to structure their efforts.

My presentation therefore not only introduced the inbound PR concept and how it differs from traditional PR, but also I gave them a lot of practical tips and actionable advice that they can implement right now, even if they don’t have a sophisticated software like HubSpot.

2016 is just around the corner! It's time for predictions! And educated hopes.

I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few 2016-prediction posts going on and I thought it would be worth sharing my reflections of the past year and my views for the new one with you too.

Time really does fly… I can’t believe how much has happened over the last year in my professional and personal life, but also in our non-silent-always-on digital economy.

Things change in seconds; they get adopted, adjusted and forgotten unbelievably quickly. Our world doesn’t sleep, ever.

I’ve observed many passing and growing trends over 2015 that have given me an indication of what will be happening more and more in 2016 and where brands should focus their efforts on.

My predictions-advice list is short – just 5 things, but if you master them, your 2016 will be a true success.

5 Key Things for Brands to Focus on in 2016:

Dear PR students, how many of you are starting to work on your PR dissertations?

I'm guessing quite a few.

By now, many of you should have at least started planning the synopsis (i.e. topic, objectives, research methods and literature) and thinking abount the actual execution (i.e. doing the research and then the writing). I thought it would be a good time to share with you some useful tools to help you throughout that process.

In fact, the below tools are super helpful for any student or professional as they can be easily adopted into one’s daily life to improve planning, writing, productivity and creativity.

The list is not rank-based but aligned with the actual process a student goes through – from initial activities such as planning and research through to putting findings together and doing the actual writing.

Hope the tools help!

Top 10 Online Tools to Help with Your PR Dissertation: