Would you say that B2B buyers talk more to sales reps than B2C buyers do?

Many believe that B2B purchases are too complex which is why B2B customers avoid digital channels to make decisions. 

According to new research by McKinsey, that's not really the case. 

B2B buyers require both the help of sales reps and the power of digital to purchase, however, what determines the channel of choice is whether or not the buyer is making a first-time purchase. 

What's also interesting is that industry sector is not a factor in customers’ decisions to turn to a digital channel rather than a traditional one when deciding what to buy.

Let's look at the first learning. 

This is a guest post by Georgi Todorov. 

Marketers are already well-versed when it comes to working with celebrity influencers. After all, who wouldn’t want Kim Kardashian to show their product in one of her photos?

But the truth is, working with traditional influencers is often cost-prohibitive and inefficient, and it’s simply out of reach for many smaller businesses. That’s where micro-influencers come in – those slightly less famous people who still have a huge amount of influence (and followers) in their niche.

Defining micro-influencers as those with under 30,000 followers, Adweek explains that they deliver a 60% higher engagement rate and are 6.7x more cost effective. Convince & Convert, meanwhile, reminds us that micro-influencers also have more targeted audiences, which allows them to aim for relevance when it comes to the brands that they work with. In addition, influencer marketing is the fastest growing channel for customer acquisition.

And it really works. Let me show you one example:

This is a guest post by Joseph Payne from CouponsMonk. 

From research to playing with words, you make efforts on each and every blog posts. But do you earn enough inbound links on it? Does your hard work pay off?

Be it an article or video content in blog posts, earning inbound links is a prerequisite to succeed in SEO. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and engage readers. But most of the marketers lag behind in creating attractive content. 

Content is a crucial thing that can either make or break your marketing strategy. In order to survive in this cut-throat competition, it becomes part and parcel to focus on content creation. 

It’s time for you to craft blog posts in such a way that it drives skyrocket traffic to your site. As a result, it would greatly impact your marketing strategy, improving your brand values and your SEO ranking. 

Getting smart with the strategy simply means understanding your audience thoroughly and creating content accordingly. When content is created while considering the audience, then i's apparent that you can significantly engage readers. 

Here are some key ideas to take into consideration when revamping your content marketing strategy in such a way that it can earn better inbound links.

5 Types of Blog Posts That Earn Inbound Links

I've been looking at a lot of data lately. 

Last week we dug into some social media marketing numbers, this week we'll go bigger and look at some of the major internet trends from Mary Meeker's latest report. 

Let's start with a bit of a perspective.

There are 3.4B global internet users. And there are about 7.5B people in the world. That's a penetration of 46%. 

Is your head spinning? It certainly will be after we go through some of the major learnings I've picked out for you. 

Let's get started. 

My start-up Smile Arty has now been live for about three months. 

Painful months. It was hard, really hard in the beginning. Things like getting the company registered, getting a bank account, setting up everything for accounting, revenue etc. were nerve-racking. 

The one thing that was easy was the website and all the content. 

I say easy because I have a PR background and I now work in inbound marketing so I didn't have to start learning any of this from scratch whereas the whole administrative thing for a new business was completely new to me.

I have to say, though, in less than three months, content started working.