Pavel Beinia Archives - B2B Marketing Blog

Influencer marketing has become a really big deal in a relatively short time. According to Google Trends, average monthly searches related to influencer marketing have increased 6X since early 2016.

As an industry, influencer marketing has grown by nearly a factor of 10 in that time, from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $16.4 billion in 2022. 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing at some point, and collectively they plan to directly spend almost twice as much on influencers in 2023 as they did in 2016.

Why? Put simply, while 38% of consumers say they trust brand-produced social media content, 61% trust influencer recommendations.

Among other differences between B2B and B2C influencer marketing, the consumer side is larger, has more established processes, and has a more extensive ecosystem. That wasn’t always the case though. In 2017, when influencer marketing was still a fairly new practice, it required a lot of manual work and it was difficult to find the right influencers.

Frustrated with the challenges, inefficiency, and lack of tools, one agency owner set out to build an influencer discovery platform that would automate manual processes, save time, and make it easier for marketing professionals to measure their influencer marketing results. Here’s the story of Pavel Beinia and the company he founded, BuzzGuru.
[Read more…]

An “entrepreneur” (a.k.a, startup founder) has been defined as someone who will work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40. There’s no question they are a special breed.

What inspires them to solve certain problems? How do they generate business when they first launch their products? What did they learn from the experience that they can share with other aspiring entrepreneurs?

Those are among the questions I’ve had the opportunity to ask of 44 successful startup founders so far (plus one whose enterprise ultimately didn’t make it).