23 Thought Leaders Every Online Marketer Must Know

Now more than ever it’s important to surround yourself with influencers in your industry if you want to succeed online. This is how you build your own following, how you learn about the latest trends and stay up to date, earn more social shares and visibility, build natural links, and more. Even if you don’t “know” some of the top online marketers, engaging with them by commenting on posts and learning new tips can be invaluable to your online strategy.
If you’re not sure where to start and who to start searching for, it can help to break down some of their expertise into categories and sort out who you should follow that way. Below gives you a starting point with 23 of the top thought leaders for online marketers to get to “know” today:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Rand Fishkin. Wizard of Moz.
It sounds like a “ludicrous” title as Fishkin will tell you, but he is the founder and former CEO of the company, formerly SEOMoz. He is also the man behind the popular “Whiteboard” Friday posts that help to teach SEOs about complicated topics through video and whiteboard examples. He’s one of the best when it comes to cracking tough SEO questions and breaking down complicated topics. He built Moz from the ground-up in 2004 as he began posting data reports and creating tools, and it has blown up to be one of the most well respected blogs and SEO tools in the industry.
Mike Blumenthals. Author of Understanding Google My Business & Local Search.
There is a lot of competition when it comes to thought leaders in the SEO category, but Blumenthals made the list because of his extensive knowledge on local SEO and his ability to stay in that niche and dig deep. He is the owner of the popular blog Understanding Google My Business & Local Search, and what’s cool about Blumenthals is the fact that he keeps the blog in-house. In other words, when you want to hear what he has to say about SEO, you can count on his blog covering his writing and thoughts and his writing only. In addition to this blog, he also founded Local U, a conference series to learn more about search marketing, and co-founded GetFiveStars.com, which helps small businesses create a customer feedback and review management strategy.
Adam Heitzman. Co-Founder and Managing Partner of HigherVisibility.
Heitzman is Managing Partner of the nationally recognized SEO agency HigherVisibility. For over 10 years Heitzman has been a presence on the SEO scene before starting his own agency in 2008. Having worked with him before, it’s clear that he is passionate about what he does and is filled with extensive SEO knowledge and how the industry has changed over the years (and why it’s so important). He has worked with small businesses to Fortune 500 companies and was even recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 SEO Guru to know in 2015, so he’s one not to miss.
Eric Enge. Founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting.
If you’re even a little bit familiar with some of the SEO blogs out there, you’ve likely seen Enge’s writing. Although he is the founder of his own consulting firm, he makes it a point to get out there in the community and contribute articles on hot topics in the SEO world. He has had a 30+ year career in SEO, is the author of The Art of SEO, and regularly speaks at some of the top industry conferences such as Pubcon, ClickZ Live, and more.
Glen Gabe. President of G-Squared Interactive.
If you look at Gabe’s history it’s no wonder he started his own agency. He has held leadership positions both in-house and at a global interactive agency, was a Vice President at MRM Worldwide, led all of the aspects of SEO for yellowbook.com (a website containing nearly 20 million webpages), and blogs over at The Internet Marketing Drive, which is G-Squared Interactive’s blog. He is also a featured author in the Google Analytics Help Center, so he knows his stuff thanks to his 20+ years experience. His writing is clear and engaging, so he makes it easy to learn from him.
PPC/SEM

Larry Kim. Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Wordstream.
Kim is constantly speaking at the top PPC and SEM events and has been out in the community since founding Wordstream in 2007. He’s one of the most approachable thought leaders on this list and really seems to “get” the importance of connecting with your community online. The Wordstream blog is stellar and consistently features Kim’s own pieces, and he is the author of 4 award winning books on software development. If you head over to his author bio page for Wordstream, you can see a list of all the guest blogs he’s ever written.
Jennifer Slegg. Founder and Editor of The SEM Post.
Slegg is another thought leader on the list who frequently speaks at different SEM and PPC events like Pubcon, but it’s really her skills as an author and writer that make her stand out. Her blog includes a few outside contributors, but she remains the main writer, and you can find her writings on places like Search Engine Watch and Moz almost as frequently. She says that she’s “definitely a writer at heart” and it shows with her content-rich websites and engaging articles. If you’re someone that learns best through writing, she is the thought leader to follow.
Matt Umbro. Founder of PPCChat.
Although PPCChat might be what Umbro is most known for, he actually holds a more recent position as Senior Account Manager of Community at Hanapin Marketing. He specializes in e-commerce PPC and client relations and oversees content production for PPC Hero. In other words, although he is well versed in all aspects of online marketing he is definitely a thought leader that likes to focus on PPC specifically. As for his company, PPCChat is a weekly Twitter chat where industry specialists can interact to discuss various PPC topics using the hashtag #PPCChat. Give it a try and you’ll easily see why he’s a thought leader.
Content Marketing

Brian Clark. CEO and Founder of Content Marketing Institute.
Content Marketing Institute paved the way for content marketing, and even won the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts over the years. He’s on top of his game and definitely puts a focus on content in everything he does. Content Marketing Institute (CMI) also produces Content Marketing World, a premier international event for content marketing. It is now the largest content marketing event in the world, so this guy is arguably the top thought leader in the industry when talking about content specific.
Lee Odden. CEO of TopRank Marketing.
Odden tops the list as one of the most experienced since starting working in web development and online marketing in the late 1990s. His company currently consults Fortune 1000 B2B companies like Dell and LinkedIn. Still, even with such high profile clients, Odden manages to share his expertise on the TopRank blog and continues to put out some of the best content in the content marketing space. He is a big believe in the power and importance of content for online success, stating on his website that “Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom,” and it shows in his detailed writings.
Social Media

Mike Stelzner. CEO and Founder of Social Media Examiner.
Stelzner’s company was founded in 2009 and grew to over 435,000 email subscribers in just a few years thanks to the site’s comprehensive articles, expert interviews, reviews, and overall quality content, all published daily. Social Media Examiner also hosts a Social Media success Summit where more than 3300 marketers from around the world can learn online as well as Social Media Marketing World, an in-person event that hosts more than 3000 marketers. Naturally, all of the content centers around social media topics.
Dan Zarrella. Social Media Scientist at DanZarrella.com.
Zarrella coins himself the “original Social Media Scientist” and that title has stuck on major blogs like HubSpot, where he really started his career and worked for over 6 years. At HubSpot he was able to help the company grow from a startup to a major public company. Since last January, however, DanZarrella has been his main website (which he built up over 10 years), although his projects extend far beyond. He is the author of four social media books, has a webinar series called “Science of…” that has drawn upwards of 30,000 registrants, and holds the Guinness World Record for the largest webinar ever.
Gary Vaynerchuk. CEO of Vayner Media.
Although Vaynerchuk could probably be considered a thought leader in a lot of categories, it’s social media that makes him unique. He is all about “the hustle” and it shows with his massive community of social followers. His company is a social-first digital shop that focuses on storytelling across multiple platforms, gaining insight through micro-content to help build campaigns and drive results. VaynerMedia is one of the only companies you’ll find that uses this approach so aggressively, and it works, so he’s certainly and innovator. Just for fun, he was also an angel investor early on to many major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (as well as other companies like Uber and Birchbox).
Affiliate Marketing

Zac Johnson. President and CEO of MoneyReign Inc.
Johnson is also the man behind popular blogs bloggingtips.com and zacjohnson.com, and MoneyReign has been in the affiliate marketing space since 2000. His claim to fame: He is a self-taught entrepreneur who started making money online as a teenager. Fast-forward a few years, and on his blog you can read his story of “How I Made $860,538.38 Profit in 4 Months!” Now a seven-figure business, Johnson reviews affiliate networks to help small businesses understand where they could be making more money.
John Chow. Founder and CEO of JohnChow.com.
Chow has had JohnChow.com as well as his company TTZ Media Inc. both running for the last 10 years and has seen huge success with his affiliate marketing practices and his willingness to write about what works for him. He actually took his blog from zero to making $40,000 per month in just two years, and his blog still remains one of the biggest blogs on the Internet. With countless awards, he’ll be a thought leader in the affiliate marketing space for years to come.
Jeremy Shoemaker. President of ShoeMoney Media Group Inc.
Shoemaker is a huge proponent of sharing his own stories and struggles to help you better understand affiliate marketing, and that’s part of what makes him so successful and a thought leader in the industry. After all, who doesn’t want to hear from someone who used to sell washers and dryers and Sears and now runs a multimillion-dollar company? He calls himself “Shoemoney” and is famous for running one of the highest-trafficked websites in the world, Shoemoney.com. He later launched successful businesses AuctionAds, FreeSEOReport, and Fighters.com
Analytics

Brian Clifton. Director of Data Insights at Search Integration.
Clifton was actually Google’s first Head of Web Analytics for Europe back in 2005 for three years, but he’s actually known as an author. Students and professionals actually use his third edition of “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” worldwide. Despite the fact that he has his PhD in Physical & Theoretical Chemistry, he found his calling with Search Integration, a company that specializes in helping organizations implement “metrics understanding” using Google Analytics and other tools.
Avinash Kaushik. Chief Education Officer & Co-Founder of Market Motive Inc.
Kaushik’s company provides online education and certification for different online marketing categories, Analytics being a big one, and he is also the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google. He runs a blog called Occam’s Razor and is an author of many successful Analytics books, both known for being easy to understand and able to put a real-world application alongside all of his teachings. You’ll also see his face on other authoritative Analytics blogs around the web offering guest articles, interviews, videos, podcasts, advice, and more.
Annie Cushing. Founder of Annielytics.
Cushing lives and breathes Analytics, and lucky for us she shares her knowledge all around the web. Although Annielytics may be her main project, so is a regular Analytics contributor to many online marketing websites such as Search Engine Land and MarketingLand. According to Cushing, she “makes data sexy,” and we couldn’t agree more. Her writings are engaging, easy to apply to your own company, and they’re everywhere. She was also the Senior SEO at the popular SEER Interactive Agency, so she has experience working with Analytics in an SEO context, and it shows through her writings.
Email Marketing

Justine Jordan. Vice President of Marketing at Litmus.
Jordan is a frequent speaker at interactive and digital marketing events, and according to her LinkedIn page she says, “my passion for educating and inspiring fellow marketers to create better email is relatable, actionable, and contagious.” This comes through whenever she writes for the Litmus blog, and in fact she was even the recipient of the 2015 Email Marketing Thought Leader of the Year award.
Tink Taylor. Founder and President of dotMailer.
Taylor is a thought leader that focuses on email marketing made easy, but without skimping on quality. In other words, he’s been famously quoted saying, “dotMailer’s mission is to provide Nasa technology with a Fisher Price interface to marketers in the marketing automation space.” He has worked with major brands like BBC and Shell and has over 17 years experience in digital communications.
Jordie Van Rijn. Founder and Chief of Email Vendor Selection.
Rijn’s company was founded back in 2009 before there were any quality sources of information for those interested in email marketing. Today, the company has a list of over 300 email service providers to help make things easy for small business owners. As for Rijn, he’s a thought leader because he’s great about getting out in the community and offering interviews to Forbes and videos to email marketing companies, and of course he is an avid writer on his company’s blog. Even as an independent consultant, he was also voted one of the world’s top 50 email marketing influencers by Vocus.

23 Thought Leaders Every Online Marketer Must Know

Gartner and marketing – just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

SUMMARY: Is digital marketing now mainstream? Gartner thinks so, but then it also thought the CMO would be the lead IT decision maker around about now.

Long-term readers may be familiar with my skepticism/irritation at the propensity of tech providers over the past couple of years to trot out Gartner’s prediction that the CMO would become the real IT decision-maker by well, round about now!

(Met any CMOs who’re getting stuck into an RFP for networking tech or signing off that database upgrade recently? No? Hmmmmm, where can they be?)

Anyway, snark aside, I’ve tended to approach CMO-related studies with caution since then, but my eye was drawn to another one from Gartner which declared body that digital marketing is just marketing these days. In other words, it’s now so mainstream that when you say ‘marketing’, the digital element is presumed.

According to Yvonne Genovese, group vice president at Gartner.:

There is little doubt that digital marketing is now mainstream. Marketers no longer make a clear distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. As customers opt for digitally-led experiences, digital marketing stops being a discrete discipline and instead becomes the context for all marketing. Digital marketing is now marketing in a digital world.

According to Gartner’s research, 10% of marketers reckon to have moved beyond digital marketing techniques and are expanding marketing’s role to create new digitally led business models. Gartner argues:

The blurring of the physical and digital worlds represents opportunities for marketers to apply customer insights to create and test new digitally led experiences and business models.

My response to this is…maybe, but maybe not. Certainly digital marketing is a more mainstream concept on the corporate agenda across certain sectors, such as retail. I note with interest, for example, the comment made by Victor Herrero, CEO at Guess?,the other day when he declared:

I consider digital marketing and social media capability to be critical for interact with our existing customers and gaining new customers.

Over in the food and drink industry, Denise Morrison, CEO at Campbell’s Soups, sees an increasing role for digital in her firm’s marketing strategy:

We’re shifting more of our marketing budget to digital channels…we’re shifting our spend overall to about 40% of our spend in digital, and that is creating a different dynamic between working and non-working media. With our cost savings efforts, we’re trying to be as responsible and efficient as possible in the area of non-working media. When you shift to digital, you’re spending a lot of time and expense on content, but TV is just a different dynamic.

In early October, we began airing our new Made for Real, Real Life advertising. Built around the strategic insights we’ve shared with you about the changing mosaic of the American family, this campaign represents a major departure for Campbell and depicts how our real food fits into real people’s lives in an authentic and relatable way. Digital media is playing a larger role in this campaign than in previous efforts.

But not everyone gets it just yet. Another study, this time UK-centric, finds strong indicators that UK businesses at least are not as up-to-the-mark as they should be around digital marketing.

The Digital Marketing Managers Census 2016, from Marin Software, found that:

• There’s not enough budget being allocated to digital marketing, with 61% of respondents wanting offline spend reallocated to online.


• Some 49% of all UK adult media consumption is via digital channels, but only 46% of the UK’s £15.7 billion total ad spend goes on digital.


• 
Some 39% of respondents are critical of the heads of marketing, saying that while digital is flagged up as important, their bosses don’t actually understand fully what it means. As such, they don’t allocate the budgets, a complaint made by 62% of respondents.


• But it’s not all about digital with 68% emphasising that online needs to be better integrated with offline marketing.

That said, there’s also evidence of schisms within the online world with nearly two-thirds of respondents arguing that more attention needs to be paid to integrating different digital marketing tools, such as paid search, social, SEO, and display, into a unified whole.

But given that we go along with Gartner’s thesis to a certain extent and accept that digital marketing is where the spend increases are going to come, what do you need to do to ensure success? Some simple starting points from my own observations:

Do you know your customers and their values? If you don’t then how can you possibly target them effectively? It’s like coming out of your house in the morning to drive to work, getting in the car and saying to yourself ‘I’ll set off and see if I get there!” Chances are that unless you know your destination and the best route to get there, you’re going to end up lost in the middle of nowhere.

Where are your customers on the digital landscape? Once you’ve worked out who your customers are and what their target values are, how can you best reach out to them and via which mechanism? Are they on Facebook? Are they going to find you through search? Is Twitter a viable platform? You need to hunt down your buyers on whatever channel they prefer to use. Don’t follow the herd onto Facebook if that’s not where your customers congregate and engage.

Work out how you’re going to know when you’re winning. If you can’t metricise the results of your digital campaign, then you’re not going to get the return you’re looking for. A lot of traditional marketing has been based on gut instincts. That’s not going to fly in the digital world. What the metrics are will vary from organisation to organisation, but you need some kind of measurement to live by.

Get your content right. Content is king, queen and royal family hangers-on. And content is hard. You’re going to need to drill down on your content creation and content marketing. You have to get this right. You need to understand what your audience wants to read about or hear about, not just decide what it is that you’re going to tell them.

Don’t put all your eggs in the one digital basket. Digital is the direction of travel, but don’t suddenly decide that offline doesn’t matter. For certain customer constituencies, digital may well be less appropriate than traditional offline channels. For customers of a certain age demographic, for example, putting all the budget into mobile marketing may well be a false spend.

My take

Perhaps the most important point to note is that this is an emerging science, not one that’s fully formed. Nobody gets it right all the time, even companies that are digital natives. Take Amazon just this week, whose marketing campaign for its new Amazon Prime series The Man in the High Castle went horribly wrong.

Promoted by an integrated campaign of online and offline advertising, the integrated campaign for the show – about a world in which the Germans/Japanese won World War II (that’s original!) – did fine online. But the offline aspect involved plastering Nazi-style iconography all over the New York subway.

Not the best idea marketing ever had

Amazon said the show was “high-quality, provocative programming that spurs conversation”. Indeed – just the wrong sort of conversation in this case. Someone’s gut instinct didn’t kick in on this one!

Stuart Lauchlan

Stuart Lauchlan has been tracking and commenting on the enterprise IT market for 23 years during which time he’s managed to amuse, inform and irritate buy and sell side participants in equal and appropriate measure. Lauchlan also helps companies understand the needs of technology readers.

@whostu

Tech journalism – the accident from which I’ve never recovered

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Gartner and marketing – just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water