At the rate the digital marketing industry advances, the people to rub shoulders with in 2020 are somewhat different to many of those who were instrumental 10 years ago. Based on a combination of factors such as exceptional performance, thought leadership and achievements, we have compiled a list of industry leaders worth following:
Rand Fishkin – CEO of Moz
Having succeeded at providing one of the most widely used tools for SEO professionals, there are very few people in the world who can impact SEO policy as much as Rand does. For example even the ratings criteria that MOZ introduced, changed how many media buyers measure the quality of sites from which they procure guest posts. Rand Fishkin is also the author of “Art of SEO”, an Amazon best-seller.
Jeff Bezos – CEO of Amazon
Marketers are increasingly turning to Amazon pay per click in an attempt to scale up businesses that run out of bandwidth on search volume. They’re hoping that the strong user-intent of searching on a leading shopping site such as Amazon, would lead to better conversions. It is fair to say that in the US and UK, soon Amazon may take as much as 10% away from Google and Facebook. The genius “A to Z” approach of Jeff Bezos is one of the things that enabled the company to roll out “Amazon Marketing Services” alongside it’s retail and cloud operations. The marketing world has great expectations and also a sense of fear given Amazon’s growing dominance.
Jeff Bullas – Author, blogger, consultant
According to the AdAge power list, the website of Jeff Bullas is ranking among the top 50 marketing blogs worldwide. If you don’t believe us: do 10 X searches on different SEO related “know-how” topics and see just how many times his site appears on the search results: he certainly has put in tremendous work to reach this position.
Avi Ben Ezra – CTO of SnatchBot, author, researcher
Wondered who are the quiet geniuses behind the scenes when it comes to clever AI bots transforming digital marketing and omni-channel communication? Avi Ben Ezra is widely seen as one of the worlds’ leading authorities on chatbots and AI. With his brother Henri Ben Ezra, they succeeded in launching “no-coding” bots as much as 5 years ahead of Microsoft and other late entrants.
Bill Slawski – Director of search marketing, Google search patent expert
Bill is widely known as the editor of “SEO by the sea”, but in reality, he commands a very unique position in the industry: he is one of very few people with an understanding of Google patents that relate to search. As such, he is considered as one of the architects when it comes to understanding and navigating what many would consider a “necessary evil” in the business world.
George Thomas McCormick – Founder of a Facebook and Instagram marketing agency
George Thomas McCormick is becoming increasingly known as the genius behind some of the most successful Facebook & Instagram Advertising campaigns in recent years. As the founder of a rapidly growing agency in London, he manages as many as 500 global campaigns at any point in time for major brands. He has become a key player in the advertising industry as many CMO’s are turning to him for help after his results have staggered the industry. At the age of just 23 years old, he is certainly one to watch out for in the next few years.
Oleg Shchgolev – CEO of SemRush
When it comes to pay per click competitor research as well as organic research across most countries and major search engines (Google, Bing), SEMRush is a leader. This does not assume that the company is well-loved by the entire industry, but it produced a somewhat necessary tool at a much better price than the main competitor SimilarWeb. Under the leadership of Oleg, SEMRush started to present e-learning and a wealth of blog information, moving closer to a position of being a key hub for industry information, which in turn generate more sales. It occupies a slightly different position in the market when compared to MOZ and WEBCEO.
Final scoop – a non-exhaustive list indeed:
There is a plethora of other names well worth mentioning. For example, several key members of the Google and Facebook boards, media-buying platforms and off course the leadership at Microsoft that commands a fair share of the B2B market by means of owning the Linkedin platform. Let us know if there are any other names worth mentioning during future updates.