Top 30 Digital Marketers To Follow In 2021

Digital marketing is a massive topic that’s always changing. And while the strategies of getting customers remain the same, there are always new tactics.

But how do sift through the garbage and find stuff that really moves the needle?

Well, that’s where the top digital marketers in the world come in.

They do the sifting for you, experiment with their own money, and give you the cliff notes.

And to make it even easier, I’ve compiled a list of the very best digital marketers. So you can get your marketing fix, keep up with the latest trends, and know you’re in good company.

1. Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He invests in early-stage consumer startups and previously led the Rider Growth teams at Uber, focusing on efforts across acquisition, new user experience, churn, and notifications/email.

He also writes about user growth, metrics, and network effects on his blog and sends out a weekly email newsletter. It’s a great read if you’re interested in high-level marketing, startups, and learning how to rapidly grow and retain customers.

Connect with Andrew: Twitter / Website

2. Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the Co-founder of MOZ and now the founder of SparkToro. He’s best known for being a leader in the SEO space and helped thousands of people better understand how to increase search traffic. 

He’s a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship topics around the world and always puts out interesting content. 

Connect with Rand: Twitter / Website

3. Larry Kim

Larry Kim is the founder of Wordstream and MobileMonkey, ranked as the #8 most popular author on Medium, and is an expert on all things advertising and start-ups. 

Having sold Wordstream for $150M in 2018, he’s now growing MobileMonkey, a tool to help businesses create engaging chatbots without coding. He also writes a weekly column called “In The Trenches” for Inc. Magazine. So be sure to check that out.

Connect with Larry: Twitter / Medium

4. Dave Gerhardt 

Dave Gerhardt is one of the leading brand builders in the B2B industry. He helped build Drift into one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of all-time and did it in just 4 years. Famous for using Conversational Marketing to grow companies, he’s currently the CMO at Privy.

Dave also has a private marketing group where he helps people with modern B2B marketing.

Connect with Dave: Twitter / Dave’s Marketing Group

5. Nathan Barry

Nathan Barry is the founder of the popular email marketing platform ConvertKit. He’s a serial creator, authority, and thought leader in the internet marketing world. 

ConvertKit was started as a side project of Nathan’s in 2013 and has since grown to 25M/year. Powering over 30,000 creators including Tim Ferriss, Gretchen Rubin, Tim McGraw, and many more.

Connect with Nathan: Website

6. Mari Smith – Social Media Examiner

Mari Smith is one of the biggest names in digital marketing. Best known for her influential content on the popular site Social Media Examiner. She is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Facebook marketing and social media.

Connect with Mari: Twitter / Website

7. Oli Gardner 

Oli Gardener is the co-founder of Unbounce, a landing page software that helps businesses rapidly make web pages and collect leads without code or design skills.

He’s a speaker, thought leader, and shares some of the best marketing content from around the web. So be sure to follow him on Twitter.

Connect with Oli: Twitter / Website

8. Tommy Griffith  

Tommy Griffith used to work at PayPal and AirBnB doing SEO. Now he’s built an educational empire with ClickMinded, offering digital marketing courses with industry experts. GrowthHit’s very own Jim Huffman created their Sales Funnel course.

Tommy is a great guy and is quickly becoming one of the top digital marketers to follow.

Connect with Tommy: Twitter / Website

9. Eric Siu

Eric Siu is most known for his growth strategies for Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing start-ups. His marketing agency Single Grain focuses on driving scalable revenue growth with Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, YouTube advertising, and more.

He’s also the co-host of the Marketing School Podcast alongside Neil Patel.

Connect with Eric: Twitter / Website

10. Steve Rayson

Steve Rayson is the co-founder of one of the most popular sites for content marketers, Buzzsumo. He also was a co-founder in Kineo, a technology-based consultancy firm building better workplace learning experiences. 

Connect with Steve: Twitter / Website

11. Aaron Levy 

Aaron levy is the group director for SEM at Tinuiti. Having spent years developing his PPC and SEM skills, he’s now worked with fortune 500 clients, high growth companies, and internationally recognized retailers to create marketing and search strategies that bring in more customers.

Connect with Aaron: Twitter 

12. Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is a marketing thought leader and prolific content creator for Search Engine Land. She’s got more than 15 years of marketing experience, having held both in-house and agency management positions. Now creating content around commerce and digital strategies.

Her articles and Twitter feed as a great resource for anyone wanting to grow their business online.

Connect with Ginny: Twitter 

13. Michelle Killebrew 

Michelle Killebrew is a data-driven marketing expert. She’s leading marketing for PwC’s New Ventures and serves as an advisor to Proof Analytics. Michelle is an award-winning leader, speaker, and thought leader in the marketing industry.

If you’re interested in the customer experience, leadership, and modern-day b2b digital strategy, follow Michelle.

Connect with Michelle: Twitter / Website

14. Jay Baer

Jay Baer is the founder of Convince & Convert, one of the world’s best content marketing and social media consulting firms. Advising some of the biggest brands on Customer Experience and how to turn customers into raving fans and volunteer marketers.

He’s an author, speaker, and serial entrepreneur. Jay is definitely worth following.

Connect with Jay: Twitter

15. Tim Ash

Tim Ash is an international speaker and bestselling author of Unleash Your Primal Brain and Landing Page Optimization. He was the co-founder and CEO of SiteTuners for 19 years and developed CRO strategies for some of the world’s leading brands. 

Connect with Tim: Twitter / Website

16. Shama Hyder

Shama Hyder has built her agency, Zen media into an industry powerhouse. Working with technology companies on building out PR and social strategies to amplify and grow brands. She’s a great person to follow on LinkedIn and has been named one of their “Top Voices” in Marketing & Social Media for four years running.

Connect with Shama: Twitter / Website

17. Brian Dean 

Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko, one of the leading educational sites for SEO and white-hat link building strategies. He’s a thought-leader in the marketing world and widely respected in the industry as a speaker and SEO expert.

He writes about extremely practical strategies to grow an online business.

Connect with Brian: Twitter / Website

18. Jon Morrow 

Jon Morrow has a truly inspirational story. He’s a writer, blogger, and content marketing expert. Best known for building up SmartBlogger into the resource that it is today, with 300k+ email subscribers and a monthly income of over $100k — all from blogging.

Connect with Jon: Website

19. Julius Fedorovicius 

Julius Fedorovicius is a technical marketer best known for his Google Tag Manager courses and free content. He writes great blog posts around GTM and GA at Analytics Mania.

If you’re looking to learn more about analytics and using tag manager to up your marketing game, take a look at Julius’ posts.

Connect with Julius: Twitter / Website

20. Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is an expert in SEO. As the editor of Search Engine Land and founder of Search Engine Roundtable, Barry consistently puts out interesting SEO content. If your SEO is weak and you want to learn everything there is to know about search, Barry is your guy.

Connect with Barry: Twitter / Website

21. Ann Smarty 

Ann Smarty runs one of the best SEO educational websites where she publishes guides, courses, and free material to help businesses drive more organic traffic. She shares a lot of great content from her blogs and around the web on Twitter.

Connect with Ann: Twitter / Website

22. Brian Balfour

Brian Balfour is the founder of Reforge, a growth marketing education company as well as a venture partner at Long Journey Ventures. He was previously VP Growth at HubSpot and has helped technology companies grow to millions of active daily users.

He writes essays on growth, user acquisition, retention, and building performance growth teams. His content is serious and extremely valuable for anyone interested in growth.

Connect with Brian: Twitter / Website

23. Casey Winters

Casey Winters is the chief product officer at EventBrite and puts out the greatest content on all things related to growth, acquisition, and retention strategies. He’s worked with some of the most successful companies online, like Grubhub, Pinterest, and many others.

Connect with Casey: Twitter / Website

24. Nat Eliason

Nat Eliason is the founder of Growth Machine, a search-focused content marketing agency working with some of the most popular brands online. Nat also writes a weekly email newsletter with musings on life, business, articles and book notes. It’s a great read, so I recommend you sign up.

Connect with Nat: Twitter / Website

25. Julian Shapiro

Julian Shapiro founded Demand Curve, a Y Combinator startup that helps grow startups, train marketing teams with courses, and also runs an ad agency. He writes in depth guides on topics like growth marketing, how to write well, and mental models. There’s some really interesting content on his personal blog which is worth checking out.

Connect with Julian: Twitter

26. Bryan Harris

Bryan Harris became big in the online world with his blog VideoFruit and selling courses, then later pivoted to Growth Tools, where he creates free tools and offers growth coaching to businesses. His free content is some of the very best online and he’s always sharing great stuff on social media.

Connect with Bryan: Twitter / Website 

27. Harry Dry

Harry Dry writes marketing case studies each week and shares them with his 44k email list over at Marketing Examples. They’re really useful, practical examples of what great brands are doing with their marketing. You’ll learn a lot by following Harry and subscribing to his newsletter.

Connect with Harry: Twitter / Website

28. Toby Howell

Toby Howell runs Morning Brew’s twitter account and shares his insights on running successful social and twitter strategies. He has an interesting story in that he’s never worked in social media before growing Morning Brew’s twitter presence to 100k+ followers in a very short period of time.

Connect with Toby: Twitter

29. Stew Fortier

Stew Fortier is a writer and creative that puts out interesting content on storytelling, writing, and thoughts on life and business. His writing is witty and always an interesting read! Take a look if you’re looking to get better at writing and want some inspiration.

Connect with Stew: Twitter / Website

30. Jim Huffman

Jim Huffman is the CEO of GrowthHit. He grew two startups from idea to over $10M in sales,  spent over $4M on Facebook ads, and led workshops at Fortune 500 brands like FedEx, Oreo, Hot Wheels & Intuit. 

He’s also the best-selling author of The Growth Marketer’s Playbook and writes a weekly email newsletter about growth marketing, startups, and leadership. Go subscribe!

Connect with Jim: Twitter / Website