Whether you call them content marketers, digital marketing experts, or SEO gurus, one thing remains the same: they are darn good at marketing and enjoy spots at the top of their industry.
There are undoubtedly others that should be on this list, but we tried to keep it concise for those newer to digital marketing looking to learn more from the influencers who constantly deliver extremely valuable and helpful content.
In no specific order, here are our top five digital marketers to follow for beginners:
Joe Pulizzi
This list wouldn’t be complete without the founder of Content Marketing Institute, which Joe Pulizzi created in 2007. Also an award-winning author and speaker, Joe is following up his bestselling 2013 book, Epic Content Marketing, with Content Inc, which you can see more about here. The video trailer for the eBook gives a good explanation of how you need to develop a content-first strategy to help grow your audience (and your business).
CMI also holds the world’s largest content marketing conference every year, Content Marketing World, which brought 3,500 marketers to Ohio in 2015. Joe is very active online and social media, constantly sharing videos, eBooks, reports, slideshows and more that will help marketers learn how to do content marketing better.
Rand Fishkin founded Moz (formerly SEOMoz), an industry-leading adviser that creates online tools and software that helps digital marketers and SEO agencies. SEOMoz began back in 2004 to engage the online marketing community. He is a co-author to The Art of SEO and Inbounding Marketing and SEO, and has spoken at many conferences and events.
In 2013, he decided to step down as CEO of Moz to focus on doing more research that would help the digital marketing industry. He still remains active, doing the extremely popular Whiteboard Friday videos, where he dives deep into a topic and explains it all in a whiteboard video. His most-viewed whiteboard video on YouTube was from back in 2013 on the topic of SEO’s dilemma between content marketing and link building.
Moz hosts one of the biggest digital marketing conferences in the industry called MozCon in Seattle, WA, where thousands of digital marketers, brand evangelists, and SEO experts get together for a few days every summer. Rand Fishkin is also the co-founder of inbound.org, which is a very popular social network among inbound marketers that want to share resourceful content with each other.
Rand Fishkin’s most popular tweet:
I think one of the most admirable qualities in a person is the ability to reverse long-held beliefs in the face of contradicting evidence.
Neil Patel is also in Seattle, Washington as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and enterprise consultant, as well as being co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Kissmetrics.
Crazy Egg creates heat maps so website owners can literally see where their visitors are clicking. Hello Bar is a tool for websites to display a customized bar to get more subscribers, social shares, and customers. Kissmetrics is a website analytics platform to help optimize your website, increase conversions, drive engagement, and get more results online.
He also blogs regularly at his marketing and business blog, Quick Sprout. Quick Sprout University is an educational tool available to help marketers increase their knowledge in everything from SEO to social media to email marketing and conversion optimization.
Neil has written complete and ultimate guides to almost every topic in digital marketing, including the very popular Advanced Guide to SEO eBook.
Jeff Bullas is one of the top content marketers online and has won many awards for it along the way. Besides being an avid blogger, he is a speaker, business consultant, and author of Blogging the Smart Way. He has been ranked among the best for content and digital marketing on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, Huffington Post, and many more.
The blog contains tons of insightful and how-to information on social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, email marketing—basically any form of digital marketing. Here is an interview to find out more about Jeff Bullas:
Wil Reynolds is the founder of Seer Interactive, which started in Philadelphia in 2002 and now also has an office in San Diego, CA. Seer Interactive has made a helpful but easy-to-use toolbox for digital marketers that ties many different online tools together through APIs. Besides consulting enterprise companies with all of their digital marketing needs and managing his team of over 100 employees, he is one of the most prolific speakers in the digital marketing industry.
Wil makes online marketers think about the tried and true ways of doing digital marketing, which doesn’t involve manipulating search engines with black hat tricks. Instead, he believes in creating truly amazing content to get to your target audience. He has a popular motto, “doing real company stuff,” which you can see him talk about in this 2012 MozCon video:
Wil Reynolds’s most popular tweet:
Marketing amplifies, if your brand is amazing or crap, marketing will amplify that, think about that before you “drive traffic” #mozcon — Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) July 13, 2015
So start following these digital marketing influencers on Twitter, go through their slideshows, read their books, and try to engage or share their content whenever you can. These are the digital marketers that we follow to keep up with marketing trends. If we have any that we missed in our list, please let us know in the comments section below!
Tom Malesic
Tom Malesic is a seasoned entrepreneur, author, and founder of EZMarketing. For 30+ years, he’s helped thousands of businesses grow with practical, no-fluff strategies that get real results.
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Google Tag Manager simplifies the management of marketing tags on your website without code changes.
Name
Description
Duration
td
Registers statistical data on users' behaviour on the website. Used for internal analytics by the website operator.
session
cookiePreferences
Registers cookie preferences of a user
2 years
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
Name
Description
Duration
_GRECAPTCHA
Google reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis.
179 days
WhatConverts is a call tracking and lead intelligence platform that captures and attributes leads — including phone calls, form submissions, and chat interactions — to the marketing campaigns, keywords, and traffic sources that generated them. It uses dynamic number insertion (DNI) to swap phone numbers on the page in real time, enabling accurate tracking of which marketing efforts drive inbound calls and conversions.
Used by WhatConverts to track visitor session data for lead attribution and call tracking on a specific page. The timestamp in the cookie name is unique to the visitor session.
Session
wc_visitor
Used by WhatConverts to store a unique visitor identifier. Links the visitor's session to their marketing source, enabling lead and conversion attribution across visits.
2 years
wc_swap
Used by WhatConverts to manage phone number swapping for dynamic number insertion (DNI). Stores the phone numbers to be swapped on the page to connect visitor sessions to trackable call numbers.
5 minutes
wc_client_current
Used by WhatConverts to store the current visitor's client tracking data including referral source and visit details. Works alongside wc_client to maintain up-to-date attribution data for the active session.
Session
wc_client
Used by WhatConverts to store visitor and client tracking data including referral source, visit details, and visitor ID. Used for lead attribution and connecting marketing sources to conversions.
6 months
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
Clarity is a web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic.
Used by Google to support cross-domain tracking and conversion measurement. Helps Google Ads attribute conversions to the correct ad click when visitors navigate across multiple domains.
Session
_gcl_au
Used by Google Ads (via Google Tag Manager) to measure ad conversion rates and track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Stores a unique identifier to link ad clicks to actions taken on the website.
4 weeks
FPGCLAW
Google uses cookies for advertising, including serving and rendering ads, personalizing ads (depending on your ad settings at g.co/adsettings), limiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user, muting ads you have chosen to stop seeing, and measuring the effectiveness of ads.
90 Days
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90 Days
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Cookie required to use the options and on-site web services
2 months
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Targeting cookie. Used to create a user profile and display relevant and personalised Google Ads to the user.
2 years
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2 years
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Targeting cookie. Used to create a user profile and display relevant and personalised Google Ads to the user.
2 years
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Targeting cookie. Used to create a user profile and display relevant and personalised Google Ads to the user.
2 years
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Targeting cookie. Used to profile the interests of website visitors and display relevant and personalised Google ads.
2 years
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90 Days
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Google uses cookies for advertising, including serving and rendering ads, personalizing ads (depending on your ad settings at g.co/adsettings), limiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user, muting ads you have chosen to stop seeing, and measuring the effectiveness of ads.
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Google uses cookies for advertising, including serving and rendering ads, personalizing ads (depending on your ad settings at g.co/adsettings), limiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user, muting ads you have chosen to stop seeing, and measuring the effectiveness of ads.
90 Days
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Google uses cookies for advertising, including serving and rendering ads, personalizing ads (depending on your ad settings at g.co/adsettings), limiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user, muting ads you have chosen to stop seeing, and measuring the effectiveness of ads.
90 Days
AEC
AEC cookies ensure that requests within a browsing session are made by the user, and not by other sites. These cookies prevent malicious sites from acting on behalf of a user without that user's knowledge.
6 months
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Profiles the interests of website visitors to serve relevant and personalised ads through retargeting.
2 years
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Targeting cookie. Used to create a user profile and display relevant and personalised Google Ads to the user.
2 years
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2 years
Google Maps is a web mapping service providing satellite imagery, real-time navigation, and location-based information.
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2 years
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179 days
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Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
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This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
GPS
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
Meta Pixel is an analytics and advertising tool by Meta (Facebook) that tracks visitor activity on your website to enable ad targeting, conversion tracking, and audience building across Facebook and Instagram.
Used by Meta (Facebook) to track website visitors for advertising purposes. Stores a unique browser identifier to enable targeted ads, conversion tracking, and audience building across Facebook and Instagram.
90 days
LiveIntent is an advertising and audience targeting platform that helps brands reach audiences through email newsletters and websites using a people-based identity graph.
Set by LiveIntent to register a unique visitor ID for targeted advertising and behavioral tracking across websites. Used for campaign attribution and building advertising profiles.
30 days
GoHighLevel is an all-in-one marketing, CRM, and call tracking platform. Its LeadConnector backend powers lead capture, call tracking, and dynamic number insertion.
Used by GoHighLevel’s call tracking / Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to store the visitor’s assigned tracking type (e.g., “pool”) for number pool management and lead attribution.
12 months
session_id_dloTJBTIT3axdZPqsqxE
Used by GoHighLevel to store the visitor's session ID for call tracking and lead attribution. Part of the LeadConnector visitor tracking system.
Session
poolId_dloTJBTIT3axdZPqsqxE
Used by GoHighLevel to store the assigned number pool ID for dynamic call tracking and visitor lead attribution. Part of the LeadConnector call tracking system.
Session
pool_id_dloTJBTIT3axdZPqsqxE
Used by GoHighLevel's call tracking system to assign visitors to a number pool for dynamic call tracking and lead attribution.
12 months
is_active_dloTJBTIT3axdZPqsqxE
Used by GoHighLevel to track whether a visitor session is currently active. Part of the visitor tracking system used for lead and conversion attribution.
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Used by GoHighLevel as a fallback tracking cookie when a visitor pool ID has not yet been assigned. Part of the visitor session tracking system for lead and conversion attribution.
Session
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Used by GoHighLevel to flag that a visitor pool session is currently in progress. Part of the visitor tracking system used for lead and conversion attribution.
Session
count_dloTJBTIT3axdZPqsqxE
Used by GoHighLevel to count visitor sessions and track lead attribution. Part of a group of cookies that identify and manage visitor pools for call and conversion tracking.
