Knowing the work of those exponents of digital marketing who stand out for their extensive academic and work experience within the market can serve as a source of inspiration when designing our marketing and brand-building strategies.
How did they manage to be so successful, how did their ideas change the way marketing is done today? What contributions did they leave us and how to get the most out of them? These are some questions that we would like to address in the following lines.
Here are some of the most important authors within this line of research:
1. Seth Godin
Seth Godin is considered one of the most important marketing theorists of the 21st century. He is the writer of several bestsellers such as “The Purple Cow” and “Tribes: we need you to lead us” where he captures key elements to differentiate ourselves from the competition and take advantage of the rise of the Internet.
Gordin is an American of Jewish origin who graduated in Philosophy and Computer Science from Tufts University in 1982. He then obtained a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from Stanford Business School.
In the first years of his professional career, he served as brand manager at Spinnaker, where he led the first generation of multimedia products, which was an innovative contribution for its time.
In 1995, he founded the company Yoyodyne Entertainment specializing in interactive marketing. This stood out for creating online promotional programs, such as games, contests and raffles for Internet users.
Thanks to this, that same year Seth Godin received the Momentum award, which is a credit to his notable achievements in the Internet industry and digital marketing itself.
We consider that his contributions laid the foundations for what we know today as inbound marketing, through his work “Permission Marketing.” Here is one of his reflections within this book that we would like to share with you:
“Interruptive Marketing will never be effective anymore. You can’t expect that finding large groups of people to send spam messages to will result in any of them sending you money.
Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish an easy channel for satisfied customers to recommend products to others. If you can get the spark off, you just have to stand aside and let them do the talking.”
In this way, he is not only an important exponent of digital marketing but also laid the foundations for a new way of turning marketing into a more human, empathetic and consumer-friendly practice.
2. Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan is co-founder with Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot, a software that is designed to easily carry out the main strategies found in each of the stages of inbound marketing methodology.
When devising a company that would be a pioneer in a new field within the digital world, he had to develop an entire theory to support it and that is where he published Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs in 2009 (in which he thanks to Seth Godin for serving as a source of inspiration for his work).
Following in 2014: Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. In this way, Halligan became an important exponent of digital marketing in the world, changing the way we do marketing and at the same time providing us with a technological solution like Hubspot to materialize his new vision.
By profession, Halligan has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Vermont and completed a master’s degree in business administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2005.
His professional career began at Parametric Technology Corporation. From 2000 to 2004 he worked at Groove Networks as vice president of sales, a company that was later acquired by Microsoft and renamed Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.
In 2006 he founded Hubspot, which 10 years later reported in its Year In Review that it has received $271 million in total revenue and 1,597 employees based in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Dublin, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Portsmouth. This demonstrates the great success that your company and its software itself has within the digital world and for companies.
3. Tim Ash
Tim is a Russian digital marketing consultant and advisor, and author of the bestseller: Landing Page Optimization (with more than 50,000 copies sold worldwide).
He is co-founder of SiteTunners, a company dedicated to offering conversion web page and landing page development services with offices in San Diego and Tampa.
It should be noted that landing pages have become important tools within inbound marketing to convert visitors into leads.
Tim has developed extensive experience in user-centered marketing and design, persuasion strategies and understanding online behavior, neuromarketing and landing page optimization.
Tim obtained a double bachelor’s degree in science, he graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering and a degree in Cognitive Sciences from UC – San Diego while studying in the United States.
During his doctoral studies at this same university, he also obtained his Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on self-learning neural networks and artificial intelligence.
In 2015, this important exponent of digital marketing was mentioned by Forbes as one of the 10 best experts in online marketing and by Entrepreneur magazine in 2016 as part of the top 15 “online marketing influencers to watch.”
Over the past 20 years, Tim has helped several top US and international brands develop successful web optimization initiatives. Companies like Google, Expedia, eHarmony, Facebook, American Express, Canon, Nestlé, Symantec, Intuit, Human, Seimens, and Cisco are some of them.
4. Neil Patel
Continuing with the top 10 of the best online marketing experts highlighted by Forbes magazine, we cannot fail to mention the important role of Neil Patel within the digital world, since he is also recognized for being among the top 100 entrepreneurs with less than 30 years old, appointed by former President Obama.
Born in England and of Indian origin, Patel is the creator of 4 of the most popular SEO tools in the world and author of one of the main Marketing blogs. He is co-author of the bestselling book Hustle: The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum with Patrick Vlaskovits and Jonas Koffler.
He is the founder of multiple digital marketing tools such as: Crazy Eggs, Hello Bar, Kissmetrics, Quick Sprout and his most recent keyword analysis and search platform Ubersuggest to improve the SEO of web pages.
Using social networks and influencer marketing, it was made known through a campaign using the hashtag #quienesneilpatel translated into the Portuguese language as #quemeneilpatel.
This made many people start searching on Google about it, making it a trend within this search engine.
5. Vilma Núñez
If you have been researching and looking for information about digital marketing on social networks and on Google for some time, you have surely come across an article, a video or a post from this advertising specialist and consultant.
Vima Nuñéz has a degree in Advertising (Magna Cum Laude) from the APEC University in Santo Domingo, she has a Master’s in Advertising and a Master’s in Business (MBA) at the EUDE Business School located in Madrid and a doctorate in Advertising and Public Relations ( Ph.D Cum Laude) at the Camilo José Cela University
He has more than eight years working in communication, marketing and advertising. Since 2011 she decided to create a blog where she could share her knowledge and learnings in the digital world.
Thanks to the rise of its content, a year later it won the Bitácoras award for the best public blog (being the most-voted blog among more than 20,000 who participated). In 2013, he founded “Convierte Más” a company that offers marketing consulting to companies, where he has educated more than 21,000 professionals and 950 professionals with his paid consultancies.
In short, all these exponents of digital marketing, in addition to having important training in the advertising world, stand out for their entrepreneurial spirit by materializing their ideas into successful projects and companies, where they highlight the importance of marketing strategies today digital to sell and offer valuable content to consumers.
