The digital marketing experts featured for 2017 are Dan Shure, Eric Enge, Annie Cushing, Wil Reynolds, Barry Schwartz, Joanna Wiebe, Larry Kim, Pam Moore, Chad White and Britney Muller.
What changed in digital marketing in 2017
TikTok's predecessor Douyin launched its international version worldwide in September 2017. It was barely a blip for Western marketers, almost none of whom are paying it any attention yet.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Dan Shure
Founder, Evolving SEO
Was named one of the top 20 technical SEOs to follow in 2017 by OnCrawl. His podcast, Experts on the Wire, had already featured guests including Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox and Annie Cushing.
Running a podcast built entirely around long-form SEO conversations gave the industry a format for depth that conference talks, limited to 30 or 45 minutes, rarely allowed.
- 02
- 03
Annie Cushing
Founder, Annielytics
Spoke at multiple industry conferences in 2017, known for making analytics data accessible to non-technical marketers.
Her knack for turning dense analytics dashboards into plain-language takeaways filled a real gap, since most marketers had access to data they didn't know how to act on.
- 04
Wil Reynolds
Founder, SEER Interactive
Continued speaking widely on audience-first SEO through SEER Interactive.
SEER's growth through the 2010s tracked the industry's broader move away from pure link building toward SEO grounded in real customer research.
- 05
Barry Schwartz
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Remained the industry's most consistent daily chronicler of search engine news.
Fourteen years of daily posts by this point made the Roundtable a de facto historical record of nearly every algorithm change the industry noticed, big or small.
- 06
Joanna Wiebe
Founder, Copyhackers
Continued teaching conversion copywriting through Copyhackers.
Her frameworks kept spreading well beyond her own clients, as marketers elsewhere adopted "conversion copywriting" as a standard part of the CRO toolkit.
- 07
- 08
Pam Moore
CEO, Marketing Nutz
Continued as a recognized voice on social strategy and personal branding.
Her early argument that individuals, not just companies, needed a deliberate social strategy looked increasingly prescient as personal branding grew into its own industry.
- 09
Chad White
Email marketing researcher
Kept building a research-driven reputation in email marketing.
His deliverability research kept pushing email marketers to look past open and click rates toward the technical factors that decided whether a message reached the inbox at all.
- 10
Britney Muller
Senior SEO Scientist, Moz
Joined Moz as Senior SEO Scientist, bringing a background in data science to the company's research.
Her background blending SEO with machine learning is making her one of the clearer voices translating what AI means for search practitioners, well before most of the industry is talking about it.
Also featured in 2019
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.
