The digital marketing experts featured for 2020 are Will Critchlow, Danny Sullivan, Seth Godin, Aaron Wall, Bill Slawski, Barry Schwartz, Ross Simmonds, Joanna Wiebe, Marie Forleo and Andy Crestodina.
What changed in digital marketing in 2020
Instagram launched Reels in August 2020, its answer to TikTok, right as the pandemic pushed a decade's worth of e-commerce growth into a single year and rewrote most marketing budgets overnight.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Will Critchlow
Founder & CEO, SearchPilot
Spun the SEO A/B testing platform SearchPilot out as an independent business in February 2020, the same month the rest of Distilled and SearchLove were acquired by Brainlabs.
Building SearchPilot around statistically testing SEO changes, rather than just implementing best practices on faith, gave the platform a rigor most SEO tools didn't attempt.
Also featured in 2011
- 02
Danny Sullivan
Search Liaison, Google
Had joined Google as its Search Liaison in 2017 and spent 2020 translating the company's ranking systems for a public hungry for answers during a chaotic year.
Explaining Google's ranking systems from inside the company, rather than as an outside journalist, put him in an unusual position after two decades covering search from the other side.
Also featured in 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2018 and 2026
- 03
Seth Godin
Author & entrepreneur
Published widely read commentary on marketing at a moment when most businesses were rethinking their entire strategy.
His long-running argument for building something remarkable, rather than just advertising louder, found a receptive audience among businesses forced to rethink their whole playbook that year.
- 04
- 05
Bill Slawski
Founder, SEO by the Sea
Continued his patent-based SEO analysis on SEO by the Sea.
His patent research stayed a rare, evidence-grounded counterpoint to the mostly correlational SEO advice that circulated elsewhere in the industry.
- 06
Barry Schwartz
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Stayed the industry's most consistent daily chronicler of search engine news.
Seventeen years of daily posts made the Roundtable one of the only continuous public records of how Google's search results kept shifting.
- 07
Ross Simmonds
Founder, Foundation Marketing
Was becoming known for his work on content distribution.
His argument that distribution deserved as much attention as content creation itself pushed back against an industry that mostly measured success by publishing volume.
Also featured in 2024
- 08
Joanna Wiebe
Founder, Copyhackers
Kept teaching conversion copywriting through Copyhackers.
Her frameworks kept spreading well beyond her own client work, cited widely as businesses leaned harder on ecommerce copy during a year of accelerated online shopping.
- 09
Marie Forleo
Entrepreneur & video marketing educator
Had published Everything Is Figureoutable the year before and kept building one of the most-watched business education platforms online.
Her platform's growth accelerated as more entrepreneurs turned to online business education during a year when in-person options largely disappeared.
Also featured in 2024
- 10
Andy Crestodina
Co-founder & CMO, Orbit Media
Published widely cited content marketing research through Orbit Media.
Orbit's annual surveys remained a go-to benchmark source for content marketers trying to gauge whether their own output was typical or an outlier.
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.
