The digital marketing experts featured for 2021 are Aleyda Solis, Sarah Bird, Eric Siu, Mike King, Ross Hudgens, Tom Critchlow, AJ Wilcox, Amy Hebdon, Kath Pay and Pat Flynn.
What changed in digital marketing in 2021
Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework arrived with iOS 14.5 in April 2021, making cross-app tracking opt-in instead of default. Roughly 80% of users said no. Attribution and retargeting models that digital advertising had run on for a decade broke almost overnight, and the industry still hasn't fully recovered.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Aleyda Solis
Founder, Orainti
As Google rolled out its Page Experience update through the year, became one of the most closely followed voices helping search practitioners make sense of Core Web Vitals.
Breaking down a technical ranking change into guidance non-developers could act on kept her among the most-shared voices in SEO that year.
- 02
Sarah Bird
CEO, Moz
Left Moz this year after 14 years at the company, including seven as CEO.
Her departure closed out a run that had taken Moz from a scrappy SEOmoz blog through its maturation into an established SEO software business.
- 03
Eric Siu
CEO, Single Grain
Kept leading Single Grain, working with major consumer and tech brands.
Steering an agency through a year when tracking and attribution broke overnight meant leaning harder on organic and content-driven channels less exposed to iOS 14.5's fallout.
- 04
- 05
Ross Hudgens
Founder & CEO, Siege Media
Kept Siege Media on the Inc. 5000 list, alongside recognition as one of Inc's Best Workplaces.
Landing on both lists in the same year suggested the agency had scaled without sacrificing the culture that built its early reputation.
- 06
Tom Critchlow
SEO & strategy consultant
Continued independent SEO consulting through his SEO MBA education platform.
Teaching strategy rather than just tactics filled a gap in SEO education, which mostly focused on technical how-tos rather than organizational decision-making.
- 07
AJ Wilcox
Founder, B2Linked
Had grown B2Linked into a LinkedIn Ads specialist agency managing some of the platform's largest accounts.
Staying LinkedIn-only for seven years by this point gave the agency a depth of platform-specific knowledge that generalist paid social shops rarely built up.
- 08
Amy Hebdon
Founder, Paid Search Magic
Ran Paid Search Magic's Google Ads consultancy and podcast.
With attribution breaking down across platforms that year, her focus on conversion-side account structure became more valuable, not less, as advertisers lost visibility into where results were coming from.
- 09
Kath Pay
Founder & CEO, Holistic Email Marketing
Kept advising global brands through Holistic Email Marketing.
As third-party tracking broke down elsewhere, email's first-party nature made it a channel brands leaned on more heavily, raising the stakes on strategy like hers.
- 10
Pat Flynn
Founder, Smart Passive Income
Remained one of the most established voices in online business and affiliate marketing education.
Over a decade of publicly sharing his own income reports had, by this point, made his brand of transparent teaching a template other online educators copied.
Also featured in 2024
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.
