As a marketer, knowing who to follow and learn from can be incredibly challenging. With a seemingly endless amount of content and marketing experts to sort through, it’s not always easy knowing whether someone has demonstrated the ability to ‘walk the walk.’
Having a large social media following doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great marketer. And if you Google “top marketers,” and you’ll often find the same lists of the same names, you probably already know.
Even worse, many of those top lists aren’t inclusive, leaving many objectively great marketers unseen.
At CXL, we wanted to work to build an authoritative marketers database that wasn’t based on superficial metrics, or simply rehashing the big names of today.
We wanted to go beyond a one and done list and to create an evergreen resource for marketers to find experts in specific areas of marketing.
For this project we had a few specific goals.
1. Highlight and showcase the best marketers period—not just the ‘big names’ or those with a large following.
2. Cut through the noise by directly asking our marketing peers who they learn the most from.
3. Create the go to resource for marketers to reference so they can know exactly who they can connect and learn from for specific marketing advice.
Today we’re excited to share our Top Marketers Database, and explain our process for how it all came together.
Who are the top 1% of marketers?
Before we share how we went about putting this list together, we should note that there are some limitations of our process. By design, you may not see some of the house-hold names of marketing that you might expect (and perhaps rightfully deserve to be on the list.)
At CXL, we’re huge fans of shipping an MVP and working to improve it over time, and that’s exactly what we did with this project. Over time we expect the collection of marketers to continue to grow and we’ll update the list as responses continue to roll in. Additionally, we also plan on building out the ability to sort marketers by their specific area of expertise.
For an individual to make version 1 of our list, we required that they receive 2+ votes from their peers. Our intention behind this, was to prevent individuals making the cut simply because their friends voted them in.
That of course, means that some qualified individuals may not be listed (yet.)
Our process for finding the best marketers
To kick off this project, we first started with a list of some 50 marketers who we subjectively believed to be world class: experts well known for their advanced knowledge in SEO, digital psychology, analytics, content, branding, and CRO.
This initial list included CXL contributors, course instructors, and other marketing colleagues we’ve worked with first hand. We did our best to ensure that the initial seed list of marketers was as diverse as possible.
From that list, we then sent out a short email which read as follows:
As we noted in our initial outreach email:
The goal of the project is to help new(er) marketers pay attention to the smartest people, and we’re developing that list by following the trail—asking smart marketers to name other smart marketers, then asking those marketers to name a few more, and so on.
Here’s how it looked in action:
From the responses, we then collected the names of those mentioned, and tallied how many votes each individual received. Reaching out to just shy of 500 people, we received 343 votes.
On average, 1 in every 4 people we reached out to ended up filling out the survey, adding more names to the list, allowing us to continue to do outreach based on their responses.
From the names compiled, we then spent time collecting their social media profiles as well as other information such as their company and or website. In future updates, we hope to list their specific area of expertise as well as title.
We suspect as we continue to do more outreach, that many more of the names listed will move up the rankings and present an accurate picture of who the best marketers are.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this project started out as a way to scratch our own itch. We wanted an easy way to quickly know who we should be following to keep up to date with what’s working (and not) in marketing.
There are thousands of incredibly smart marketers and practitioners whose voices aren’t always heard and our goal is to help amplify those who are the best at their craft.
We invite you to check out the first version of our marketers database here.
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