TRENDS, WEBSITES AND INFLUENCERS POWERING THE WORLD OF DIGITAL MARKETING IN 2020
Whether you are doing SEO, PPC, CRO or just learning new skills, it’s no doubt that digital marketing is a hot topic. Whether it’s industries powerhouses like Google and Facebook, upcoming tools such as SparkToro and CopyTesting, there are so many websites keeping us busy.
How can you tell what tools and technologies are used by the most people? How about what tools are growing and which are shrinking, so that you can tell which are most worth investing time in?
I have put together the ranking of 100 of the biggest digital marketing websites, tools and influencers in the world, taking into account Google searches, engagement, social following and more.
Which are the most popular digital marketing websites right now?
I have selected 6 major criteria to discover the 100 most loved digital marketing websites of 2020: the increase in usage’s interest shown on Google Trends, the overall websites searches per year, the number of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn, the websites’ engagement rate on Twitter and % changes in search Year on Year.
Taking all the above into account, I ranked the websites from the most popular to the least popular.
Most Popular Digital Marketing Websites
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We, marketers, love to be lazy (or more efficient:-). That is why we use a range of tools to help us. But trends come and go as in every sector.
I have researched how online searches for different tools have changed year on year, showing those that have seen the biggest increase and those that we are moving on from.
The digital marketing tool with the biggest increase in popularity this year was “MobileMonkey”, with a whopping increase of 174.35% compared to last year. What is MobileMonkey? MobileMonkey is the world’s best Facebook Messenger marketing platform. Since it’s connected to Facebook, it promises to reach 1.3 billion customers globally!
After this, three more tools have seen a radical surge in popularity in the last 12 months, all of them part of the wider SEO group. And they include UberSuggest (143.23%), KeywordsEverywhere (114.19%) and Seobility (103.84%).
They are keyword research tools that facilitate all sort of SEO-related tasks.
Also, it was surprising to see new tools rising that didn’t exist in the past twelve months and now they are getting more and more popular.
For example, CopyTesting and SparkToro were just launched in April 2020 and already saw a spike respectively of 72.45% and 16.43%. Also, Sitebulb, launched last year, shows an increase of 39.58% in the last 12 months.
It was surprising to see how many tools dropped in popularity this year. For example, “CrazyEgg” dropped -33.27% compared to last year.
CrazyEgg is the heatmap tool part of the wider industry of conversion rate optimization.
Two more tools related to conversion rate optimization that lost popularity are VWO (-28.49%) and Optimizely (-13.33%).
Even more surprising is the fall of AdEspresso, the Italian based tool that makes Facebook ad creation and optimization easier and faster. Since it was founded in 2011, it has grown to become a Facebook advertising partner and a preferred marketing tool for brands all over the world. But this year, it lost –28.18% in popularity.
Many of the faces that run the most powerful tools are just as popular as the tools themselves. Many powerful digital marketing celebrities have a huge following on social media and some of them are easy to engage with.
They are entrepreneurs that became social media superstars due to the products they launch and the learning their share.
Top Ten Most Powerful Influencers
#1 NEIL PATEL
Combined followers: 1,381,835
Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics.
In 2014, Forbes named Neil as one of the top 10 marketing experts.
In my ranking, he has the biggest number of followers and ranked #2 on global Google searches with 109,000 searches a month.
#3 LARRY KIM
Combined followers: 859,744
Former CEO of WordStream, Larry recently founded MobileMonkey, which is also the fastest growing tool in my ranking.
He is the influencer with the most Twitter followers (750K+) but he almost doesn’t have any YouTube followers (only 41).
#5 MARI SMITH
Combined followers: 650,286
Often referred as the “Queen of Facebook” for her expertise in Facebook Ads, Mari Smith ranked on position 5 for the total social following, in my ranking.
IBM recently named Mari as one of 7 women who are shaping digital marketing.
#7 JEFF BULLAS
Combined followers: 605,508
His website, www.jeffbullas.com, receives over 5 million visitors a year and he is in a mission to inspire and educate entrepreneurs to grow their business in a digital world.
With over 500K followers on Twitter, he is also very known for affiliate marketing.
#9 SUNDAR PICHAI
Combined followers: 2,822,863
No need for introduction, Sundar is the CEO of Alphabet, the company that owns Google.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t have a LinkedIn account but he made it into out top 10 thanks to the 500K/month searches and his Twitter’s following of over 2M people.
#2 ANN HANDLEY
Combined followers: 457,430
Ann Handley is a writer, digital marketing pioneer, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author.
She scored #1 for LinkedIn and #7 for Twitter followers. The reason why she is behind Neil Patel is that she doesn’t rank well for global searches (2,200/month).
#4 SETH GODIN
Combined followers: 731,982
Seth published 19 best-selling books and he is in both the Marketing and Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fames.
He has a huge number of Twitter followers (700K+) and more than 60K searches per month on search engines.
#6 KIM GARST
Combined followers: 631,028
She is the CEO of her own company and Forbes top 20 Women Social Media Influencers in 2013. This is how she has gained a large social media following.
In my ranking, she is in the top 3 for number of Twitter followers.
#8 BRIAN SOLIS
Combined followers: 602,826
Currently working as Global Innovation Evangelist @SalesForce, he is one of the brightest analysts of our time. Solis began his career as a programmer and database architect in 1991.
He became known through his digital company FutureWorks doing social campaigns for Oprah Winfrey and Pepsi.
#10 RAND FISHKIN
Combined followers: 544,092
Many attribute to Rand the birth of SEO as we know it and he is best known for co-founding MOZ, whose blog is arguably the best place to learn SEO.
He is now the co-founder of SparkToro, an author and sought-after Keynote speaker.
The Most Popular and Powerful Digital Influencers Ranked
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