What Makes for a Brilliant Marketer?
When I came across this Shutterstock blog post about 50 brilliant marketers to follow, I was intrigued.
Who are these brilliant marketers? What makes them brilliant? What do they have in common? And who should I really follow? After all, I can't follow all FIFTY . . . (that would be a full time job).
The promise made by the Shutterstock blogger is that if you follow these 50 "you’ll be able to communicate to your demographics and top the results of any search."
Breaking it down – of the top 50 – 37 were men (1 black man, several Asian), and 13 were women (including 1 black woman, 1 Indian, and 1 Asian).
Only 13 women? Hmmm . . .
They're all big wigs – either owning their own big time agency or holding CXO positions in large global corporations. Their current roles are varied from co-founder & strategic director, to digital evangelist (there were a bunch of evangelists there), journalist & analyst, Harvard professor, author/speaker, consultant, and more.
Their areas of expertise include web development, SEO, data analytics, conversion, content marketing (yay!), storytelling (big yay!), design, branding, social media marketing, digital/online marketing, PR, PPC, and one hurrah for mobile marketing. That's surprising. Only one? What about mobile first? What about – most web experiences happen on mobile? What about – most emails get opened on mobile?
And what do they all, or almost all of them have in common? Well, it falls into one of these three main buckets (and sometimes all three):
They provide actionable recommendations that work
They are inspiring speakers
They are great writers
So, even if your goal isn't necessarily to have half a million followers on Twitter or to get invited to a TEDx roadshow of North America – nevertheless, we all want to deliver a brilliant product or service to our customers – whether internal or external.
If we inspire and provide actionable recommendations that work and can execute deliverables that achieve strategic marketing goals – then we're there. And, of course, great writing is likewise strategically important for engaging, differentiating, and converting marketing content.
Want to do something brilliant with your marketing? Get in touch and let's do great marketing together >>
This post as been updated since its original publication in 2017 .