Growth marketing has had a meteoric rise over the last few years in the marketing space. This is due to the unprecedented success of companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber. These major brands stepped away from traditional marketing teams and marketers. These companies realized that in order to achieve exponential growth, they needed marketers that had skill-sets that were much more versatile and holistic. So began the rise of elite growth teams and growth marketing hackers. Growth marketers are unique because of their versatile skill-sets that range from digital marketing, product, engineering, design, and much more.
Nowadays, it seems like every company is looking for a growth marketer that can lead and execute for them. So naturally, this leads to an influx of talent and so-called growth experts. However, like in every profession, there are some who stand out from the rest. We’ve put together a list of some of the top growth professionals in the world today. These growth pioneers are still changing the game, and if you want to learn the ins and outs about growth marketing, start following them.
Here is our highly vetted list of the best digital marketing experts and growth hackers to follow in 2021:
Julia Yan
Mayur Gupta
Dave Gerhardt
Gustaf Alströmer
Cynthia Kleinbaum
Guillaume Cabane
Barbra Gago
Fareed Mosavat
Nir Eyal
Brian Dean
Julian Shapiro
Jill Essig
Sean Ellis
Sujan Patel
Mostafa ElBermawy
Julia Yan
Experience: TikTok, Bytedance, Amazon
Areas of Expertise: User Acquisition, B2C & B2B Marketing, Growth, Product Management, Strategy Consulting
Media: Linkedin
Julia Yan is an established growth professional who is currently the Head of Growth for the fastest growing app in the world, TikTok. Her career started at PWC and Deloitte, and soon after, she became a product marketing leader at Amazon. She has a proven track record of building high-performing techniques and strategies to drive marketing success.
Mayur Gupta
Experience: USA Today Network, Freshly, Spotify, HealthGrades
Areas of Expertise: Digital Marketing, Marketing Technology, Growth, Analytics
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Mayur Gupta currently is the chief marketing & strategy officer at USA Today Network. He has an impressive resume that dates back to the early 2000s. Some of his major accomplishments include CMO at Healthgrades, VP of Growth & Marketing at Spotify, and CMO at Freshly. In 2014, Mayur was recognized as one of the “40 under 40” leading marketers in the industry by BrandInnovators.
Dave Gerhardt
Dave Gerhardt is currently CMO at Privy, and is one the best creative marketing minds in the industry today. His prior experience includes his time at Drift as VP of Marketing. During his time at Drift, he helped the company become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of all-time. Dave loves marketing and travels around the world to give talks on marketing including lectures at Harvard.
Experience: Privy, Drift, Hubspot
Areas of Expertise: Conversational Marketing, B2B Marketing, Copywriting
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Gustaf Alströmer
Gustaf Alströmer is a brilliant product designer and manager who understands growth exceptionally well. Currently, he is a partner at Y-Combinator. Before joining Y Combinator he spent 5 years at Airbnb. During his time at Airbnb, he helped start the product growth team in 2012 and worked as a Product Lead.
Experience: Y-Combinator, AirBnB, Voxer
Areas of Expertise: Product Growth, Viral Marketing, User Growth
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Cynthia Kleinbaum
Cynthia is currently the VP of Mobile and Product Marketing at Walmart. Her marketing career spans over 14+ years. This includes experience in brand management, customer insights, strategy, e-commerce, and much more. She was also a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group and holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. Cynthia has been extremely successful in her career at helping companies grow and achieve true profitability.
Experience: Walmart, Bonobos, Gilt
Areas of Expertise: eCommerce, Brand Management, Strategy
Guillaume Cabane
Guillaume Cabane has 15+ years in growth and is passionate about projects that include a mix of marketing and engineering teams. His entrepreneurial mindset and analytical skills have provided him opportunities to work and lead growth teams for some of the fastest-growing startups such as Segment and Drift. Currently, he is a Growth Advisor at G2 and other SaaS companies.
Experience: Mention, Segment, Drift
Areas of Expertise: Acquisition Marketing, SaaS B2B, Growth Hacking
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Barbra Gago
Barbara Gago has over 12+ years of experience in both agency and client-side building brands and scalable marketing engines that drive rapid growth. Her skill-set ranges from digital marketing to lead nurturing and loves being part of mission-driven companies that provide great customer experiences.
Experience: Miro, Greenhouse, LifeDojo
Areas of Expertise: customer experience, content mapping, customer acquisition
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Fareed Mosavat
Fareed Mosavat is a product-driven executive that has a versatile resume. He has worked for some great companies over his career including Pixar and has experience in a variety of verticals and disciplines. Fareed is a product-driven growth professional who is focused on value creation for customers.
Experience: Reforge, Slack, Instacart
Areas of Expertise: product growth, product development, engineering
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal is a best-selling author who writes to help companies create behaviors that benefit their users. Nir is known for some of his best-selling books including “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” and “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.” His writing has also extended to other publications such as Harvard Business Review and TechCrunch. He has also lectured at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Experience: Americorps, Boston Consulting Group, Standford
Areas of Expertise: Technology, Psychology, Business
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Brian Dean
Brian is well known in the marketing community as an SEO expert. His award-winning blog and company, Backlinko, has provided many in the marketing community with insights into the ever-changing digital marketing and SEO industries. His blog and youtube videos attract more than 2 million users a year.
Experience: Backlinko, Exploding Topics
Areas of Expertise: SEO, Digital Marketing
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Julian Shapiro
Julian Shapiro is the founder of Demand Curve, which is a growth program that trains and mentors teams at major companies like Microsoft, Zendesk, and many more on growth marketing. He is well known for his expertise in marketing and has consistently written on many topics for publications such as TechCrunch. He also writes extensive handbooks and blog posts on a variety of topics on his website Julian.com, which attracts over 1 million users a year.
Experience: Demand Curve, Webflow, Techcrunch
Areas of Expertise: Growth, Digital Marketing, Writing
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Jill Essig
Jill Essig is a results-driven marketer who has led marketing initiatives for some of the biggest global brands including Fox and Bed Bath & Beyond. Currently, Jill is a Senior Director of Growth Marketing at Walt Disney. Jill’s 12+ year career has enabled her to build a versatile skill-set in marketing. Her areas of expertise include performance marketing, segmentation, customer insights, project management, to name a few.
Experience: The Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Bed Bath & Beyond
Areas of Expertise: Marketing Analytics, Marketing Automation, CRM
Media: Linkedin
Sean Ellis
Sean Ellis is one of the early pioneers of growth marketing. He coined the term growth hacking and has a long career helping elite brands like Dropbox reach exponential growth. Sean is well known for his best-selling book “Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success” and successfully co-founded GrowthHackers.com, an online community built for growth hackers, which currently has over 2 million global users.
Experience: Dropbox, Lookout, Gualaroo
Areas of Expertise: Growth Hacking, Writing, Online Community
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Sujan Patel
Sujan Patel is a data-driven marketer and problem solver. His skills as a professional marketer are deep and wide. It ranges from SEO to content distribution and from growth hacking to branding. Over Sujan’s 15+ year career in marketing, he has helped execute creative growth strategies for hundreds of companies.
Experience: Single Grain, When I Work, Mailshake
Areas of Expertise: SEO, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing
Media: Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube
Mostafa ElBermawy
Of course, we are going to shamelessly plug our very own, Mostafa ElBermawy. He is an accomplished growth leader with over 12+ years of experience helping fast-growing start-ups and Fortune 500 companies accelerate revenue and user growth. As a seasoned SaaS and eCommerce growth hacker, Mostafa is constantly reinventing growth marketing strategies and tactics to help brands achieve the best ROI. Currently, he runs a world-class growth team as the Founder and Growth Lead at one of the fastest-growing growth marketing agencies in the country, NoGood.
Experience: NoGood, American Express, Microsoft
Areas of Expertise: Growth Marketing, Growth/Viral Loops, Performance Marketing
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