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Today I am serving my skills into the digital marketing industry. There was a business mindset within me since engineering. I Didn’t knew how business was done. How businesses were scaled and how we can create solutions to meet the demand and generate revenue in return. My vision during those days was just to make money.
I joined many businesses as their representative, campus ambassador etc to learn how they are doing the business. During this transition phase from learning the business to starting one of my own, I can across many like-minded people in the industry where
- Some inspired me,
- Few of them showed me the right path,
- Some of them motivated me to take the risk to grow better.
And most importantly, they all helped me grow as a businessman. Who were those people? My mentor? or trainer or coach? You know what people call such persons who advise you to take the right or may be for you, the wrong turn?
Some people call them self-proclaimed Gurus.
Table of Contents
Why so many Marketing Gurus in Online marketing?
Digital marketing is a new world Term. Earlier it was called as online or internet marketing. Since the internet didn’t have deeper reach among the civilization, hence nobody was aware much about making some money online.
Currently, with the advent in high-end technologies and medium to engage people online, it has become important for the business to have their presence online. Digital marketing has become an important department to build brand.
Businesses have different shape and size, some starts and grow exponentially while others grow at a different rate. Growth of a business depends on too many factors where marketing plays an essential role to build the business as a brand.
The marketing team has two blocks. The online and the offline team.
The online marketing team is the department where these people are either guided with self-proclaimed gurus or they themselves are the same people.
What are the reasons to see so many marketing gurus in Online Marketing?
Have you heard about any university that is offering a bachelor’s degree in Digital marketing if we go back? Even today, Digital marketing is just a subject for a term in a full term degree like MBA in Marketing or BBA at Indian Universities
There is no dedicated degree from big universities on Digital marketing. When it comes to marketing, Universities offer complete marketing degree that has the entire curriculum of a marketing profile.
These degrees are offered at huge fee which cannot be afforded by everyone. Since the demand in digital marketing directly proportional to the penetration of the Internet in people lifestyle hence it is quite considerable that already we have
- So many people to connect
- So many things to learn.
- And so many opportunities to get into the discussion.
A situation where there is high demand, too many online contents to learn and so many people trying to make money out of them but no curriculum or degree to show the right path to follow, It is obvious that people will learn things from each other.
Learn from anyone and everyone
In this online industry, people have started bashing out others by defining them as a self-proclaimed guru. An industry who is not headed by any university curriculum or format would obviously not have a definite learning path.
Any proven strategy by others will be tested by you or your team. Online marketing heavily depends on User experience. It depends upon the decision and not on commitments.
Without test and trial, you cannot come down to any conclusion. Hence, connecting with any self-proclaimed marketing guru and trying to learn the best out of him/her will always be the right path to success instead of bashing them with any word that can demotivate them to contribute to the society.
We know that there are many people who try to make money by being your marketing guru but you should be smart enough to take out the best out of them before they take out everything from you.
This world follows the Darwinian evolutionary theory where the fittest survive. Hence, take benefits from all possible self-proclaimed guru. Test their methods and strategy and be intelligent to use the best one that suits your business requirement.
My List of top 8 Marketing Gurus of 2020
As I said in my blog earlier, that the marketing field is very dynamic. If we specifically talk about marketing, this has got two different zone now. One is your conventional marketing and now we also have digital marketing with the advent of strong online platform to reach a target set of people.
So, in all these field of marketing, we always need a mentor to help us grow in our journey. I have my own list of marketing guru from whom I keep learning new things. This is my personal list and it may vary from people to people. I follow a lot of marketing gurus and mentors and these 10 people have got a transformational change in my marketing career.
Let me remind you, this is my own list of Marketing gurus. Means I am mentioning people from whom I have learned something. I am not taking any random people names.
1. Deepak Kanakaraju
He was my first paid guru as I bought his course to confirm if I am going in the right direction on learning digital marketing. Till now, I prefer going back to his course on learning digital Deepak because the course keeps on updating the value of current changing trends in digital marketing.
2. Shibram Mishra
I count him 2nd in my list because he has taught me the facebook’s profitable funnel which I feel rarely anyone is working upon. It’s his strategy of profitable facebook funnel which has changed my way of advertising on facebook. I can confidently boost about my skills on facebook marketing all because I learned some great hacks from Him.
3. Neil Patel
Like every other digital marketer would say this, yes, I do follow him a lot because Neil Patel is like the leader in this niche. He is present everywhere when you have to learn something about digital marketing. I consider him as my guru because he experiments and shares the same results with us which we cannot test because we can’t do everything ourselves. Here Neil Patel has helped us learn more strategies, tricks, and ways to grow better digitally.
4. Brain Dean
I know more than half of the SEO starter would have come across his name. He is the king of on page and off page knowledge sharer. When I started my learning into SEO in 2016, Backlinko blog was my holy book. Backlinko is a blog on SEO runned by brain dean. He experiment every minor changes of GOOGLE algorithm and shares his learning in a smart way. All my seo teachings and learnings comes from him a lot.
5. Sanjay Shenoy
Can’t miss him on SEO. After brain dean, anyone else whom I believe in SEO then its clearly sanjay shenoy. I have learned the real essence of content marketing from him. Not only through his courses but also through the digital conferences that he and his team does quite frequently. I got in touch with his learning sessions in 2018 when I got deepak kanakaraju’s digital marketing course and it all started there, with a new angle of learning SEO.
6. Raja Koppula
Hardly anyone knows him. He is like a secret superstar. If I reveal a lot about him, I know half of the world would start searching for him. He was the person who got me into marketing. If he wouldn’t have existed, I would have been working somewhere in hell and regretting my life. If you are reading this blog on my website today, it’s all because I had learned everything from him or got motivated to learn things into marketing with his guidance from him. I can write an entire blog about him as his achievement, knowledge and work are hidden to the world and only I know the level of expertise he owns in this industry. To give a hint, he is the multi-million dollar marketing guru who only becomes a guru for only limited people and I was the lucky one. He owns some of the very big secret business, which most of you must be consuming [ If you are into digital marketing ] but isn’t aware that it belongs to raja koppula.
7. Anil Agarwal
I have been consistently following him for motivation in digital marketing. He is one of my biggest motivations in SEO as he is the real hero of archiving actionable results from SEO. Though he is expertise in many other genres but He has been my source of inspiration for learning digital marketing.
8. Eric Ries
If he is not into your list you are in the wrong direction. I am serious about it. If marketing and entrepreneurship is a part of your life and you have no idea about Eric rise, you have lost your mind. He is the writer of the best seller book named “The lean startup”. If you haven’t read that and wish to start your marketing startup or journey into marketing, you will definitely make a lot of failure but if you follow the advice of eric, you will save a lot of time, money and energy.
Strongly recommending you guys to read his book: The lean startup.
i HOPE, in this journey of learning, I will come across more smart mentors of marketing from whom, i would get to learn a lot.
My Final Verdict
Many of us didn’t go to a B-School to learn marketing. But we don’t have a B school as well that teaches you digital marketing for a complete 2-year program and offers a degree that is internationally or nationally accepted or recognized. We use our online marketing skills to grow our or other’s businesses. I remember my Digital marketing mentor had a mentor and his mentor’s mentor also had a mentor and thus, a complete chain of mentorship made me a digital marketer. We learn from others to grow together. Bashing out other marketers, being yourself a marketer can be bad for the digital marketing fraternity and hence I believe we must make a common vision to bring the entire world’s business online to make our industry crowded with opportunities that never ends.
