10 Marketing Entrepreneurs & Influencers To Follow In 2022

Marketing is one of the integral parts of any business. If you want to be successful, you need to be able to market your product or service effectively. People can’t buy something that they don’t even know exists.

Further, the quality of what you are offering only matters if you can effectively show it to potential customers. While a bad product can be successful with good marketing, it’s a lot harder for a good product to be successful with bad marketing. This is especially true in the digital age we are living in. Global retail e-commerce sales amounted to $4.28 trillion in 2020, and most marketing is done online.

To stay on top of the marketing world, you need to keep up with the experts in the field. So, here are some of the top marketing entrepreneurs and influencers to follow in 2022.

Jimmy Donaldson, Founder of MrBeast Burger

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is a video content creator, businessman, and philanthropist. He is an expert at viral marketing and has managed to build an enormous social media following of more than 200 million people across social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. At the age of 23, Donaldson has already managed to create a massive media empire that is generating well over half a billion interactions a month, and he is using his reach to further grow his brand and other ventures.

In December 2020, Donaldson launched MrBeast Burger, which is a virtual fast-food brand that offers restaurants a concept to run out of their kitchen to make MrBeast Burger food that is only available for delivery via food delivery services. With this concept, MrBeast Burger is now serving more than 1,000 locations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Further, he co-created Team Trees and Team Seas, which are fundraisers dedicated to protecting the environment. Team Trees has managed to raise more than $20 million to plant trees, and Team Seas has raised over $30 million to clean up the ocean.

Gary Vee, CEO of VaynerMedia

Gary Vaynerchuck, commonly known as Gary Vee, is an accomplished marketing entrepreneur. He owns the communication companies VaynerX and VaynerMedia, which offers advertising services to Fortune 100 companies. Influencer marketing is among the services provided by Vee’s media agency. Further, he is a partner in VaynerSports, which is an athlete representation agency, Resy, which is a restaurant reservation app, and Green Street, which is a marketing agency.

After he graduated from college, his marketing skills helped him successfully run his father’s liquor store and increase its sales tremendously. Vaynerchuck renamed the liquor store Wine Library and launched a webcast named Wine Library TV on YouTube. Nowadays, he has millions of followers on social media platforms, and he was an early investor in most of them, including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Uber, and Venmo.

Valón Thorpe, CEO of Mystique Integrated, Managing Director of M-One Productions

Valón Thorpe has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the West Indies and is the CEO of Mystique Integrated, which is one of the top full-service marketing agencies in the Caribbean. He founded the business in 2013 and has since worked with various big name companies, such as Campari, Scotiabank, Digicel, KFC and Heineken, to further their impact across the Caribbean.

Thorpe also is the Managing Director of M-One Productions, which is a full-service video production company that the entrepreneur successfully cofounded. Additionally, he is credited with conceptualizing the Jamaica Rum Festival, which is a massive annual festival led by the global brand Appleton Estate.

Neil Patel, CMO of NP Digital

Neil Patel is the co-founder and CMO of NP Digital, an award-winning performance marketing agency. He is also a co-founder at Crazy Egg, Stride, and Hello Bar. Through marketing, Patel has helped big companies, such as Airbnb, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, NBC, and Amazon, grow their revenues. The marketing expert has a huge online following, with his blog having over 4 million monthly visits.

Patel created Ubersuggest, which is a popular SEO tool. There are many who consider him to be a top marketing entrepreneur, and he is frequently covered by media outlets.

For example, President Obama recognized him as a top entrepreneur under the age of 30 while the United Nations recognized Patel among the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35. Further, Forbes listed him among the top 10 entrepreneurs, and The Wall Street Journal considers Patel to be among the top online influencers.

Patel speaks at major growth marketing conferences and also shares information on marketing in his HubSpot column and his blog.

Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko

Brian Dean is an established SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko, which is a popular and award-winning marketing blog. He is an entrepreneur that had to be resilient before success finally came his way. Dean had created five online businesses, but they failed. Not one to give up, Dean created the Backlinko site in 2012 and specialized in the personal finance niche. He used it as a platform to share the lessons he gained from his experience.

Since then, Dean has achieved success and made a name for himself. He helps businesses apply SEO strategies that will grow their operations. The strategies are tried and tested, and they can help businesses get more traffic and higher rankings in search engines. The main source of income that the Backlinko site generates comes from the SEO courses. Forbes listed Baclinko.com as a top “blog to follow,” and Dean has been referred to as a “brilliant entrepreneur” by Inc Magazine and as “SEO genius” by the Entrepreneur magazine.

Maryam Mahjoub, CMO of Verasity

Maryam Mahjoub has 20 years of marketing experience with a focus on software technology in security, health-tech, and blockchain. She has a Master’s of Science in Healthcare Leadership from the University of Denver as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Currently, Mahjoub is the CMO of Verasity, which is a blockchain-powered AdTech company that is known for its patented proof of view technology and its esports streaming platform, VeraEsports.

Before Mahjoub started working at Verasity, she was the CMO at the Cardano Foundation, which reached a valuation of around $100 billion in 2021, making it a top five cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Additionally, Mahjoub was recognized as one of the top marketers in blockchain by Flipside Crypto and worked with names like HL7 and ConsenSys.

Daria Bukatova, CBDO of Ancore Strategy

Daria Bukatova is the former Marketing Director and now CBDO of Ancore Strategy, which is a Swiss consulting and communications firm that offers strategic advice and expertise to technology startups in crypto, blockchain, and fintech. Bukatova has a Master of Science in Management with a specialization in entrepreneurship and project management from Lomonosov Moscow State University. Further, she has extensive experience in brand licensing and marketing as well as the global media and entertainment industry.

Before Bukatova joined Ancore Strategy, she managed content licensing in Latin America and the Middle East for Riki Group. Additionally, she oversaw the brand licensing program of Masha and the Bear across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for Animaccord. Recently, she was a speaker at the World of Web3 summit in Dubai and has been managing NFT collaborations with big brands for Ancore.

Donald Miller, CEO of StoryBrand

Donald Miller is the founder and CEO of StoryBrand, which is a marketing and consulting business that helps companies understand customer needs to refine and optimize their marketing efforts. Miller has extensive experience with public speaking and his books have spent more than a year on the NYT Bestsellers list.

The accomplished author puts a big focus on clarity, and StoryBrand is no different. The company has already consulted multiple billion-dollar brands and thousands of smaller businesses and helped them increase their revenue with its SB7 framework.

Tim BRDNIK, Founder of Internet Made

Tim BRDNIK is the founder of Internet Made, which is a metaverse fashion brand and creative hub looking to enable users of metaverse worlds to create, purchase, and trade Ethereum-based Internet Made fashion NFTs. Having initially gotten involved in e-commerce in 2017 through his dropshipping business, BRDNIK went on to found a fashion brand in 2019.

However, with the limited success it experienced, BRDNIK moved on to found a performance marketing agency that has generated more than $8 million in sales in less than a year. Now, the merely 20-year-old entrepreneur is taking his learnings across e-commerce, fashion, and marketing to establish the digital fashion brand Internet Made.

With Internet Made, BRDNIK is looking to utilize all the positive aspects of digital fashion, such as easy verifiability, better sustainability, fewer supply chain issues, and higher margins, to facilitate a lower barrier for entry as well as higher earnings for aspiring designers in the fashion space.

Rok Božič, CEO of Fuell Media

Rok Božič is the CEO of Fuell Media, which is a leading multinational web3 marketing agency for various digital industries, such as crypto and NFT, DeFi, e-commerce, and more. Fuell Media puts its focus on viral growth, engagement, and customer acquisition and is always looking to get the best deals for its clients. For example, in December 2021, Fuell Media sold NFTs worth over $200,000 with a marketing budget of just $10,000, netting its client a 20x leverage.

Currently, the firm is working with various so-called ‘’alpha’’ groups in the NFT space, as well as some of the biggest influencers for an upcoming digital fashion brand. Božič believes that creating the best possible customer experience, a close-knit community, and keeping followers asking for more is the most important thing when it comes to marketing, because in the end a project’s success directly correlates to its community strength.