Beyond serving our customers as best as we possibly can, we here at WordStream pride ourselves on our thought leadership—that is, our commitment to introducing new, outside-the-box ideas that help business owners and marketers succeed in a world where online advertising changes almost every day. In fact, thought leadership is one of our core values.
Greg won the thought leadership award at this year’s Core Values ceremony.
Although this blog is certainly one means to that end, it’s far from the only one. Between whitepapers, webinars, videos, and speaking engagements, my coworkers create a whole lot of PPC-related content. And recently, four of them were recognized for their efforts!
Every year, PPC Hero (by way of Hanapin Marketing) names the top 25 most influential PPC experts—the folks who push the industry forward by consistently sharing new ideas, new research, and new strategies. Plus, in order to start generating some buzz for the following year’s list, PPC Hero also names the industry’s top 5 rising stars—the folks who are starting to make some serious noise.
I’m thrilled to say that it was an awesome year for WordStream employees. Let’s take a look at our four in-house experts!
Mark Irvine: Director of Strategic Partnerships
Mark being named a top PPC expert isn’t anything new—he was a rising star in 2015 and has earned a top spot every year since. What is new is Mark being named the number one PPC expert. That’s right—of all the incredible minds in the digital marketing industry, PPC Hero has named Mark the most influential. And rightfully so!
What separates Mark from the pack is his commitment to speaking engagements. He’s almost always on the go, sharing original ideas at industry conferences like PubCon, Hero Conf, and Search Marketing Expo. On top of that, he writes blog posts, hosts webinars, and serves our customers by constantly strengthening our relationships with Google, Facebook, and Bing.
Navah Hopkins: Services Innovation Strategist
Navah—who juggles both serving her clients and innovating new ways to serve those clients even better—is no stranger to this list either. She earned the number 25 spot in 2018, and one year later she’s jumped six spots and landed in the top 20!
Navah, like Mark, dedicates a ton of her time to representing WordStream at digital marketing conferences. In fact, I had the pleasure of attending her presentation at this year’s Hero Conf—I had no idea there was so much to know about Quality Score! In addition to her speaking engagements, Navah contributes to the blog and flexes her presentation skills with webinars.
Gordon Donnelly: SEO & Content Specialist
Of course, none of these blog posts I’m referencing would get any traction if it weren’t for some stellar SEO work on the back-end. That’s where Gordon—named this year’s number one rising star—comes into play. As a specialist in SEO and content marketing, Gordon is responsible for both writing original content and optimizing that content to rank well in the search results.
But Gordon’s talents extend well beyond the blog. In addition to giving our audience actionable PPC advice through one record-breaking webinar after another, he works hard to consistently improve the experience of our site visitors. He’s truly a multimedia talent.
Francine Rodriguez: Customer Success Manager
As I alluded to at the beginning of this post, serving our customers is the reason we come to the office every day. As a manager on our Customer Success team, Francine is leading that charge. It takes a true thought leader to consistently deliver solutions to the unique problems each customer faces, and Francine is that person.
Like Mark and Navah, Francine does a fair bit of travel—but not for reasons you may expect. Working with Parallel18—an accelerator dedicated to getting startups off the ground in Puerto Rico—Francine teaches business owners about PPC and helps them get their first campaigns going. Tangentially, she’s committed to creating online advertising resources in Spanish—something of a rarity at this point in time. That’s some serious thought leadership!
Can’t forget our contributors!
We were also excited to see a few of our regular contributors among the top 25! Congratulations to Joe Martinez, Michelle Morgan, and Akvile DeFazio, and thanks to our friends at Hanapin for the recognition!