Looking to make a greater impact in your marketing role? Look no further than this insightful "ask me anything" with Tara Robertson, CMO of Bitly.

In it, Tara shares her top tips for:

Get ready to be inspired and take your marketing leadership skills to the next level!

How can you influence a more positive culture when you take on a new marketing leadership role?

When you’re joining a new team or company, it's important to understand the existing culture. You can't just walk in the door and start dictating what the new culture is going to be. Instead, take the time to listen and learn what’s already working and what’s not.

When I first join a team, I typically do a listening tour – it's in equal parts about building out what the team needs now and figuring out how to build the right experience for the team that you want to become. Culture plays such a huge part in that.

During those listening tours, I'll always ask the following questions:

  • What do you love about working here?
  • What do you not love about working here?
  • If you were to wave a magic wand and fast forward a year from now, what would you like to see?

Often, a lot of things come out of those conversations that impact what the day-to-day company culture looks like.

Once I’ve gone through the listening tour, I bring this data back to everyone and share it. For example, in our case, people loved working with their colleagues but disliked the chaos and lack of a Northstar. They also wanted more time to get to know each other better.

We need to work together to solve these issues, and these changes have to come from the bottom up. Communication is key here. The more you can be transparent and communicate with your teams about the things that aren't working, the better you’ll be able to solve those problems together.

A tangible way to do this is by creating team committees. Suppose we identify the need for more recognition within the team. In that case, we can find champions who care about recognition and want to advocate for change.

They can bring new ideas to the team and help roll out initiatives like a quarterly MVP award, where the team votes for the most valuable player in the department, or other events that are important to them individually.

What tactics do you use to influence change in your organization?

I can't emphasize this one enough: communicate your strategy over and over and over and over again. That’s how you bring people along for the ride. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d also recommend picking up a copy of The First 90 Days.

It sets up a great framework for bringing people in and communicating the changes you're making.

Even after those first 90 days, there are a couple of things that I'll consistently do. One is a monthly report – not a report with a whole bunch of slides or words. Sometimes I'll do a video, for instance.

It’s about finding ways to communicate what the marketing department has been able to achieve and what our focus for the next quarter is going to be.

When it comes to communicating with my team, I often do a weekly email and share that with the leadership team as well. That way, people know not just where we're spending our time, but also how things are going more generally.

The world is hard right now and we all have different feelings about it, and that's okay. Talking about it is how we show up as one at work.

Communication in general is an area that I would say is often undervalued. It’s important not just to communicate but to over-communicate, and to make sure you’re sharing the right things with the right people.

What I’m saying to my CEO or my CFO is very different from what I'm saying to our Director of Sales or the go-to-market team, for example.

The CEO gets spreadsheets and plans thrown in his direction every single day. To cut through the noise, I have to distill everything I share with him into the most important things he needs to hear in the day-to-day to be able to say, “Aha, I got it!”

Early on in my career, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from my husband, bless him.

I was really struggling with my leader at the time, and he was like, “You do know that your job is to make her look good, right? Your job is to make her show up and be a rockstar. That's how you're a rock star. She shouldn't know everything you're doing – that's why she hired you.”

He was absolutely right.

And that's our job with the CFO and the CEO. If you're a marketing leader, your job is to help them present to the board all the awesome things that marketing is doing as well as all the things that aren't going very well and all the areas you need support in.

If you've got big revenue goals that you need to hit, but you don't have the team, the software, or the capacity to hit those goals, you have to be loud about it – but do it in a way that speaks to them.

If I'm talking to our CFO about unit economics, LTV to CAC, and what’s going to drive the right efficiency, I’m speaking his love language.

If I tell him I need this headcount because that's going to help me achieve my goals, he’s not going to be so interested. It’s the same thing with the CEO. Know who your audience is, distill your message down into the most important points, and always over-communicate.

When you’re building a high-performing team, what are the top things you look for, and what are the red flags?

Obviously, we need to hire for skills, but I hire for chemistry first. I think when you’re building a high-performing team, they’ve got to leave their egos at the door, so the biggest red flag is somebody coming in with a big ego, or a mindset of, “Ooh, that's not my area!”

That's not the right mindset. I want somebody with a growth mindset. And then you’ve got to hire people different from you. We can’t have everybody be lookalikes. For instance, I tend to be more of an extroverted outside thinker.

I'm not the kind of analytical person who wants to dig into spreadsheets and run a bunch of formulas and find all the data. My VP of Acquisition, on the other hand, is probably the most analytical person I've ever met. He's incredible, and I'm learning from him every single day.

It’s the same thing with diversity and inclusion. That is unbelievably important. When we think about who we're hiring for our team, we have to think about being inclusive and making sure that we've got diversity of thought in the way that we're going to market.

Outcomes are also critical. Every single marketer that shines is somebody that speaks in terms of data to a degree. If I'm hiring a brand marketer, I want that brand marketer to be able to tell me that through branding we’re going to drive this many impressions and this much awareness, and this much direct traffic.

That goes for creative too. People often say you can’t put KPIs on a creative team, but I love it when creative teams want to know about the revenue that their designs have influenced. Having that curiosity about data and being outcomes-driven is also really important.

Do you have any advice for people who are changing roles and still trying to execute their current responsibilities during that transitionary period?

That can be a really tough situation, but it’s part of learning and growing, so let me try to distill it down into a couple of tips.

The first thing is to be realistic about the responsibilities you can take on in the time available to you, then have an honest conversation with leadership about that so you don’t end up trying to do two jobs at once.

For example, if you're moving from a product team to a marketing team, you'll want to have a group discussion with the leadership of both teams to make sure you’re allocating a fair amount of time to both areas.

That way, you can deliver on both responsibilities without feeling stretched too thin. It's also important to agree on a specific deadline for the transition and get it in writing so there's a clear start and end date for everyone involved.

Have you ever had to deal with a misalignment between marketing and sales when it comes to investing in the brand? If so, how did you overcome it?

Interestingly enough, I haven't run into that problem much with sales; I generally run into it in the budgeting process. It's something that I hear a lot of marketing leaders tend to struggle with because it can be hard to quantify a brand and the investment that you need to make in it.

However, throughout my career, I've been lucky enough to work for organizations that understand the impact that brand can bring, so it's always had its own line item in the budget.

In Bitly’s marketing team, our focus is on acquisition marketing and revenue marketing, rather than brand initiatives, and my alignment with sales is different than with other departments because of this. In fact, I’m currently in the process of rethinking our pipeline meetings and lead system with my sales partner.

The challenge with brand initiatives is that it can be difficult to quantify their impact on revenue. During budgeting, the CFO might ask you how you’re going to turn brand investments into revenue this year, which may not be the right metric.

To make sure everyone’s on the same page about what brand can achieve, it’s important to figure out what works best for your business and make sure internal teams are educated on that.

What works best for us at Bitly is connecting our brand in our brand investments with our performance marketing investments and then looking at the overall unit economics for the department. That’s how we do all of our budgeting and make sure we’re speaking the CFO’s language.