Liz Carter on Leading in the Tech Trenches

The Gist

• Unexpected beginnings. The journey from english major to CMO.
• Staying ahead in digital. Carter’s approach to an ever-changing marketing landscape.
• Success in collaboration. A multimillion-dollar campaign strategy.

As chief marketing officer at Reputation, Liz Carter oversees the company’s global marketing organization, which includes demand gen, product marketing and corporate marketing functions. She is an experienced marketing leader who has built and managed high-performing teams that deliver results across demand gen, communications, corporate events, field marketing and thought leadership.

Previously, Liz built the field marketing and corporate events function at ServiceMax and managed various aspects of corporate marketing, communications, and demand gen. Prior to joining ServiceMax in 2011, Liz was the senior event marketing manager at SuccessFactors where she developed corporate event programs like SuccessConnect, SuccessFactors’ annual user conference and supported SuccessFactors’ goals of high growth and IPO through events. Liz holds a B.A. in English from Vanderbilt University.

We caught up with O’Neill for a five-question Q&A on her role as CMO in our latest edition of the CMSWire CMO Circle series.

Editor’s note: This transcript is edited for clarity.

An Unexpected Journey to CMO

Jennifer Torres: Hi, I’m Jennifer Torres reporter with CMSWire and this is CMO Circle, our chance to get together with a different CMO and ask them a few questions in a Q & A format. Today I’m very excited to welcome Liz Carter, chief marketing officer at Reputation. Welcome Liz.

Liz Carter: Hi. Thank you, excited to be here.

Torres: We’re very happy to have you and we’ll get right to the first question. So, what inspired you to a career in marketing? How did you get your start in this industry?

Carter: Well, I kind of fell into a career in marketing, and that’s how I like to put it. I got out of college and frankly, I was an English major. I moved to Atlanta with a bunch of girlfriends, and I ended up taking a job at a tech company in Atlanta. They needed event support because they were losing an employee. It was a team of three and they were losing someone on their team.

So, they were looking for a person with a lot of experience, but they wanted to hire a sort-of contractor to make do during the time that they were they were trying to fill this role. And so, it was event marketing — and I didn’t even know what that meant. But I like to say that it’s really what grounded me in the sort of overarching world of marketing, right? Running events and being a part of the team that builds out a tradeshow experience or a kickoff experience for a company is a way in which you really see all the elements of marketing and the cross functional relationships that marketing has played out. And it was so fun.

In the very beginning, running these events, learning about what it meant to work with the product marketing team or the field marketing team or the PR team, or how to manage all these different aspects for one event. And that’s really what inspired me to just keep learning and growing in my career and expanding sort of the knowledge that I had. And so, I really credit sort of starting in that event world as how I found a love for marketing.

Related Article: Unconventional Beginnings: From Investment Banking to Marketing Mastery

Leading in the Tech Trenches: Staying Ahead in the Digital Marketing Marathon

Torres: Great. Question number two. How do you approach the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and emerging technologies? For example, generative AI is all the talk these days. There are all kinds of new tools coming out. How do you keep up?

Carter: Oh, my goodness, it is hard. I mean, I guess what I would say is, I read, and I try to learn. I try to learn from my peers and places like LinkedIn where your peers are posting about things that they’re doing and today’s marketing technology companies that are in the martech space are constantly wanting to educate marketers, right? I mean, that’s what they’re there to do.

So, there’s a ton of content out there, and so I think for me, it’s a matter of trying to stay up with what’s going on. It’s partnering with vendors that I believe are on the cutting edge or have an idea of how to continue to leverage new technologies like generative AI in their solutions that they provide to us. And, you know, as a company, we’re having a marketing mid-year off site, and I think we’re going to talk about AI as a marketing team. What should we be looking for, doing, or using — and sort of just bringing the team together to talk through. So, I feel like trying to stay up with the content and then really making it an environment on my team to sort of bring new ideas all the time.

The Making of a Multimillion-Dollar Campaign

Torres: Can you provide an example of a successful marketing campaign that your team executed recently? And what were the key factors that contributed to the success of it?

Carter: I’m a little over six months into my role at Reputation, so, I have been getting my arms around all the various aspects of the marketing team that we have here — the way in which we go to market as an organization and what our customers are doing with our products and solutions.

When I got here, one of the things that Reputation does really well is they put together these reports for specific industries where our customers come from, and so what I understood is there was a healthcare report that was about to come out that our team had been working across collaboratively with our data science organization around what’s happening in the healthcare industry when it comes to reputation management and customer experience.

And so, what we did differently was we really worked across the company to educate everybody on what the report was going to say, how it was coming together, and what that meant for new customer acquisition, as well as what the value of that was for our current customers. We put together not just the content of the report, but actually a sort of multichannel approach to getting that report out there. And then having a very cross functional way of doing outbound and inbound marketing with that report.