Tech Leadership: Building a Successful Marketing Career

Join host James Sweetlove as he sits down with Loreta Tarozaite, Founder & CEO of Loreta Today and Head of Global Corporate Communications and Marketing at Phison Electronics. In this powerful episode, Loreta shares her extraordinary journey through the tech industry, revealing the strategies, challenges, and insights that have shaped her remarkable career.

Discover the unique perspective of a global marketing leader who has successfully navigated the complex landscape of technology and corporate communications. Loreta Tarozaite breaks down the essential skills, mindset, and strategic thinking required to excel in today's competitive business environment. From her entrepreneurial ventures to her pivotal role at Phison Electronics, this conversation offers an unfiltered look at what it takes to build a truly impactful marketing career in the fast-evolving tech industry.

Connect with Loreta:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loretatarozaite/
• Loreta Today: https://www.loreta.today/
• Phison Electronics: https://www.phison.com/en/

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Transcript

James: Hi everyone, this is James from the Ctrl+Listen podcast, brought to you by Octopart. Today we have a special guest for you. This is Loreta, founder and CEO of Loreta Today and the head of global corporate communications and marketing at Faison Electronics. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to have you here.

Loreta: Thank you so much, James, for having me.

James: Anytime. Just to get started, because you are across a lot of different areas, can you tell us a little bit about Loreta Today and explain what the company does and what its backstory is?

Loreta: Sure. I moved to the United States in 2003. I came from a very busy life as a TV news anchor and TV journalist, so I had to reinvent myself when I moved here and figure out how those skills could be applied. It took me a while to figure it out, but in the end I realized that at the core of what I do is communication and sharing information.

I started creating video stories for businesses with one goal in mind: humanizing those companies. Back in 2009, when I started tapping into that scene, I realized that many company leaders and employees were hidden behind corporate walls. Moving from Lithuania, my home country, to a completely different environment, I was not used to a lot of automated messages on the phone or a lot of button clicking before you get to a person. I thought, how can we show the people who are actually working in those corporations?

So I shifted my communication and TV journalism skills into telling business stories through video. That was the start of my career here. Through many years living in the United States, what I do now has built upon that storytelling, with communication being at the core.

When I started working in different organizations like Western Digital and SanDisk, and working with technology-related startups that really struggle in communicating their story, I realized that a lot of times technology is how people lead instead of humanness. I took it upon myself again to figure out how to tell those human stories better and how to communicate inside organizations better.

I observed a lot of dysfunction and many broken ways of how larger organizations were functioning, as well as how companies in the growth stage were scaling fast, but many processes and much communication became broken because of that scale and speed. Over the years I observed all these problems and realized that besides storytelling and understanding marketing, I am also very good at the operational part of the business.

Without preparation for video production, without preparation for understanding the news and information flow for national news television, you cannot really tell a story clearly. All that preparation work, all that operational aspect, was part of my DNA. I combined all of that together, and now I call myself the chief of staff with a CMO flavor. I understand the operational aspect of business, but I also understand presence.

So I solve three problems for companies: people, process, and presence. That is how all of this came together for me at this stage of my life.

James: Fascinating. You raised a good point there about the story and the human aspect, because I think especially in the tech space, if you have a fantastic product, it's really easy to lean on that and not focus on other aspects of the business and the environment. It's really interesting that you work in that space.

Loreta: Indeed. After living in Silicon Valley for about 17 years, I really got the bug for tech. When you live overseas and you hear "Silicon Valley," you can't really grasp what that means. Only after moving here and surrounding myself with opportunities to network in the tech space, to meet founders, and to work in tech as a video producer, I started realizing how difficult it often is for engineering minds to operate in terms of communication. It's difficult for them to express what they are trying to achieve.

James: Definitely. Before we get into Loreta's offerings and that whole aspect, I want to ask a little bit about your role working with Faison. Tell us a bit about what you do there.

Loreta: I lead the corporate marketing and communications function there. When I first joined Faison in 2020, the company was still in that growth stage. It's a very deep engineering company in the semiconductor industry and still in data storage. It just happened that a lot of my corporate career ended up being in the data storage industry, so I understood the market in general.

Faison was very uniquely positioned in how their business model is structured. They never saw themselves as a brand, which to me was fascinating, because any company that has been built and has reached 20-plus years of existence is a brand in my mind. How you communicate that brand outward is what had to change.

They were, and still are, in a growth stage, but they had never really invested in marketing or storytelling. Everything was at a very deep tech level. I came in and saw the operations inside. It's a global organization, and I quickly realized there were many things that could be improved. The company at that time was 20 years old and now it is hitting 25 years.

I saw a lack of presence online. I saw a lack of leadership presence as well. I saw a lack of processes inside the organization that were affecting how people work together across the two regions. I saw the opportunity to fix all of that and implement some structure around it.

I ended up building out the corporate marketing and communication function and educating both sides of the world about what that function is supposed to achieve. I introduced PR and thought leadership programs. We started being more consistent on social platforms where our audiences are. We grew that consistently over time without any ad dollars because, again, it's an engineering company, so they do not quite understand or prioritize investments into ads. Everything had to be very organic and very slow, but by being consistent, we moved the needle forward.

Every year I was able to expand the scope and set higher standards for my team. At that time it was all an external team. Over time I started bringing people in-house because as a company grows you have to think about where communication breaks again. You might have external partners supporting you at certain stages of the organization, but then it becomes too cumbersome to relay all the stories and business goals happening inside to external partners.

So I started bringing people in-house to drive certain initiatives and grow that team. From a one-woman corporate marketing show, I grew the team in-house, along with external partners I still consider team members, to about 20 people over the course of five years. Building out that structure was one of the biggest challenges because the company is deep core engineering and they were not used to seeing themselves as a brand. We had to show them what that is.

James: I love that. That's fantastic. To jump back quickly, can you tell us a little bit about Loreta Today and the primary services involved with that?

Loreta: I have my own process of how I view companies when I start working with them, and there are four pillars that make up my process. First and foremost, whenever somebody engages with me, for example someone comes and says, "Hey, Loreta, you're in marketing, so do you do social media?" No, I don't. "Do you create logos?" No, I don't.

So I have to first educate them on what I do because it's complex. I see marketing and communications as a bird's-eye view. What does a company need first? What are the business goals? I investigate that. I look at the digital landscape. I try to understand what's going on internally, so I dive deep with the leadership team and with cross-functional teams. I assess the external presence before I present any solutions.

Any social media, logos, and all of that comes as part of that understanding of the business and where the company is right now and why they called me to work with them. Usually companies think they want to fix one thing, and then we start opening and peeling the layers and we see that there are many more things broken that they should fix first before they try to achieve the marketing goal they think they need.

It is a four-step process that I normally go through. In the deep dive, I uncover all the problems. Then, in step two, we align with the company leadership on where the business priorities are and what we need to fix first. You cannot just go and start fixing everything; it's change management. You have to change people's minds. You have to change how people operate. You even have to change leadership's mindset about how to view marketing and communication.
We then design the plan on what we will aim to fix that aligns with immediate business goals. I work with teams to set goals, parameters, and metrics, and I train them to be self-sufficient in managing their own accountability, their own processes, and cross-functional collaboration.

In phase three we implement the tools. We build out the team if the team does not exist. We look at solutions and workflows that need to be fixed before we add new people, or we implement workflows within existing teams. It all moves in the direction of organizing, building structure, and making sure we have the right people doing the right jobs.

A lot of times when companies are scaling or moving fast into growth, people are tagging along because everything keeps piling up on them. They end up doing 10 roles instead of the one they were hired to do. Employees become overburdened and frustrated because they are doing so much with a limited amount of time. We have to fix that. We cannot have a graphics designer driving a communications program, or a communications person becoming a graphic designer and web developer. We have to have the right people with the right skills and roles before we add complexity.

I am all about data analytics and measuring success. I make sure the teams know exactly what they are trying to achieve. I help them set goals, and I help the leadership team hire the right people. Sometimes executives do not fully understand what marketing and communications functions are, nor should they. That is why they bring me on board.

In phase four, once we clean up the house and put some structure into the chaos, it becomes about longevity. How do we continue communicating? How do we train the leadership team to continue being present for their teams? How do we continue growing the external presence?

If there are any culture shifts, I bring in partners who are experts in culture change and leadership coaching so that whatever we fixed can last longer, not just temporarily. I am not the type of person who will come in, tell you what you need to do, and then leave. I actually work alongside and help implement what I think needs to be fixed.

James: That's fantastic. It's a very holistic approach, and I think that's very necessary for something like this.

Loreta: Yes. I can't look at it any other way. It's difficult for me to see fragments. I have to understand the big picture before I propose anything to improve.

James: I think that's a major issue in many companies: compartmentalization and silos. It prevents people from seeing where the real problems lie because you don't get the whole picture.

Loreta: Yes. Even though I lead with marketing and communications as my background, I see problems deeper in the organization. I may not necessarily have the authority to fix IT problems or HR problems, but I see how the lack of certain processes or expertise in those departments affects marketing and communications.

I have to educate leaders of other cross-functional departments on what they need to do to help the marketing department be more effective and efficient when it comes to elevating company presence externally. Everything in the organization is interconnected. Sometimes we think, "This is an IT problem," but that IT problem is affecting how emails are coming through, or not coming through, into my inbox because someone submitted a contact form and it never arrived.

One of the things that differentiates me is my background in TV journalism. As a news anchor, you have to distill a lot of information coming your way to find where the story lies before you go on air and present it. I see very quickly where things are broken just from conversations and how information flows inside the organization.

James: That makes sense, because people with backgrounds in other sectors bring specific skill sets with them. Sometimes people don't account for that when they hire. They might look at someone who has only worked in the area they're hiring for and not think about other skills that could be brought in from different sectors.

Loreta: Yes. If you work in a corporation, you have to show those other skills yourself. You have to be your own champion and showcase what else you can do. It depends on the organization. Sometimes managers don't like you venturing out into other fields because they want you to just fix that one problem you were hired for.

But I think the world is changing, and we have to be our own champions inside organizations and show that we are more than just one lane. We all bring different experiences that can add value to the company long term.

James: Definitely. I saw something on your site that I found really interesting. You were talking about rapid scaling and mentioned that it can sometimes be more harmful than beneficial. I'd love to hear more about that and what it means.

Loreta: When it comes to companies that are scaling fast, I do not mean it from the business perspective that scaling itself is bad. I mean that leaders forget that people are the ones who help them scale fast. They forget to communicate the new vision, the new direction, and how they are scaling. What improvements are they going to make?

Sometimes employees get lost. They do not know exactly what the company is trying to achieve because it is never communicated down the chain. When a company is smaller, with five, ten, or even a hundred people, you can still get by with this lack of communication. The moment it becomes 600 or a thousand people, you have to ensure as a leader that your team knows where the company is headed.

The danger is that teams are scaling and departments are hiring their own mini-supporters, but none of them really understand the full picture of what they are trying to achieve because everyone is being hired to fix small issues instead of being aligned to a big vision: here is where we are going, and here is how we all have to work together.

When you lose that communication aspect and that connection with the people inside the organization, you lose pace. Everything becomes more fragmented and disjointed because of those pockets of silos. Maybe only department leaders know what is going on, and if they are not good communicators, their teams get confused.

Getting everyone on the same page and putting the right systems of communication in place becomes very important. Executive communication programs become important. HR communication programs become important because you have to scale the reach internally, just like you scale marketing externally.

Once you grow and want more reach, you add dollars to marketing, communications, promotion, and sponsored ads. Similarly, inside the organization, you have to scale how you reach your employees and continue inspiring them to stick around.

James: That makes total sense. Back to the holistic view of things: what is the best way for companies to align sales and marketing teams, and why is that so important?

Loreta: That is always the problem: who is right, marketing or sales, in describing what kind of story? The way I look at it, sales always has the closest touch to the customer. Always.

Corporate marketing is an umbrella, and then we have product marketing teams. Product marketing teams should be closely aligned with sales because whatever products are being developed, sales will sell. Sales is also the immediate recipient of feedback from customers. They come back and say, "This feature didn't work," or, "We're struggling with customer experience," or, "We don't have enough parts to sell."

Product marketing has to respond: what are we doing? To achieve revenue goals, those two have to go hand in hand, because sales cannot sell something that does not exist yet. They have to know the timelines and deadlines of when the product is going to ship so sales can promise something to customers. That alignment is very important.

Then you have to think about how to reach new customers. What kind of funnels do we design? How do we organize our database to understand which stage of the funnel customers are in? How do we capture more? How do we create content that is relevant for all stages of the funnel?

In my view there has to be a lot of information flow between those two cross-functional teams. Sometimes it just does not happen because the mindsets are different. Sales and business development teams think, "We have to sell to generate revenue." Marketing teams think, "Who are we selling to? Tell us the problems because we need to create content, create funnels, and support your activities to garner attention."

We have to streamline the information flow between the two groups. Marketing teams could sit in customer meetings so that they hear firsthand what is going on, and vice versa, sales teams should understand how marketing can better support them.

Having common goals, understanding the customer journey, and aligning on key pillars is crucial between those two groups. That would be the primary thing I would look at: what sales is doing, what marketing is doing, and how the two intersect.

James: I'd like to bring things back a bit to your time in Silicon Valley. I know you worked with a lot of tech startups. What would you say are some key steps a tech startup could take early in its journey to ensure success later?

Loreta: Very early-stage startups rarely think about branding. Their understanding of brand is limited to, "I need a logo and a website." Many founders in tech are very technical, so they do not prioritize their personal brand either.

It's only when they have to start fundraising that they realize, "Maybe I need some PR," or, "Maybe I need to post something on LinkedIn," because at that point you have to have some presence, some external authority for investors to check you out.

I would say one of the first things they should do is be present online and hire a PR manager to help with article pitches or interview pitches—something that helps them start building their authority at the beginning rather than waiting until the company is ready to fundraise.

In order to receive funds, investors have to trust you. They do searches on you. They look at what you've been talking about externally. If you are quiet and your LinkedIn does not even have a picture, that does not build trust. If it has a dog picture or a cat picture instead of you, that does not build trust either.

You have to be more present and think about yourself as a leader in the industry rather than just someone building a product. There is a reason why you started building that product. You can share perspectives and ideas and even drive conversations based on your ideas and solutions externally. You have to think beyond the logo and beyond just the website.

James: Definitely. I wonder if this ties into something I discussed with a recent guest about accessibility being a key thing people overlook. If you go to a company's website and you can't find basic information or contact details, that's going to be hugely detrimental to retaining or gaining new users.

Loreta: Yes. These days customers research everything possible first, looking at reviews and all sorts of information before they call you. You have to give them what they need up front to close that gap between sales and their investigation. If you don't catch them at the right moment, you lose them.

On websites today, which still surprises me, many still do not have videos. I started my video-producing business in 2010, and even now many websites do not have videos on them. They do not have founders introducing their stories. They do not have that human aspect.

Yes, the picture is nice and the write-up is great, but people want to see real people. Especially right now in the AI age, when a lot of things can be faked, you want a real human connection to someone you know exists, not an avatar but a real person, a real founder, a real team introducing themselves and talking passionately about what they are building. People will start getting hungry for that human connection in our AI-based world.

James: I think so too. I definitely agree. To shift slightly back to technologies: how would you say a B2B technology company in a high-growth sector differs from other clients in the need for visibility and brand authority?

Loreta: B2B is all about trust. It is a much longer relationship-building cycle in B2B than in B2C. In B2C you can go viral and already capture a big part of the market. It's a slightly different emotional connection.

In B2B you have to exude authority. You have to be trustworthy because the stakes are bigger in the end to do business with you. Customers in B2B are not looking for fluff. They are looking for foundational things.

How is your customer experience? What are salespeople saying in meetings? Is it the same message they just heard from the CEO in an earnings call? Is the story consistent? How do you show up externally? Are your visuals consistent or does everything look out of place?

All of that indirectly affects the impression potential customers or partners receive about you as a business. It's different from B2C. B2C is a jungle: you don't know what will happen because there are so many people you have to influence with a product. You have to connect on a different emotional level in B2C than in B2B.

James: Yes, that definitely makes sense. It is a much more emotional decision with B2C. I agree with that. What do you see in your world? How do you shape the company's connection and trust-building in your role?

Loreta: I think a lot of it comes down to what the community says. Within the electronics sector there are strong communities. People talk and express very honest opinions. Businesses look to those communities and ask, "What are people saying about your product?"

Does the general community think it's a good product? There is more to it than features. What is the company like to work with? What are the features like? Is the pricing effective? Pricing is a big factor for businesses as it has to fit into the budget. There are many factors, and I think there is more to consider than in B2C.

James: How do you help grow the communities? Do you go into specific platforms where the business exists? What are your priority communities?

Loreta: Obviously places like Reddit are important. There are huge communities in that space. You also have spaces like YouTube. Many people go to YouTube to find professional business possibilities and opportunities. LinkedIn as well. I think LinkedIn is a huge one.

I think for B2B, YouTube and LinkedIn are underutilized, in my opinion, because those are platforms where leadership can garner a lot of attention.

On YouTube, from my experience, it's difficult to get attention in B2B because there is not a lot of virality. The content is more educational and white paper–like, especially in tech. You're building trust that, for example, your lead engineer is talking about a recent feature that might affect how a data center is cooled.
It is different, and sometimes it's difficult to sell the ROI aspect on YouTube—why we should do more video content. People say, "We only had 50 views," but those could be very high-quality views versus quantity and virality.

James: I definitely agree. As you said, it's that trust building. It's showing you have expert knowledge in the area you operate in. A white paper is a great example. I've found that sharing a well-written white paper from someone within your organization makes people say, "That's interesting. They're working in that space. They really know what they're talking about," and they might reach out.

Loreta: Yes. So we share similar pain points.

James: Yes, I think so. AI was something you mentioned earlier, so I'd love to talk about that a bit. I saw that you mentioned in a recent talk that AI can be an amplifier for structure, or it can lead to chaos. What is the differentiator there, and how do you direct things in the right direction in the AI space?

Loreta: I feel like everyone right now is in AI craziness. People think, "We can't be left behind," and there's a fear of missing out. Sometimes I feel the same way. I think I should be improving a lot of things with existing AI tools, but I feel like I can't keep up with how many tools are out there, and it's hard to distill.

Many companies are jumping on this bandwagon. In marketing and communication, you can benefit a lot from AI. However, there is also a danger. You cannot just start pushing AI-generated content and assume you are adding value. Anything you do with AI has to bring value, in my view, to the audience—externally or internally.

When companies start putting AI on top of broken processes or workflows, it just continues breaking. Then they ask, "We added an AI feature. Why is it not fixing this problem?" Because it was already a problem that needed to be fixed before you added AI. Many company leaders do not understand that because they hear "AI is here, we have to do things with AI, let's subscribe to something and implement it."

They don't think about the fact that employees have to adapt how they operate. They have to learn the tool. They have to rework their workflows, and it becomes extra time for them because it is not part of the current process. That's where frustration kicks in.

When I talk to leaders in my presentations, I say I come in to get your company AI-ready. I help fix workflow problems, process problems, people problems, and presence problems. Then we can start adding an AI layer on top because there are more streamlined ways of operating, instead of adding AI onto a broken system that will continue breaking.

That is the education that needs to happen because companies are moving too fast. There is a lot of frustration, and we expect humans to just flip a switch and know what they're doing when an AI tool comes in. I struggle with that myself. I know logically we need efficiencies improved by AI, but I know I need the right people—implementers—who will drive and own that piece of the process or tool. I'm not going to be the one learning every tool out there to implement as well.

James: We're coming up on time, so I want to ask about one more topic: brand authority. It's a relatively recent term. How has it become so crucial in building trust and driving momentum, and where did that shift come from?

Loreta: I can't speak to when that shift happened, but authority is tied to trust and to humanness in my mind. If you are not afraid to show up, that builds more authority and more trust in your company. If you are hiding behind walls and you don't want to address difficult questions from customers, consumers, or journalists, that means there is a lack of transparency in your organization.

Authority is about how you move the industry. How do you position yourself as a leader where people look to your organization for a comment or for an innovative way of approaching a problem and coming up with solutions?

That authority building extends primarily through people. Is your leadership team present? Are they being invited for interviews in publications, podcasts, or TV appearances? You as a leader, by extension, help build brand authority because you as a human show up. That helps the organization feel more "out there"—being mentioned more often in media or being seen in different keynote presentations or industry events.

That helps with the perception of authority, which then equals, "I trust them. They've been around. I hear about them." There is a perceived trust-building that happens, and in the end that hopefully translates to sales.

James: I read a couple of interesting papers about this topic recently. What I found interesting was how each generational group determines this. Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and millennials put a lot more value than older generations on a brand's public image, on what that brand champions cause-wise, and on whether they find that brand trustworthy. They care less about the product or the price and are willing to pay more if they know they can trust and believe in that brand.

Loreta: Yes. Newer companies that are coming to market often already have that mindset because they need to relate to audiences and customers who think differently. They need to resonate.

They already come with that preconceived way of operating. If you take a company that's 30 years old, with leadership that never changed, they will operate completely differently and will never resonate with millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha because they are just not that style. It is difficult to break something old and ingrained in the culture and make it completely new without really cleaning out the house.

When times change and a company does not adapt, they can become extinct. You just have to adapt.

James: Definitely. Wrapping things up, if people want to get in touch or contact you about working with you, what's the best place to do that?

Loreta: I hang out on LinkedIn, so you can get in touch with me there or through my website. It's going to be revamped with new content. I still have the presence checklist on it that you can download and use to assess your company or your own leader presence. After the website is updated later this fall, I will take that document down and introduce new ways to engage.

James: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been absolutely fascinating speaking with you.

Loreta: Thank you, James. Likewise.