MTI: Hi Cristy, welcome to the latest MarTech Top Voice Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey.
Cristy: Marketing is always what I wanted to do. I knew from the time I was in high school that marketing was right for me – and not just marketing, but I was really interested in B2B technology. I had a feeling that’s where I could make a big difference as a marketer, because as a creative person, maybe you stand out more in a slightly specialist market than in some of the more conventionally glamorous sectors a lot of people are targeting. So before I was CMO at impact.com, I was Vice President of Marketing, and before that I was Vice President of Global Marketing at Celtra and Rakuten Advertising.
MTI: How does impact.com transform the way businesses manage and optimize various partnerships, and can you tell us more about it?
Cristy: impact.com helps businesses easily create, manage, and optimize all types of partnerships to acquire customers effectively. Our offering is unique in that we provide a unified platform that connects brands, publishers, and communities with award-winning products, including Performance for affiliate marketing, Creator for influencer marketing, and Advocate, a customer referral solution.
Customers increasingly trust third-party validation and seek recommendations from trusted sources before making a purchase. impact.com helps brands partner with affiliates, creators, content publishers, customer advocates, other businesses, and more, who meet these consumers where they are with authentic commerce content, reviews, and recommendations.
We support over 225,000 active and productive partnerships for more than 4,000 of the world’s leading brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oreal, Fanatics and Levi’s.
Our platform addresses the challenge of fragmented data by integrating performance metrics from multiple sources into a single, cohesive platform. This empowers teams with streamlined reporting and deeper, more actionable insights, offering a holistic view of campaign performance to drive smarter, data-informed decisions.
impact.com is the only business that offers a comprehensive, unified platform that combines the power of affiliate marketing, influencer marketing and customer advocacy or referrals. This purpose-built platform is available for all sizes of businesses, from the Fortune 100 to individual users. Our award-winning technology is widely touted as the best in the industry and we continually innovate by creating new features, tools and products to meet the needs of modern marketers.
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MTI: Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any business. Can you share some of the strategies you use to generate good, qualified leads?
Cristy: It all starts with content. Aim to create content that is helpful before you expect to see conversions. I have always benefited from the “give, give, ask” approach to lead generation. The goal is to offer your prospects something of value so they can learn more about products and services organically without a hard sell approach.
It’s critical to ensure you’re reaching the right audience. Spend time speaking with clients and prospects; research to understand who your personas are and invest in truly understanding who you’re marketing to. The next step is to test messages and see what is moving the needle. Once you have all of the ingredients, then you can start channel level strategy and execution.
MTI: How can broader, more contemporary partnerships enable CMOs to enhance brand growth and drive revenue in the era of partnership-led growth?
Cristy: That is part of what makes partnerships such a strong option – they allow companies to grow revenue by reaching prospects and customers they might not otherwise reach. Influencers, affiliates, ambassadors, and publisher partners are uniquely positioned to reach a brand’s target audience when they are weighing their options and looking around. These partners don’t just boost awareness, they drive a lot of revenue.
Managing partnerships well—there’s a lot to it, but at the top level, it comes down to organizational agility, capitalizing on a variety of partnership models, including the newest, most contemporary ones, and leveraging technology to optimize the opportunity.
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MTI: For marketing and sales teams at the nascent stage of implementing and deploying new AI technologies to drive growth goals: what tips would you share?
Cristy: AI can do an immense range of things, but one place to start is to remember what it can’t do, which is to replicate human emotion and connection. If your goal, like ours, is to reach real people how they want to be reached, there’s an element of authenticity that has to be there, and AI won’t give you that.
But we are leveraging artificial intelligence to supercharge labor-intensive processes. For example, AI tools can help marketers identify the right influencer by evaluating how well they align with your brand’s values, and they can perform deep searches to identify a creator’s other brand connections and check their prior activities, which is really important for reducing risk. We can also identify best-performing content, dig for influencer fraud, monitor performance, and create in-depth analysis of audiences – it’s an incredibly useful tool for us.
MTI: What essential skills and qualities do you believe modern CMOs must possess to thrive in today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape?
Cristy: You need to learn how to delegate, because you’re not going to be able to do everything yourself when you’re a CMO. And in reality, some of what you are doing as a CMO isn’t specifically marketing but broader business activity: finding paths to growth, working on product development, and more generalized business needs. So you need to know how to make data-driven decisions, oversee digital transformation efforts, and ensure that marketing technology seamlessly integrates across the organization.
Marketing leaders are in a strong position to prove the revenue contribution of their efforts, and you can do that through partnerships. So you need to think like a CFO, but the pay-off is, that’s how you win the big marketing budgets, and it’s how you get more freedom to do the creative things we know make a big impact.
MTI: If you had to share five predictions of AI-powered martech and salestech: what would they be?
Cristy: Attitudes and expectations of what to automate, and how, are going to be nearly as important as the technology itself. On the one hand, you can free up affiliate managers to spend more time with their partners doing what matters, instead of getting caught up in time-consuming tasks AI could do better and faster. But it’s also about knowing what not to try and automate. Influencer marketing is the most human channel out there, and large elements need to remain human.
Segmentation will be very important – personalizing messages according to behavior, interests, and demographics. Also on my personal wish list is an AI tool that can provide strategic recommendations on program strategy. Which placement opportunities will drive the most impact for my product launch? Which partners should I contact to drive 10% more sales this month? I’d like to see that, and I won’t be surprised when we do.
MTI: What advice would you offer to an emerging CMO looking to follow a path similar to yours, considering your journey to becoming a highly accomplished leader in the field?
Cristy: For me, it was very important to be a generalist and learn a lot of different facets of marketing. When you have that general grounding, you have a better sense of what good looks like, and you are in a stronger position later on to fill the specialist roles on your teams.
Another thing, from a career-planning point of view, is to not stay in the same place for too long if you know you’re not growing in that role. If you feel stuck in a role and you’re not getting the mentorship or the growth you need, move on to a place that will help you with those things.
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MTI: Four social media marketing fundamentals you’d leave us with before we wrap up?
Cristy: Of course! Here’s my take…
#Fundamental 1: Community. It’s all about community, it always has been. If your brand is using social media as a broadcast channel it’s not set up for success. Being community-focused prioritizes long-term relationships, fostering trust and loyalty, which in turn, builds a bigger community.
#Fundamental 2: Social communities hold all the power in the relationship. That’s why partnerships are so valuable. Brands get to tap into those communities authentically through strategically aligned partnerships with influencers, creators, and brand ambassadors.
#Fundamental 3: Always be testing. Social communities create continuous change and your social media marketing efforts need to mirror this.
#Fundamental 4: Adopt a growth mindset in your approach; failure is useful. Not every piece of content or strategy will win in organic or paid social media. In fact, the data from poor performers often offers more insight into what your community of followers really wants than the high performers.
Thank you so much, Cristy Garcia for sharing your insights with our audience. We look forward to having you again with us.
For media inquiries, you can write to our MarTech Newsroom at news@intentamplify.com
About Cristy Garcia
About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading partnership management platform, enabling businesses to easily create, manage, and optimize all types of partnerships to effectively acquire customers. impact.com offers a unified platform that connects brands, publishers, and communities with award-winning products including Performance, for affiliate marketing, Creator, for influencer marketing, and Advocate, a customer referral solution. Customers increasingly trust third-party validation and seek recommendations from trusted sources before making a purchase. impact.com helps brands partner with affiliates, creators, content publishers, customer advocates, other businesses and more, who meet these consumers where they are with authentic commerce content, reviews and recommendations. impact.com supports over 225,000 active and productive partnerships for more than 4,000 of the world’s leading brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oreal, Fanatics and Levi’s.
