The 5 secrets of marketing leadership – Thomas Barta

Thomas Barta, Founder of The Marketing Leadership Masterclass
Read time: 4 minutes Where should marketers be focusing for success in 2023? ChatGPT? Prices & inflation? More digital? In this week’s webinar, the founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass, Thomas Barta, took to the TMM stage to share some secrets and practical tips to help you become a more influential and persuasive marketer. Watch […]

Read time: 4 minutes

Table of Contents

Where should marketers be focusing for success in 2023? ChatGPT? Prices & inflation? More digital? In this week’s webinar, the founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass, Thomas Barta, took to the TMM stage to share some secrets and practical tips to help you become a more influential and persuasive marketer.

Watch the session back here, or read on for the 5 key takeaways on how to become a better marketing leader.

👏 You are already a marketing leader.

Forget about B2B/B2C acronyms, push aside whether you work for an agency, in the retail industry, or for a SaaS company, if you’re in the business of ideas, thoughts, and creating change, then you are a marketing leader.

🧗 Getting people to back your ideas and agree to them is the hard part.

Business politics are always tricky to navigate, and as marketers, it can often feel like our ideas hit a brick wall when we try to get involvement from other departments, like sales, finance, and the board. So, you need to consider what those people are thinking about, and work out how to shape your plans to fit with their business priorities. You can do this by thinking about your leadership skills.

📈 Marketing leadership skills are the biggest driver of marketing success

In the largest study of its kind, Thomas found that more importantly than what industry a marketer is in, their technical marketing skills, their gender, or the company they work for, a person’s marketing leadership skills are the biggest determiner of success.

The best marketers don’t just know how to do good marketing, they know how to make stuff happen. Great marketers know how to lead their bosses, colleagues, and teams.

Here are Thomas’ 5 tips to becoming a great marketing leader yourself:

⭕ Expand your value creation zone

The value creation zone is where your customer’s needs meet your company’s needs.

A great marketing leader is constantly thinking about how they can add more value to everyone involved.

⛺ Join their camp

You can only influence people if they believe you’re part of the group yourself.

Invest time and energy making up the trust gap between the work you say you’re going to do and the impact that it actually has on the people around you. Think about the language you use – keep it simple and clear that you understand what everyone else is doing.

🍔 Feed your firm forward

CFOs are so often viewed as the most powerful people in a company, despite not owning the business or working on the product or service directly. They don’t own the business, but they do own the numbers and the data on which parts of the business are best/worst performing. Their worth comes in sharing that data. And you can do the same.

You know what your customers want, because you have access to them. Customer data is hugely powerful, if you play it right. It’s not about sending reports to people, i’s about figuring out which data is important.  


Some of the best data Thomas has seen, has come in the shape of customer testimonial videos. He explains how bringing videos, complaints and photos of real life customers is immensely powerful and establishes you as a person worth listening to.

🔍 Know how to zoom in and out

With new technologies and tools hitting our Linkedin feeds every day, how do you ensure that you’re keeping your skillset up to date without getting lost in all the noise?

Thomas explains that it’s important to be able to zoom out, to look at the bigger picture, before jumping on the trend. First ask yourself – what’s my top 2023 marketing goal? Then, once you have your answer, zoom back in, and ask how the specialism, technology or tool can help you achieve that goal.

📱 Become your own influencer

There are a lot of half-baked marketing opinions on the internet. Some of which, Thomas believes, would be best placed in a bin. He explains how to be a great marketer, you need to start unfollowing the Binfluencers ™ and use data, small-scale experiments, and research to create your own marketing truths. Ask:

  • Why people are buying from you
  • What makes people buy more
  • Why people keep coming back
  • Why people are leaving your organisation
  • Where the market is headed

The answers to these questions will be individual and unique, and as a result, probably not on Facebook or Linkedin. But, with your answers to these questions, you’ll be able to create a set of principles that can guide your strategy and ultimately, help you achieve great success as a marketing leader.