Financial Narrative at Money 20/20: In conversation with Karna Crawford, CMO, Marqeta

In this insightful discussion, Karna Crawford, CMO at Marqeta, joins Ashley Jones of Financial Narrative to share her journey from leading iconic consumer brands to driving innovation in fintech marketing. Karna delves into her leadership philosophy, strategies for cutting through a crowded market, and how Marqeta is transforming the payments space with data-driven approaches.

More conversation is below the video.

Tell us about your role and what you're doing now

I have the privilege of caring for the marketing organization at Marqeta, leading global communications. It's been kind of an interesting career shift for me. I've spent my entire career leading transformation in the marketing space for very iconic consumer brands. Think JP Morgan Chase, Ford, Coca-Cola, and Verizon. And this has been an amazing opportunity to take all of my data-driven marketing expertise and apply it in the Fintech space.

Our industry is at a point of transformation, which sounds odd since FinTech in and of itself was transformational. But as we look at this pivot towards FinTech distribution, especially in the world of embedded finance, there's a transformation there as well. Marqeta, at our core, is about driving responsible transformation of the payment space, which means we are constantly changing, evolving, and innovating.

How do you find new ways of reaching your audience?

As a marketer, my job is to really empower my teams to challenge the status quo. And so we're constantly thinking about change. To me, the playbook for marketing at its foundation isn't what changes. It's the "how" of the executional side of that. How do we get smarter with our target? How do we find new ways to reach the very unique audiences that we may have in the B2B marketing space? How do you break through in a different way? So the way that we keep up with that change is to stay connected to culture, and then create a culture that is rooted in constantly evolving and changing to stay ahead of the space.

How do you lead in a way that empowers your team?

I find team empowerment to be very interesting because as a leader I’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years of my career rooted in transformation, driving change in marketing organizations. What that often means is you're reskilling and upskilling amazing talent to learn how to be prepared for what's next. So you're constantly striking a balance between needing to be more hands-on to help people learn how to do something new. But at the same time giving people the empowerment to just go out and try.

As a leader, the most important thing that I do is try to set a clear vision and provide a clear view of what 'great' looks like. That allows the team to have something to utilize, to go and try on their own, make choices and decisions on their own. And then also having a good feedback loop to help them see what was great about the things they tried and what they may want to do differently. But doing so in a way that's supportive. I will be honest, as a human being, I have not been perfect at it every single time. But what makes me a strong leader is my ability to listen and understand how to keep doing that in a way that inspires my team.

I'm one of those people who always wants to be there to help, to be there to prevent people from failure. And I have had to remind myself constantly as a senior leader, you have to remove the safety net sometimes and give the team the opportunity to fall.

How do you cut through the noise in a crowded market?

Every company has news to share, especially at events like Money 20/20. So what I really talk to my team about is, while Marqeta is a large company with a strong market cap, our marketing function and our communications function needs to be very scrappy. And I've talked to my team about punching above our weight - starting from the story first, and then figuring out how to scale that story through social and earned media to create a moment out of it. And only then, figuring out how the press release, or event marketing plays into that.

So we start from the story and be creative. 

Then we think about how am I going to make "three out of one" for everything that we do? And that really has been a transition in the way we think about our marketing and in particular our comms, to be social first and creative led. Because as a company matures and as your marketing matures, it becomes increasingly difficult to be able to break through. And this is a great way to do it.  

How do you prove marketing ROI to leadership?

One of the most important things I've done with my communications team is to realize it's a lot easier to show the ROI and impact, particularly of communications, when you've stopped thinking of communication as metrics. It is not necessarily about successfully how many tier-one interviews did you see, or how many impressions of your press release pick up. But rather, what was the inner relationship of that to leads and traffic and the downstream engagement? That makes it easier to connect the dots between a press moment and ROI.  

When we introduced our State of Payments report, we thought about the release of that core report all the way through the funnel. From the point of getting press pickup and social to using it to garner leads and drive people through the funnel. By connecting those dots, we were able to attribute a lot of our performance directly to the press that went around one aspect, which we could then tie to value and therefore demonstrate in a much better way the value of marketing to the business. It's a really challenging thing when you think about it in isolation. When you start to connect it to the actual business outcome, then you really start to realize the power.

How do you manage the relationship between marketing and sales teams?

We identified the importance of this relationship very early on. At its core, we are only successful with what we do as we enable the sales team to do what they do. And so we introduced something called 'The Triad'. The Triad brings together three critical groups: the sales organization, the marketing and campaign organization, and then our sales development organization, who are kind of the intermediary between all of the great campaign and marketing activities happening, they are the people in the middle doing direct outreach and getting customers into the funnel. 

When we introduced this Triad, we created new routines for how they are cross-populating who they want to talk to, what messages we are sending out from a marketing perspective, and how that connects to the messaging for the sales organizations. And then having a strong feedback loop, where they're connecting every single week around who we talked to, who did we move, what did our demand base have to offer, and more. And that starts to create real, tangible connections between the three versus purely just relational. And that has fundamentally changed how that group goes to market and the power of the connection between them. 

How do you build brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty is all about engagement and that holds true in the way that we both compel people to be customers and then how we retain those customers. For us, that engagement comes from very high touch, high-value exchanges with our partners. We bring strong thought leadership like our most recent State of Credit report as well as custom experiences that are really rooted in the insights that our customers don't have as much access to but find a lot of value in. I've built an outstanding analytics organization and insights team to be able to pull together more thought leadership to add value to the problems that our customers are trying to solve and put us in a place where we have more reasons to connect beyond the transaction or beyond just a renewal. 

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