Leaders

What led you to foray into marketing? Tell us about your professional journey in the field of marketing.

I am an engineer by degree but a writer at heart. After graduation, I faced a health setback and skipped campus job offers. When the universe intervened, a friend suggested trying a writing platform, Elance. Within two weeks, I landed three clients earning far more than I would expect without an IIT background.

I jumped in fully and even became the first Indian mobilizer for Elance, helping others see the potential of the gig economy and earning in U.S. dollars from home.

Working in copywriting projects soon led me to tracking results, testing variants, and adding surveys, long before I knew it was called conversion rate optimization. Over time, I evolved from pure writing to strategic, long-term marketing, though my love for writing never faded.

Having worked across various roles, what key areas of expertise have you developed as a marketer?

Two of my biggest strengths as a marketer are seeing the bigger picture and building strong relationships. Too often, marketing is treated like a checklist of tactics, but real impact comes from understanding how every lever connects to the company’s growth model, things like CAC, LTV, how quickly you recover acquisition costs, and how marketing builds revenue pipelines, not just leads. That perspective takes you from being a junior marketer to having a real seat at the table.

The second strength is relationships; about 80 percent of my wins have come from knowing the right people, being able to tap into trusted networks, and creating content that truly resonates with our ideal customers.

Introduce us to Convert. What is the core vision of the company?

Convert is an A/B testing and personalization platform built for companies that prioritize privacy, businesses committed to ethical data practices, avoiding manipulation, and respecting their customers’ trust. However, Convert is more than just a tool; it’s the embodiment of our CEO Dennis van der Heijden’s vision to turn a business into a force for good.

Through a unique one-to-one model, every dollar our customers spend, helps plant trees and fund climate-positive projects. Our growth directly mirrors our impact on the planet. While sustainability is at the heart of our mission, we are also expanding our efforts into other areas, including diversity and inclusion, ensuring that the positive change we create reaches far beyond the environment.

In your opinion, what are the fundamentals of building an effective marketing campaign?

First, don’t think of marketing as just a collection of campaigns. Treating campaigns as isolated efforts will never allow you to build the discipline to learn, improve, and create the next level. Marketing works when you see it holistically, each initiative stacking on the last to amplify the end goal.

The goal shouldn’t just be “get leads”. Traffic and leads are upstream metrics; the real focus is on downstream impact: whether that’s educating your ICP on a critical problem, building awareness with 50 qualified enterprise accounts, or turning a single stakeholder into an internal evangelist. Not every campaign directly ties to revenue, and that’s fine; branding and education often pave the way.

The key is to know the bigger blueprint. Research deeply, talk to the target audience, and understand exactly what impact you want to create before launching anything.

What challenges do marketing leaders face in the current business climate? How do you navigate through these roadblocks?

The biggest challenge right now is noise, especially with AI. While AI can boost productivity in niche cases, for marketers, it’s often creating more disruption and clutter than real value. My role has become about consuming as much polarizing information as possible, as on one side, people claim AI will change everything; on the other, those dismissing it entirely. I synthesize these extremes to find the middle ground, preparing my company for a future where the reality, as always, lies somewhere between the hype and the dismissal.

How is the marketing landscape evolving? Which industry trends will create a significant impact moving forward?

Marketers will need to evolve into true full-stack professionals to stay relevant. The traditional “T-shaped” model, going deep in one area and knowing a bit about the rest, won’t be enough. With AI handling parts of the work, one still requires hands-on experience across all layers of marketing to quality-check output and ensure they are genuinely impactful.

Secondly, full-stack marketers should have two critical skills: systems thinking, seeing exactly where each campaign fits into the bigger business puzzle, and design thinking, crafting customer experiences with intention. As these frameworks are applied, one’s professional taste sharpens, giving them the instinct to spot what will work. That instinct will make a marketer valuable not only to AI-first companies but to any business aiming for meaningful, effective marketing.

Trina Moitra, CMO, Convert

Trina Moitra is the Chief Marketing Officer at Convert, a privacy-first A/B testing and personalization platform designed for businesses committed to ethical data practices and customer trust. With a forward-looking approach to marketing and building trusted networks, she champions the idea that future marketers must be full-stack professionals with systems thinking and design thinking, creating impactful customer experiences.