At a time when social media is reshaping the entire customer journey, Alicia Johnston is uniquely positioned at the intersection of this transformation as a marketing leader at Sprout Social. As Vice President of Customer & Integrated Marketing at a global leader in social media management and analytics, Johnston leads a team that spans the full customer lifecycle — from acquisition of new customers to engagement with network partners to helping customers succeed.
Johnston’s journey to marketing leadership began as an AmeriCorps volunteer helping high school students navigate college access. The experience taught her how to craft compelling messages, connect with diverse audiences, and maintain a customer-first mindset. She joined Sprout Social during its startup phase and has been instrumental in the company’s growth into a well-recognized brand that recently celebrated its five-year IPO anniversary. Throughout her tenure, she’s held roles across communications, employer brand, content marketing, and now customer and integrated marketing, which has given her a unique cross-functional perspective to leadership.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, she shared with us her insights on the evolving role of social media in the customer journey, the future of integrated marketing, and the importance of understanding change management.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
There are a few marketing podcasts I enjoy, but I gravitate to books and podcasts that focus on people leadership and building high-performing teams. One of my favorites is Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, which focuses on leading teams in high-growth companies. Johnson shares her personal stories along with perspective from other leaders. She offers practical, engaging exercises for leaders and teams to explore as they grow. Change is a constant in this environment and it’s inspiring to learn from the wisdom of someone who’s been there before.
How are you and your team currently using AI?
I want my team to be able to deliver the best customer experience possible through all of the work we do. That means they need time and space to be creative, strategic and customer-centric, which is where AI comes in. AI tools are helping us create efficiencies and remove toil from people’s day-to-day. We use AI to aggregate and synthesize large volumes of information, generate initial concepts for campaigns, webinars or content, and even speed up internal processes like onboarding and knowledge transfer. I think of AI as a partner and amplifier, helping each member of the team build on their existing strengths to deliver better results for our customers.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
Call me biased, but social is becoming the epicenter of the entire customer journey. With the rise of creator marketing, social search, and social customer care, people are increasingly using social for product discovery, to purchase and through ongoing engagement with brands. The days of social being in a silo or only viewed as a communications channel are in the past. To keep up with where our industry is headed in the next few years, marketers need to develop fluency in using insights from social to shape stronger results across every channel and customer-facing initiative. I often hear that marketers want to have more of a seat at the table, and this is how. In leveraging social for business-wide strategic foresight, creating memorable brand experiences and developing customer trust, marketers will play an even larger role in impacting the bottom line of their organizations.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
I took on a new role at the beginning of this year, so I’ve had the opportunity to dive deep into an area of the business, Customer Marketing, that I haven’t explored as much in the past. I’m enjoying a new level of partnership with our Customer Experience leadership team as we envision how our collective work can transform the customer journey. Our goal is to evolve our existing programs to become more highly personalized, tailored journeys that seamlessly blend digital and human-led experiences across every channel. Ultimately, this work will support Sprout in engaging and growing our customer base by increasing retention and delivering more value. We’re still in the early days but I’m excited for the path ahead!
What’s the most pressing business challenge you’ve faced in the last year and what have you done to solve it?
Audiences’ attention is becoming increasingly difficult to attract, given the breadth of channels, news updates and AI-generated content capturing their screen time.
We’ve been exploring what this means for integrated campaign performance over the past year and we’ve evolved our thinking on channel mix and investment. Despite the headlines on the effectiveness of traditional marketing channels, they do still work, but we needed to invest in following our audience’s attention. That meant making a much larger investment in influencer marketing. We focused not only on social-first activations but incorporating creators, their content and their insights into nearly all of our content, event experiences, research processes and more.
We’re seeing a richer tapestry of lead and pipeline generation through these efforts, and honestly, it can be a lot of fun! It’s inspiring to work with influencers who bring a wildly different perspective to your work and industry, and that prompts a lot of new creative thinking even after a partnership ends.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
An underrated skill for marketers is change management. While it’s important to be adaptable, curious, and proactive, leaders have to bring others along on the journey. Our world and our field are evolving rapidly, and our team members all experience these changes differently. Practicing impactful change management requires intentionality, an ability to find the opportunity in challenging situations, and a deep sense of empathy — traits I’ve seen in every great leader I’ve worked with.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
“Answer what they’re going to ask, before they can ask it.” When I was working in PR, my manager at the time gave me that advice for working with both executives and media. Beyond those groups, though, this advice really encapsulates the job of a marketer: to know your audience so thoroughly that you know exactly what’s needed to make your message land. That applies to leadership as well — providing the information your team needs, sometimes before they know they need it, to ensure they feel prepared, capable, and confident in new situations.
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
I love getting out into nature and doing something tactile in my time off. That might be a walk along the Lakefront Trail in Chicago, a backpacking trip on the Tour du Mont Blanc or teaching a friend how to make sourdough. Pottery has also been an energizing hobby; it’s helped me find the joy in creating, without needing to be particularly good at it.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
