Elina Vilks entrepreneurial journey began at a young age. At just 12 years old, she demonstrated her sales prowess by leading the highest candy sales in her class, all to fund a field trip to an adventure park that her parents couldnt afford to send her to.
She didnt stop there. After graduating college and pursuing two masters degrees, she held many marketing leadership roles at innovative tech companies, including Yahoo, Meta, PayPal, and WooCommerce. Bringing over two decades of experience in leading high-performing marketing teams, Vilk joined Hootsuite as chief marketing officer in August 2023.
Hootsuite is a SaaS marketing firm that exists to unlock the value of social media relationships.
Since joining Hootsuite, Vilk has honed in on the pain points of social marketing managers: proving the value of social and managing the sheer volume of tasks that they own. To address this, under her leadership, Hootsuite launched OwlyWriter AI in 2023, a tool that helps simplify content creation and copywriting for social marketers.
She also spearheaded Hootsuites Social Media Career Report, which highlighted the realities of working as a social media marketer (SMM). Her creative campaign for the report, which leveraged the companys first LinkedIn creator campaign and engaged influential SMMs to share their personal stories and takeaways from the report, generated impressive results: nearly $1 million in influenced pipeline, over 1.2 million impressions, 5,600 link clicks, and more than 18,800 engagements. She also played a pivotal role in Hootsuites acquisition of the leading social media listening platform Talkwalker.
Elinas journey from a candy-selling schoolgirl to a leading marketing executive exemplifies her entrepreneurial spirit, commitment to relationship-building, and dedication to supporting and empowering others in the social media marketing industry, said her colleagues. She empowers her team through clear vision, goal-setting, and a focus on innovation.
Vilk has been recognized as a two-time honoree in the women to watch awards, presented by Remodista, and has helped earn Hootsuite top honors from customers, including the best relationship award and the most loved product award in 2024 from TrustRadius.
In a word, Vilk said the most important characteristic of successful leaders is resilience. Try, try again, if you fail try once more. Leaders need the ability to pivot, the ability to hold it together when it feels like the earth is shattering below. The ability to consistently succeed over time is not luck, she said. I proudly fail every day. Leadership is climbing a mountain with slippery terrain; resilience is the only path forward.
