Breaking the Marketing Mold: Mark Emond Of Demand Spring On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Content: The biggest AI use case so far in marketing has been around ideating, creating, and atomizing content. Marketers are using AI to repurpose and optimize content for various platforms, to automate content syndication workflows, and for analytics for AI-driven content refinement.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Emond from Demand Spring.
As Demand Spring’s founder and CEO, Mark has a tremendous passion for helping marketing leaders transform their revenue marketing practices, enabling them to be strategic leaders in their organization. Over his 25 year career, Mark has been an executive and strategic marketing leader advising high growth organizations and Fortune 500 brands.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
I studied business (and Sports Marketing) in university, and then spent 17 years as a B2B marketer in the technology industry before starting Demand Spring. Marketing in the tech industry beginning in the late 90’s with the dot.com era and then into the SaaS era was such an exciting time. I learned so much through successes and failures and participated in an amazing evolution of the B2B marketer with the growth of the MarTech stack and the ability to connect with B2B buyers in a highly personal way at scale. I had an opportunity to work with some amazing organizations such as Cognos and IBM and to learn from so many talented marketers.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
The life of a B2B marketer has changed so dramatically during my career. In the mid- to late-90’s we really were about brand and sales support. The growth of technologies like Marketing Automation and ABM platforms have allowed us to understand where in the buyer journey someone is, what role they play in the buying process, and to deliver highly personalized content to them. With B2B buyers now engaging interdependently with marketing and sales channels throughout their buyer journey, we have become essential to driving the sale at every stage. As a marketer that has always sat on the revenue marketing (or demand side, rather than the brand side) this change has enabled my career to flourish, and to ultimately create Demand Spring 12 years ago as a consultancy that automates these marketing processes.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
It’s really because the buyer has embraced new ways of engaging. B2B buyers today want a friction free, highly personalized experience — largely through digital channels. The next massive change that B2B marketers must embrace, and have already started to, is AI. Generative AI now enables us to drive significant productivity gains in marketing, to break down the silos that exist across marketing, and to deliver even more personalized and engaging content to buyers in really innovative ways.
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
When I was on the client-side in the technology industry, our team was a really early adopter of Marketing Automation. We were Eloqua’s first million dollar client in 2005. By 2007 we had over 1,400 inbound nurture streams and were using advanced analytics to understand and map the sequencing of different touch points to various target personas to drive conversion.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
Prior to implementing Eloqua, our marketing team had very little impact on pipeline creation. Two years after implementing it, we were initiating 30% of the new pipeline. It had a massively positive impact on our relationship with sales, and the strategic posture of our marketing team. It was also my inspiration for starting Demand Spring — to bring the magic of automation to other B2B marketing teams.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
Even with new strategies and new technologies it always comes back to the fundamentals of marketing. Who are you serving and what do they want and need? If you can understand that, and serve them content that educates and engages them, you are going to be successful.
Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?
I think the nature of marketing is that we are constantly trialing, measuring results, and optimizing. Even at Demand Spring, we have continued to improve the marketing strategies we design for our clients and the way that we automate them using AI and marketing automation technology. An example is buyer journey and persona research. We do a lot of this work for our clients and have always been really great at the research and documentation of how their buyers buy and what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at every stage of the buyer journey. What we discovered a number of years ago though was that while our clients loved the work we did in this area, they struggled to operationalize it across their marketing and sales teams. Now, when we do this work for clients we include a workshop specifically focused on how to take it from insights and recommendations to how do you implement it into your marketing campaigns and sales plays. It has become much more impactful. Now we are infusing AI technology into our buyer journey work to get even more precise in our understanding of buyer personas and their buyer journey.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
We are huge believers that B2B marketers should now be embracing AI in a big way. Marketing Automation was hugely transformational, but it’s now 20 years old. AI will be the next massive “platform” — driving marketing innovation, productivity, and the customer experience for the next two decades in our estimation. So, I will share 5 ways marketers can use AI now to engage audiences.
- Content: The biggest AI use case so far in marketing has been around ideating, creating, and atomizing content. Marketers are using AI to repurpose and optimize content for various platforms, to automate content syndication workflows, and for analytics for AI-driven content refinement.
- Search: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly dominate search results, the SEO landscape is rapidly evolving. AI can drive on-page and technical SEO audits and optimizations. It can automate high-quality backlink prospecting and outreach. It can perform content gap analysis and topic clustering for SEO. And marketers can perform real-time SEO strategy adjustments based on AI insights.
- Social: Brands can significantly enhance their social presence through AI-powered personalization and thought leadership. It can automate social media content calendars, and post optimization it can create and execute thought leadership content strategies for executives and thought leaders, and enable cross-platform social media analytics and trend forecasting.
- SDR Productivity: Many brands have started leveraging AI to optimize their sales development productivity and lower the cost of customer acquisition. Teams are using tools like Clay and Tiga.ai to conduct deep research on target accounts and contacts at scale, identify buying signals, discover hidden insights from long form content like SEC filings, and deliver warm outreach based on buyer insights and behaviors.
- Workflow Automation and AI Agents: One of the most exciting areas is agentic AI, which helps unite and automate siloed marketing processes, to create a more seamless customer experience.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
The biggest challenge is always change management. As marketing organizations increasingly adopt AI for example, the biggest concern that we have seen is bringing their people along. Reskilling and upskilling them. Getting people comfortable working within modified business processes. Understanding how they can partner with the technology to improve outcomes.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
When it comes to AI, there are four main measures that most CMOs we speak with are looking for: 1) Improved customer experiences, 2) Increased pipeline and revenue, 3) Improved productivity, and 4) Increased innovation.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
We believe we are at an inflection point because of AI. Marketing Automation is now over 20 years old, and it has delivered tremendous value. But, there still exists many problems that the current MarTech stack has been unable to address — disparate data, siloed marketing processes, manual tasks, and an inability to properly serve the buying centers that comprise B2B sales today.
We believe the next 15 years of B2B marketing growth will be powered by the next level of “super-automation”, delivered by AI & Generative AI.
In this new world, AI will automate workflows across marketing and sales to deliver truly integrated customer experiences. It will deliver on the promise of personalization at scale — in messaging, images, tone, and channels. It will assist sellers and SDR teams by automating the non-selling tasks that take up the majority of their time. And it will drive innovation and productivity like we have never seen before — freeing up marketers to do what they do best — be creative; be strategic; and be brilliant problem solvers, addressing buyers’ needs.
That future is already here. According to our AI in B2B Benchmarking Study conducted earlier this year, 79% of B2B marketers are already using AI or Generative AI. We are helping visionary CMOs drive competitive advantage by moving from employee experimentation to organizational transformation.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
Some CMOs we speak with are uncertain or even skeptical about using AI. That’s okay. Others believe that it has the possibility to create tremendous strategic advantage, right now. Those are the ones who believe what we believe. As I said before, B2B marketers have made tremendous progress in engaging with buyers and aligning with sales over the past 20 years. But many challenges still exist. Data and marketing processes and teams are still far too siloed. AI agents address this problem. Generative AI scales personalization at a level we have never seen before. It serves to significantly reduce costs and improve productivity in areas such as sales development and content creation. And if for no other reason, using AI to optimize for search in an LLM world is a must for organizations to be acting on now.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
As you may have guessed from previous comments, at Demand Spring we are all in on AI.
We are working with CMOs today to audit the current use of AI within their marketing organizations, align it with their marketing priorities, and update their operating model to drive innovation, productivity, and exceptional customer experiences.
The challenge for many CMOs is better understanding how and where to use AI. We are helping them with services in the following areas:
- Optimizing SEO in an LLM World
- Ideating, creating and atomizing their content in a deeply personalized way at scale
- Using AI-assisted selling applications to make their SDRs more productive and less costly
- Deploying workflow automation and AI agents to break down marketing silos across business processes
- Elevating their brand’s social presence through AI-powered personalization and thought leadership
- Reskilling and upskilling their team with AI prompt training
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
Thanks so much for talking with me today. For anyone who wants to learn more about what we do and how they can advance their marketing processes and performance with AI, please visit our website at demandspring.com.
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur and Thought Leader with over 25 years of business experience. He has founded, operated, and exited multiple companies and now builds into a handful of high impact CEOs. Chad has launched multiple online communities, including a recent leadership development platform, and also serves as a strategic advisor for Authority Magazine’s thought-leader incubator program.
To learn more and connect with Chad visit: chadsilverstein.io
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Mark Emond Of Demand Spring On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.