Breaking the Marketing Mold: Blaise Lucey Of Silverpush On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Effective marketing has to be creative, personal, and relevant, and human like never before.
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 Blaise Lucey.
Blaise Lucey is the VP of Global Marketing at Silverpush, where he leads marketing across more than a dozen countries and focuses on building the brand and product identity around the world. Previously, he led brand and product marketing teams at companies such as Lumen, Roku, Criteo, and Bitly.
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 got my start in marketing right out of college when I joined a content marketing agency that specialized in SEO copywriting. I had an English degree and I loved to write, so this was an introduction to the power of writing for brands.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
Attention saturation.
Audiences spend less time than ever exploring different channels and looking to educate themselves proactively. You can measure that by the decline of downloads, web traffic, even corporate social traffic. We might call it the death of inbound. We’ve all got twenty tabs open, ten unread texts, eight Slack messages waiting for us. We only have so much time to engage with a marketing message.
People pay attention to people, not brands. The influencer and creator revolutions are here — and they’re here for B2B just as much as for B2C companies. Effective marketing has to be creative, personal, and relevant, and human like never before.
I’ve pivoted my strategies from traditional inbound tactics like website, content marketing, and paid social to curated, in-person events where we can actually engage with our buyers and build a relationship that goes beyond the screen. Now, the trick is to create a customer journey that goes from those in-person touchpoints to online and back again.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
Too many companies are stuck in a mentality of Web2 era tactics. There’s a ton of investment in measuring metrics, but no one stops to ask if those metrics even matter anymore. Entire teams are dedicated to optimizing funnels that aren’t matched with modern buyer behavior. It’s easy to get downloads, but hard to prove that they did anything for the business.
It’s important to take a step back and look at who is really making the purchasing decisions among your target audience. What information do they need to make that decision? Where are they going to find it? How do you make sure that your solution seems like a necessity to the next evolution in their business?
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
I used to think in terms of brand-level marketing, where I would focus on creating the brand identity through content and digital marketing. Today, I think in terms of sales-level marketing. Because if sales isn’t engaged with the marketing materials, you’re essentially marketing to just other marketers — whether internally or externally. Any leads that come through the funnel will end up with a sales rep who’s totally disconnected from the process and the marketing message.
By building the bridge between sales and marketing, you build trust across teams and understand what’s happening on the ground in everyday conversations with your audience. The most powerful marketing is always the stuff that features your customers and shows the power of your product.
When I started at Silverpush, we overhauled the case study and sales enablement programs to focus on what we were hearing in the field and the results we had seen from loyal clients. We also focused a lot of investment on growing existing accounts through experiential and loyalty marketing.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
Silverpush grew 50% over the past year and we’ve seen about 14X return from our marketing investments last year overall. To me, this is a testament to the human connections we’ve made with clients and partners all around the world. From the top-down, we prioritize relationships above all else in both marketing and sales. Through our mix of account-based and experiential marketing efforts, we’ve come to understand the specific needs of every client and, most importantly, understand how our solutions can help their current challenges.
When you bring clients into your story, they stay loyal and they’re willing to test out new products. They’re also much less likely to churn to the competition.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
You always have to make sure that you’re delivering something valuable up-front to your audience. That could be new research, a new tactic, or a new solution that’s extremely relevant and immediately useful to their business. In an ecosystem where attention is saturated, the marketing has to show the power of your company for the individual client. They don’t have time to research or engage or, half the time, take calls or respond to emails.
“Resonance” at this point is all about relevance.
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?
There’s a big difference between primary buyers and business leaders. The biggest marketing investments always end up going to leader-focused activations, whether digital or experiential. The entire economy of most events in the B2B world is over-indexed on leaders. While one-to-one meetings with leaders can be extremely valuable, most leaders are far too busy and, honestly, numb to the average sales pitch or marketing message. Especially in mature markets. Leader-focused activations like panels, roundtables, and thought leadership programs are full of people who have heard it all before.
So far, these kinds of exclusive executive events have driven the softest return on investment. Account-based and buyer-based events that focus on practice and operations, rather than theory and thought leadership, are much more effective in discussing current challenges. A bottom-up approach can get you in the door much faster than a top-down approach within an organization. It’s also a lot more cost-effective!
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”?
1. Fix Your Internal Communication. This might seem counter-intuitive, but the biggest miss today, especially among distributed teams, is making sure every team understands the direction of the company. A regular all-hands meeting between sales and marketing, with leaders being very clear about priorities, can make a world of difference and open new relationships internally and new opportunities externally. Slack or Teams channels that are regularly updated are a requirement, too. There’s always room for improvement when it comes to internal comms.
2. Stop Caring About the Funnel. We live in an ambient information ecosystem. Every audience has different levels of knowledge about their challenge, your product, and the industry. You need to meet them within the right environment, not the right stage of buying. Spend less time optimizing a catch-all funnel and more time creating specific, solution-focused materials.
3. Rethink Experiential Marketing. The best way to get someone’s attention is to get in front of them in real-life, not online. How can you connect with buyers in-person? What do you want to tell them? How do you create touchpoints that drive them to further explore your product and your company? The only best way to beat attention saturation is through real-life relationships.
4. Understand the Clipping Economy. Too many companies invest in expensive video assets, post them to YouTube, and forget about them. Figure out a way to distribute your best video assets in smaller chunks, throughout the year. It’s not about more, it’s about more distribution for your best stuff.
5. Don’t Lose Your Brand to AI. The only way to stand out is to be unique. AI is flattening the speed to market as fast every brand’s identity. Make sure to oversee AI production and set best practices in place to ensure you don’t suddenly look and sound the same as everyone else.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
Everything starts and ends with approvals. The biggest challenge in transforming your operations will always be internal buy-in. Marketers often think that the reasons for their decisions are obvious. But to non-marketing teams and the non-marketing minded, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every company operates in silos, so make sure to bridge the silos and be very clear about why it’s important to test and learn new strategies and approaches.
If you’re doing something for the first time, find examples of companies that are doing variations of what you want to test. If you’re doing something and it’s already worked, always start with the numbers up front.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
It depends on the goal of the marketing strategy, but my quick rule of thumb is still a funnel at the end of the day:
- Awareness: social media likes, follows, engagement / web traffic
- Consideration: email sign-ups, email opens / downloads / form fill-outs
- Conversion: sales-won opportunity with previous marketing engagement
Silverpush is a revenue-driven organization, so we focus down on a single number to prove out marketing initiatives: return on ad spend based on marketing influence. So if an account grows in value or a new client signs up that touched a marketing event or engaged with a digital touchpoint, we attribute it back to marketing.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
I personally think AI has already hit a plateau, at least when it comes to marketing. The key isn’t quantity. It’s quality. You have to respect your audience’s attention or they won’t engage with your material. With social media and email marketing, that’s a given. You don’t want to post multiple times a day or email multiple times a day. Even if there’s infinite content, distribution is still limited.
So if we pan out over the next decade, it’s still going to be a game of attention. But I think we’ll only see new ways to build better relationships between brands and consumers.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
Always keep listening to the market — and when you’re not sure which direction to take, use customer feedback as your source of truth.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
We are going to continue to brand our events and think through new formats that are interactive and rewarding to our customers and partners — hopefully creating a community in the process that can continue to learn and grow year after year!
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
Follow me on LinkedIn!
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About The Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Blaise Lucey Of Silverpush On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.