Alisa Hammond, Senior Marketing Manager at Deltek, shares insights from leading full-funnel marketing programs across B2B and SaaS organizations. She discusses aligning brand, demand generation, and conversion strategies through audience-focused marketing while exploring AI, SEO/AEO, and automation. Alisa also highlights the importance of collaboration, experimentation, and psychological safety in building innovative teams and driving sustainable growth.
Welcome to the interview series, Alisa Hammond. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?
Hello! I’m Alisa, and I am a marketer, millennial, and mom from Michigan. I’m coming up on 11 years of experience across the full digital marketing mix: paid search, SEO, social, email, content creation and promotion, CRO, and analytics. I’m passionate about what I do, and that passion is typically fueled by cold brew and sour candy!
I graduated from Michigan State University with a Marketing degree in 2015 and kicked off my career at Plante Moran as a Senior Marketing Consultant. The role gave me incredible exposure to a wide range of industries and marketing tactics and built a foundation that deeply shaped how I think about campaign strategy and delivery. It’s also where I discovered my passion for B2B marketing specifically, which has been my focus ever since.
After five years at Plante Moran, I moved into social media management at LLamasoft. This shift helped me transition into the SaaS space—the industry I was most eager to be in—and I joined Deltek shortly thereafter in December 2020, where I have been ever since. As a Senior Marketing Manager at Deltek, I’ve had the chance to lead global, full-funnel SEM programs; manage significant paid media budgets; and launch CRO strategies and platforms. I’ve recently shifted to my current focus, which is supporting and helping scale Deltek’s video content strategy. I also write and optimize website content for SEO/AEO, which has helped bring together my creative and analytical passions.
You’ve led full-funnel marketing programs across multiple channels. How do you align brand awareness, demand generation, and conversion goals?
My approach always starts with the business goal—what are we trying to achieve, and how does marketing ladder up to it? From there, I work backward to define what each stage of the funnel needs to accomplish to move prospects toward conversion.
The key to alignment, in my experience, is building every tactic and content package around where the audience is in their buying journey. That doesn’t mean abandoning consistent branding or core messaging. What it does mean is being intentional about the role each stage plays and tailoring the experience accordingly.
A prospect who has never heard of your product is in a fundamentally different mindset than someone who has been in your nurture stream for six months. At the top of the funnel, I lean on organic social, SEO- and AEO-informed thought leadership, ungated content, and community engagement to build awareness and drive discovery. As we move down the funnel, the focus shifts to higher-intent tactics: retargeting, paid search, email nurture programs, landing page CRO, and sales enablement—all designed to convert engaged audiences into qualified leads.
The thread that ties it together is measurement. Each stage has its own KPIs, but I’m always looking at how they connect—whether awareness efforts are feeding the right audiences into mid-funnel programs and whether those programs are producing pipeline that converts.
“A prospect who has never heard of your product is in a fundamentally different mindset than someone who has been in your nurture stream for six months.”
Tell us about your most memorable experience as a marketer.
One of the most formative moments in my marketing career was attending Digital Summit and hearing Seth Godin speak firsthand about storytelling and trust. Sitting in the front row for that presentation left a lasting impression—his thinking on how brands earn trust through authentic, consistent narratives continues to shape how I approach my work. His books and talks remain a go-to source of inspiration when I need to reconnect with the why behind what I do. That experience also reinforced how meaningful storytelling can create stronger connections and influence the way audiences perceive and engage with brands.
How do you see AI and automation changing digital marketing, analytics, and campaign optimization over the next few years?
AI is transforming our industry in ways that are already tangible, and I think the changes we haven’t yet anticipated will drastically overshadow the ones we have.
What I can speak to is how it’s already reshaping the way I work. I’ve used AI to assist me with things like real-time bid optimization, analytical forecasting, automated reporting by tactic and channel, SEO and AEO optimization, and content reviews. Those repeatable, process-driven tasks are exactly where AI shines—it makes marketers faster without sacrificing quality, and it frees up something we all have too little of: time.
For me, that reclaimed time goes toward the work I find most energizing. designing video and blog content, ideating new campaign strategies, and pursuing special initiatives that have a real, measurable impact for my team and the business. AI handling the repetitive lift means I can show up more fully for the creative and strategic work that moves the needle.
On the analytics and optimization side, the shift feels even more significant. AI-assisted tools are getting better at surfacing performance patterns and suggesting or automating adjustments in real time. That changes our job from pulling together disparate reports from multiple platforms to interpreting signals and making strategic calls, which is a much better use of talent.
Where I think we need to stay thoughtful is around brand voice and trust. The efficiency boost is real, but AI doesn’t inherently understand the human context around things like pain points or complex thought processes. Trust me, people know when you’ve used AI for content, and this can backfire on the market’s perception of your brand. My approach is to use AI to move faster and test more while keeping a close eye on quality, consistency, and if the work we are doing is resonating the way we want it to.
For marketing leaders looking to scale growth, what mindset or operational practices are most important for long-term success?
Two priorities come to mind that I feel strongly about, especially right now.
The first is protecting human connection and collaboration, even as AI becomes increasingly embedded in the way we get work done. Marketing teams that stop learning from each other, stop building relationships internally and externally, and start working around people instead of with them are going to lose something quite difficult to recover—the ability to communicate and connect authentically, which is already complex in an increasingly remote profession. It sounds clichéd, but there is truly nothing more valuable in any organization than the experience, creativity, innovation, and connections built by the people who work there. Companies need to invest in their people, but the people also need to invest time, trust, and curiosity in each other.
The second is something that I am also learning in real time, which is the importance of fostering a sense of psychological safety to try something new, even if there’s a possibility it will fail. Innovation and education happen when we take risks, so true leadership means consistently reminding your teams that marketing experiments aren’t a “pass or fail” final exam but a year-round lesson plan.
About Alisa Hammond
Alisa Hammond is a B2B SaaS marketing leader with 11 years of experience across SEO/SEM, social media, CRO, analytics, content strategy, and paid media. Currently at Deltek, she leads full-funnel digital marketing initiatives and video strategy programs. Passionate about data-driven decision-making and audience-centric marketing, Alisa combines analytical expertise with creative storytelling to drive sustainable growth, campaign performance, and impactful customer engagement.
