How Gradient AI grew enterprise sales through AI influencers

Chris Chang

Co-founder & CEO

"1stCollab was the only solution that was able to get us partnerships with the most credible influencers in AI. The campaign immediately drove inbound sales by getting our technology in front of AI experts."

Enterprise AI + Influencer Marketing?

Gradient is one of the world's fastest growing AI enterprise companies. Traditionally, enterprise businesses don't leverage influencer marketing because, historically:

• Influencer marketing doesn’t drive enterprise sales. It’s only useful for consumer companies.
• Influencer marketing can’t work for topics that require deep technical expertise. It’s impossible to find the right creators and coach them on exactly how to use and talk about the product. And even if you could, it’s impossible to scale the campaign.

Here’s the story of how Gradient went from a little known brand to one of the hottest AI companies in under three months through influencer marketing.

Gradient’s Needs

"I spent two weeks doing demo calls with the major influencer marketing platforms and influencer agencies. None worked with deeply technical AI creators. None of them worked with <$20k influencer budgets. None of them could get content live in a month without significant work from me."

Gradient’s goals were around establishing credibility, getting in front of the right developer audience, and showcasing end-to-end use cases, from set up, all the way through implementing business use cases.

But most importantly, Gradient was a startup and that meant specific constraints. The important things for them were that:

• They could learn quickly and iterate. This meant getting videos live within weeks, seeing results, and then iterating based on metrics.
• They could scale with less than an hour of work a week. Gradient didn’t even have a marketing team and no one at Gradient had worked with influencers before. The campaign needed to be run directly by Chris, Gradient’s CEO.
• Every dollar translated into results. Gradient didn’t have the budget to test and not see ROI. They needed to see exactly how budget was getting translated into sales and revenue.

1stCollab’s Role

"I tried finding and emailing a few influencers myself just to test out the process and quickly realized that the only way for us to really test out influencers was to hire an influencer marketing team or use 1stCollab. Thankfully I chose the latter."

1stCollab is an AI-powered in-house influencer marketer that can run an influencer program for any business in a way that optimizes performance.

Less than three months into the partnership, here’s what 1stCollab was able to achieve for Gradient:

• 900+ creators sourced and outreached to. Not just any creators—creators who were experts in AI software engineering, machine learning, and data science.
• 400+ bids received. Getting more bids meant more flexibility with picking the highest performing creators for Gradient’s budget.
• 80+ contracts executed. From issuing contracts, managing timelines, delivering content feedback, tracking metrics, paying creators and filing taxes, and managing content usage rights, 1stCollab took care of all the work that usually takes an entire team.
• 3 campaign A/B tests run. Gradient tested a number of different features to highlight in their campaign. Results from the influencer campaign directly impacted their product priorities.

Outcomes

"It’s a pretty cool experience sitting back and just getting a notification every few days that another video went live and was getting 100k views. And then shortly after, hearing from leads that they found us through our YouTube videos."

Beyond just the engagement metrics, 1stCollab also helped Gradient acquire usage rights for videos so Gradient could feature creator videos throughout their website.

A month after starting the campaign, Gradient saw hockey stick growth in sales and leveraged the momentum to quickly raise a new round of funding. They’re looking forward to re-invest much of that funding into influencer marketing and exploring new content ideas and audiences using 1stCollab.

Sample Videos from the Campaign