Intercom recognized influencer marketing as a key growth channel but faced major hurdles in scaling due to the manual, unstructured process of discovering B2B creators, limited platform options, and fragmented payment workflows.
The team at Intercom turned to Passionfroot, using its multi-platform Discovery to identify top creators, verified data for precise targeting, and campaign management tools to streamline and scale their influencer marketing efforts seamlessly.
The partner: Intercom
Intercom is the leading AI-first customer service platform in the world. More than 25,000 global organizations, including Atlassian, Amazon, and Microsoft, use Intercom to send over 500 million messages per month and enable interactions with over 200 million people on a monthly average.
The biggest re-brand in the history of B2B SaaS
Intercom has a long-run track record of excellence in customer success, but in 2022 when the world had it’s “ChatGPT moment” things changed. It became clear that AI was the next wave of technology that would revolutionize how enterprise work is carried out.
The first area of work on AI’s door? You guessed it - customer service.
In this moment, Intercom made the bold decision to lean in and invest $100M into bringing their new Fin AI customer service agent to market.
While they were throwing everything behind development of their AI agent Fin - Intercom knew that any great product still needs to be adequately distributed. Hence, as a part of this $100M investment, Intercom increased annual marketing spend to bring their new product to life and propel Intercom to be the brand leader in customer service AI.
Just like that, Intercom had embarked on one of the most ambitious product and brand repositionings in the history of B2B SaaS.
Leaning into Creator-led growth
So what was the best way to become synonymous with AI customer service? Historically Intercom was fluent in launching events, conference partnerships, and product marketing sessions. However, Intercom saw there was an explosion of B2B creators happening on Linkedin, Podcasts, Newsletters, and other social platforms. The amount of technology coming to market was huge, and creators were becoming on of the foremost sources for professionals to learn how to implement this AI technology in their work. Therefore, Intercom decided to lean into this space with creator partnerships.
This is when our friends at Intercom met Passionfroot.
The Challenge
When Sara Crowe joined Intercom, she was entrusted to build brand authority through influencer marketing. Her first campaign with Intercom aimed to promote its 2025 Customer Service Transformation Report report to a targeted audience in the AI and customer service industries.
However, when Sara embarked on this work, she quickly realized scaling influencer marketing efforts posed several challenges:
- Finding relevant influencers: going out searching for creators on Linkedin and google was unstructured and virtually impossible.
- B2B-specific platforms: Intercom’s audience is professionals and businesses - and to find influencers in the customer service and AI space was difficult. Most platforms were consumer-focused and did not focus on Linkedin or Newsletters.
- Payments: Different creators had different payment terms and methods - this led to challenges with Intercom’s finance operations.
The Passionfroot Match
Sara and the team at Intercom explored various influencer platforms on the market but found that they all fell short on these dimensions:
- Single-platform: Many were overly focused on newsletters and didn’t offer matching multi-platform capabilities
- Data-poor: Intercom was laser-focused on their target demographic, and most platforms did not have the deep combination of verified API data and creator reported data that Passionfroot has
Sara mentioned, "We looked at a couple of other platforms but they were all very newsletter-based or just didn’t offer as comprehensive functionality and service.”
As a result, Sara and the team decided to make Passionfroot the tool to launch their Customer Service Transformation Report from. Here were some of Sara’s favorite features while using Passionfroot:
Discovery with multi-platform data
On Passionfroot, Intercom’s team could pursue all their B2B influencer needs across all platforms - helping them streamline the usually time-consuming discovery process.
"What we really liked about Passionfroot, is that it offered all the channels our Demand Gen team was focused on. Discovery made it really easy to filter through the different channels and see what products are available for each creator and what their reach and engagement is.”
Campaigns & reach potential projections
Once you’ve discovered and picked your creator roster - Passionfroot lets you build a campaign to plan your campaign and manage your outreach. Here’s where you’ll find one of Sara’s favorite features:
"I really love that when I am adding the different creators to a campaign that it tallies up the reach for me. That way we can get an early indication of how our campaign could perform!”
When building a campaign in Passionfroot, we automatically aggregate our creator data to give you a sense of the total potential impact of your campaign. With Passionfroot we give our customers a megaphone out into the world - and we want to help them measure and validate that reach!
The Results
To maximize reach, Intercom partnered with 12–14 creators in the AI and customer service space. They were optimizing for reach so they used Passionfroot to identify creators with larger followings as well as smaller creators who had history of virality. This strategy paid off:
The campaign generated significant engagement:
- 800,000+ total impressions in Intercom’s target audience
- 1,000+ total likes and engagements across all creator posts
One of their favorite posts was with Chase Dimond which got 240+ reactions, 600 likes, and generated meaningful discussions between their founder and CSO, Des Traynor, and other thought leaders in the space like Justin Welsh (+1M followers).
Not only were the Passionfroot creators a strong channel for reach, they also generated meaningful engagement with Intercom and thought leaders in the space!
“Passionfroot really helped the campaign to be successful in creating brand authority for Intercom in the customer service and AI space.” – Sara Crowe, Integrated Marketing Manager, Intercom
What’s Next?
We’re excited to continue and deepen our partnership with Intercom, launching even more influencer campaigns and making it a core part of how Intercom gets itself into the zeitgeist of AI x Customer Service.
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