How Vanta turned creator marketing into a performance powerhouse

How Vanta scaled creator partnerships with Passionfroot, and why creator content now accounts for 85% of its Meta pipeline

B2B marketers share a similar challenge: turning complex products into narratives that are clear, bold, and emotionally resonant. Vanta, the #1 agentic trust platform, found a powerful way to do it: let creators tell the story.

Today, creator marketing is a key part of Vanta's growth strategy, driving everything from brand awareness and education to measurable pipeline. And with Passionfroot, Vanta can scale its creator program without scaling any behind-the-scenes operational headaches.

The result? Creator videos have become Vanta's top-performing format on Meta, accounting for 85% of its pipeline from the channel.

We spoke with Mary Almada, who leads Brand Performance at Vanta, about building a creator program that delivers, measuring impact beyond impressions, and why less-scripted content is always the best move, even for a B2B brand.

The challenge: Making a complex B2B product relatable

Vanta operates in a category that isn't always easy to make exciting. Security and compliance are critical to growing businesses, but they're rarely top of mind for founders. That is, until a major customer asks for SOC 2, ISO, or HIPAA compliance.

For Mary, creator marketing offered a way to make those conversations more approachable.

Vanta's early experiments with podcasts had already shown the value of trusted voices and authentic integrations. From there, the team began testing creator partnerships, initially sourcing ideas through internal Slack conversations and recommendations from colleagues across marketing, sales, and leadership.

One of its first partnerships was with Clint from IT, a creator the team still works with today. But it was a campaign with The Wall Street Skinny that helped demonstrate the channel's broader potential.

Tapping into the Doechii “Anxiety” dance trend, the creators developed a skit that personified compliance frameworks as the anxiety creeping up on a startup founder just as they're about to land their first big enterprise deal.

It was a perfect recipe for the B2B brand that was looking to connect with people on a real level: timely, relatable, and funny.

The team then put paid media behind the content, extending its reach through Vanta's own targeting. That's when the pipeline opportunity became much clearer, helping build the case for greater investment in creator marketing.

“Creator marketing is really interesting because it's not just within one bucket. It can drive awareness and establish credibility, but it also educates our potential buyers and generates measurable demand.”
– Mary, Brand Performance at Vanta

The solution: Building a creator program that can grow with Vanta

With early wins under their belt, the Vanta team knew it was ready to ramp up creator efforts. But as the program grew, keeping operations manageable became critical.

This year alone, for example, the Vanta team is working with more than 90 creators. That means coordinating contracts, payments, deliverables, deadlines, and budgets across various markets. With Vanta’s rigorous procurement processes, alongside legal and finance reviews, the admin work could’ve quickly become a bottleneck.

Passionfroot gives Vanta a centralized place to manage every aspect of their creator programs.

For Mary, that comes down to three key areas:

1. Bringing creator operations into one place

Instead of chasing individual deliverables and coordinating deadlines across multiple creators, the team can see what's launched, what's going live, and how spend is tracking in one place. Streamlining contracts and payments also helps reduce the burden on Vanta's legal and finance teams.

2. Finding the right creators for the right audience

Passionfroot's creator discovery tools help Vanta easily evaluate potential creators across channels, including LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. The team can explore creators' content, understand their audience demographics and geographic breakdowns, and identify voices that align with Vanta's target buyers.

3. Managing creator campaigns across geographies

With a centralized view of campaigns and activity across markets, Vanta can better understand how its program is performing globally—from launches in the UK to partnerships in Australia—without losing sight of individual campaign details.

As the program grows, that operational foundation makes it easier for the team to focus on what matters most: finding the right creators, telling great stories, and turning effective content into measurable results.

"The biggest value of a platform like Passionfroot is operational efficiency and the ability to scale."
– Mary, Vanta

The results: Creator videos drive 85% of Vanta's Meta pipeline

For Vanta, the ROI of creator marketing goes beyond reach and engagement, and into something even more tangible for the business.

In just three months (July–September 2026), Vanta's creator videos generated more than 33 million impressions. And 85% of Vanta's pipeline from Meta currently comes from boosted creator videos.

For Mary, that stat reinforces the value of pairing authentic creator content with paid distribution. Creators bring the voice, format, and storytelling that resonate with their audiences; paid media helps Vanta put that content in front of the right people at scale.

It's a different approach from relying on traditional in-house ads alone. While brand-led creative remains important for recognition and recall, creator videos can offer even more. Think: plainly explaining why compliance actually matters or using humor to show what that means for a young AI founder.

And pipeline is only one part of the picture.

Vanta also looks at the quality of engagement, website traffic and conversions, UTM performance, cost efficiency, and qualitative feedback from sales conversations. For example, if prospects mention discovering Vanta through a creator.

That broader measurement approach helps the team understand not just whether a campaign drove clicks, but whether it reached the right people and influenced their decision to learn more.

The secret to effective creator marketing? Don't over-script it.

One of Mary's biggest lessons from building Vanta's creator program is that the best content often comes from giving creators room to do what they do best.

Vanta provides core messaging and adapts it to different audiences—from startup founders and enterprise buyers to security-focused professionals. But rather than prescribing exactly how a creator should communicate those messages, the team lets them shape the story in their own voice. That’s the power of creators, after all.

Austin Nasso, a comedian and tech creator with nearly 1.5M followers on TikTok alone, is a great example. Given a straightforward brief explaining what Vanta does, who it serves, and the problem it solves, he turns the messaging into short-form sketches with comedy, drama, and a clear narrative arc.

The brand becomes part of the story, rather than an interruption to it.

For Mary, that's the real value of working with creators: they bring an understanding of their audience and a creative perspective that an internal marketing team might not arrive at on its own.

"I try to be as unprescriptive as possible. I often give creators very boilerplate messaging, and I rarely tell them what to do with it."
– Mary, Vanta

The principle extends beyond creative execution. Vanta's current creator strategy focuses heavily on tech, AI, and entrepreneurship—reaching builders who are launching companies, integrating new tools, and preparing to land their first enterprise customers.

The goal isn't for creators to explain Vanta's products in exhaustive detail, but to bring security and trust into the conversation early enough to help businesses succeed.

What's next: Building deeper creator partnerships

As creator marketing evolves, Vanta is looking beyond individual sponsored posts toward longer-term partnerships across channels and formats.

That could mean bringing creators into virtual events, working with them as speakers, or developing ongoing content series that deepen the relationship between creator, brand, and audience.

The team is also paying close attention to how creator content influences discovery in AI-powered search. YouTube is particularly interesting because its videos have a longer shelf life than many other social formats and can continue to surface long after publication.

For AEO, Mary sees potential in dedicated videos that give a topic more room to breathe than a short, integrated spot. But a genuine fit with the creator’s audience and interests will remain essential.

It's another reason to think beyond one-off placements and invest in partnerships that make sense for both sides.

Mary's advice for B2B marketers getting started with creators

For companies considering creator marketing, Mary's advice is straightforward: start with your audience, not the size of a creator's following.

A niche creator with a few thousand highly-relevant followers may be more valuable than someone with hundreds of thousands of followers who don't match your target market. From there, test different creators, channels, formats, and messaging before finalizing budgets.

And above all, don't lose sight of why you're working with creators in the first place.

"The whole point of working with creators is the built-in trust with their audiences. They have a brand they’ve created, and you’re booking them for that unique brand."
– Mary, Vanta

For Vanta, that core philosophy has turned creator marketing into a meaningful growth channel. With the right creators, a willingness to test, and the infrastructure to scale, even a complex B2B product can become a story people want to not just watch, but act on.