How Delve Turned Bold Marketing Stunts into 101M+ Impressions with Creator-Led Distribution

Key Results

101M+ Global Brand Impressions
Creator partnerships delivered massive global visibility and sustained brand exposure.

10+ High-Authority Creators
Trusted industry voices amplified messaging to highly relevant audiences.

1,000+ Customers Gifted & Retained
Creator programs supported both acquisition and long-term customer relationships.

11× More Effective Than Traditional Ads
Creator-led campaigns significantly outperformed conventional paid channels.

A Compliance Company That Refused to Be Boring

Delve operates in one of the most crowded and commoditized categories in B2B: compliance automation. Competitors like Vanta and Drata had raised hundreds of millions and were racing to the bottom on price, making it nearly impossible for Delve to differentiate on features alone.

The problem was structural. Compliance is a “logic” purchase in an “attention” economy. Buyers don’t want to think about SOC 2 — they have to. That creates a category where marketing defaults to dry, technical content that prospects actively ignore. Most compliance companies keep their marketing boring and safe, and Delve’s leadership recognized that “safe” was actually the most dangerous route — it meant staying invisible.

Delve had the ambition to change this. The team invested in bold, physical marketing stunts: billboards placed outside specific VC offices like a16z, buses wrapped with irreverent copy about audits, and hotel room keys at industry conferences. These moves got attention locally, but the reach was inherently limited by geography.

At the same time, Delve was at a strategic inflection point. The company had built a strong customer base among startups, but leadership wanted to move upmarket into mid-market and enterprise accounts. That required a complete repositioning — not just different messaging, but a different perception of the brand entirely.

“Many people see us as a startup, and startups are the low-hanging fruit. Most of our clients are startups, but we now want to transition to be more mid-market and enterprise focused. We want to show more credibility.”

— Robin Lopes, Content & Field Marketing, Delve

The core challenges were:

• Geographic reach ceiling: Physical marketing stunts in San Francisco and New York generated local buzz but had no mechanism to scale digitally to a global audience.

• Category commoditization: Competitors with larger budgets were racing to the bottom on price, making it impossible to differentiate on features or specifications alone.

• Upmarket repositioning: Delve needed to shift perception from a startup-focused tool to an enterprise-grade compliance platform — a branding challenge that requires sustained, consistent messaging.

• Decentralized creator management: The existing creator program lacked centralized infrastructure, with communications scattered across email threads, LinkedIn DMs, and Slack channels.

  
  

Turning Physical Stunts into a Global Content Engine

Delve adopted Limelight as the infrastructure layer that connected their bold physical marketing to scalable digital distribution. The platform enabled the team to source, manage, and measure a network of high-authority creators who could transform local stunts into global content moments.

1. Creator-Amplified Field Marketing

Delve’s most innovative use of Limelight was fusing physical field marketing with creator-led digital distribution. When the team placed billboards outside VC offices or wrapped buses with irreverent compliance messaging, they didn’t just let those assets sit in the physical world.

Instead, they activated creators through Limelight to go to these locations, photograph or video the stunts, and create content that “broke down the playbook” behind the campaign — sharing budget decisions, creative strategy, and the thinking behind the bold moves. This turned every billboard into dozens of pieces of digital content, extending the reach from a single city block to millions of feeds.

“We can pay for 20 buses, but then have 30 influencers post about the buses driving around, and then it would seem like we’re everywhere in San Francisco. That’s a great idea.”

— Robin Lopes, Content & Field Marketing, Delve

The approach worked because it was authentic. Creators weren’t just promoting Delve — they were deconstructing the marketing strategy itself, turning the stunts into case studies that their audiences of founders, CTOs, and GTM leaders found genuinely valuable.

2. Repositioning Through Consistent Creator Content

Beyond campaign-specific activations, Delve used Limelight to build an evergreen creator program that consistently reinforced the brand’s new positioning. Rather than one-off campaigns around product launches, the team maintained a roster of 10+ high-authority creators on retainers, producing content every month.

This was a deliberate strategy to reshape category perception. As David Walsh, Limelight’s CEO, explained during the partnership kickoff: repositioning works when creators repeat the message consistently until it becomes solidified in the buyer’s mind. Delve needed the market to stop seeing them as “another compliance tool” and start seeing them as the brand that founders actually talk about.

“Repositioning and rebranding is really powerful, because you use creators to repeat the message over and over and over again, that it becomes solidified in the potential buyer’s mind.”

— David Walsh, CEO, Limelight

The creator roster included operators and GTM leaders who had credibility with Delve’s upmarket ICP — people like Adam Biddlecombe, Nathan Hirsch, and Jim Gonzales, whose audiences of founders and revenue leaders were precisely the buyers Delve needed to reach.

3. Product Launch Distribution

When Delve launched new features like “Groups” for role-based access control, they moved away from traditional product marketing. Instead of dry documentation and feature announcements, Limelight creators framed launches around human narratives — stories about designing teams around strengths, simplifying access controls for growing companies, and solving real compliance pain points.

This product-led creator advocacy translated technical features into leadership conversations, driving demo bookings directly from creator audiences. It proved that even in compliance, product launches can generate genuine excitement when the story is told by trusted voices rather than marketing copy.

4. Organic-to-Paid Content Pipeline

Delve also used Limelight to identify top-performing organic creator content and repurpose it into paid campaigns. The best-performing LinkedIn posts from creators were turned into thought leadership ads, retargeted directly to Delve’s ICP.

This organic-to-paid pipeline is, on average, 11 times more effective on LinkedIn than traditional ads — because the content comes from a recognized creator rather than a brand account, and it tells a story rather than making a pitch. Delve used Limelight’s analytics to identify which content to amplify and which creators to double down on.

From “Another Compliance Tool” to the Brand Founders Actually Talk About

The partnership between Delve and Limelight transformed what started as a collection of creative marketing stunts into a systematic, scalable brand engine. The results weren’t just about reach — they changed how the market perceives Delve entirely.

“This is great. I already see so much potential. Let’s say we release a feature — then we have a bunch of influencers on LinkedIn or Twitter writing about the feature, just building even more hype regarding it.”

— Robin Lopes, Content & Field Marketing, Delve

THE PLAYBOOK

How Delve Runs Their Creator Program Today

Delve has built a creator program that is uniquely integrated with their field marketing — a combination that few B2B companies have figured out. Here’s how the team operates:

Creator Strategy

The team maintains a roster of 10+ high-authority creators, primarily founder-influencers and GTM operators with audiences of founders, CTOs, and revenue leaders. Creators are selected for credibility within the YC and high-growth SaaS ecosystem — the exact buyers Delve is targeting as they move upmarket. Content spans LinkedIn, newsletters, X/Twitter, and YouTube.

Field Marketing Amplification

Delve’s unique advantage is the integration of physical and digital marketing through creators. When the team executes a field marketing campaign — billboards, events, branded buses, conference stunts — creators are activated to document, photograph, and create content around those moments. This extends the reach of a $10,000 billboard into millions of social impressions, effectively multiplying the ROI of every physical marketing dollar.

Campaign Execution

All creators receive campaign briefs through Limelight’s resource hub, which includes objectives, value propositions, key messaging, target audience, and content guidelines. Creators write their own content — the team provides context, not scripts — and all content is approved before going live. Payments, communications, and content tracking are consolidated within Limelight.

Organic-to-Paid Pipeline

The team identifies top-performing organic creator content and repurposes it into LinkedIn thought leadership ads. This strategy is 11x more effective than traditional ads because the content comes from recognized creators telling authentic stories rather than brand accounts making pitches. Limelight’s analytics surface the best-performing content for amplification.

Social Signals & Lead Feed

Delve uses Limelight’s Social Signals product to track all engagement on creator content, employee posts, brand mentions, and competitor keywords. Qualified leads that match Delve’s ICP personas (engineering, DevOps, and product leadership) are automatically pushed to a Slack channel, giving the sales team a continuous feed of high-intent prospects.

“I like one place where we can see everyone that has interacted with Delve. I think this is something that is really useful.”

— Robin Lopes, Content & Field Marketing, Delve

From Startup Darling to Enterprise Brand

Delve has done something that almost no compliance company has managed: they’ve made compliance marketing genuinely exciting. By refusing to follow the category playbook — and using Limelight to scale that boldness globally — they’ve created a brand that founders and CTOs actively seek out, recommend, and talk about.

Going into 2026, the team is focused on three priorities. First, scaling the creator program to support the upmarket push into mid-market and enterprise accounts, with creators who have credibility at the director and VP level. Second, deepening the field marketing amplification playbook — every physical activation will have a corresponding creator distribution strategy built in from the start. Third, leveraging Limelight’s Social Signals product to turn engagement data into actionable pipeline for the sales team.

The company is also rebranding and rolling out new positioning to match the enterprise-ready product they’ve built. Creators will be central to that repositioning — repeating the new message consistently until the market’s perception catches up with the product’s reality.

For Delve, the formula is proven: do something worth talking about in the physical world, then use creators to make sure the entire digital world talks about it too. It’s a playbook that turned a compliance startup into a brand that generates 101M+ impressions — and they’re just getting started.