How Sprout Social uses generative AI to share strategic knowledge and speed up time to market

Challenge

Sprout Social, a social media management and analytics software leader, provides powerful social data to over 30,000 global brands to deliver smarter, faster business impact. In early 2024, VP of Marketing, Marino Fresch, and Director of Revenue Marketing Program Management, Ryan Evans, recognized that AI would be transformative to how marketers work and wanted to invest in an internal AI strategy.

They were eager to select a solution that could accelerate their progress toward AI adoption, but they also knew it was crucial to pick the right solution. “We wanted an AI platform that would help our people get started quickly, was customizable enough to produce high-quality results, and had the right controls in place to ensure consistency and accuracy,” says Evans.

Solution

After evaluating different generative AI solutions, Sprout Social chose Writer because of its ability to meet rigorous security and data privacy requirements and for its robust capabilities. “Writer is purpose-built rather than just a chat app,” says Fresch. “It has both well-designed prebuilt apps for popular use cases to enable quick adoption and ability to build custom apps for our unique use cases. The entire Writer platform, including AI Studio and Knowledge Graph, helps us achieve scale while maintaining our high-quality bar.”

Writer AI Studio’s no-code tools make it easy for non-technical users at Sprout Social to build new custom AI apps using techniques like multishot prompting and prompt-chaining. “Writer AI Studio is tremendously powerful,” says Fresch. “We can provide our best examples for each use case to train the model, which allows us to generate outputs that are extremely specific, controllable, and tailored to the right audience.”

Additionally, Sprout Social saw the opportunity to use Writer Knowledge Graph to create a central data hub. By uploading key reports and resources, they made an accessible internal repository. This allows employees to retrieve industry statistics and comprehensive data reports efficiently. “Things change so quickly in our industry that it can be a challenge to share the most updated resources internally and with our customers,” explains Fresch. “Now, with Writer Knowledge Graph, we’re able to pull the most accurate information with little lift and swiftly repurpose it.”

Results

Sprout Social uses Writer extensively throughout the marketing organization. With AI Studio, Evans and other team members have been able to quickly build new apps for product messaging, campaign assets, release notes, and help center video scripts. Adoption is also spreading to functions like sales, where the team uses Writer to improve sales outreach.

One of Sprout Social’s most impactful use cases with Writer is reimagining their SEO workflows. The in-house SEO team collaborates with freelancers to produce their most strategic assets. Previously, the internal team spent up to 8 hours crafting each SEO brief in significant detail to give freelancers enough relevant company context and knowledge. Initial drafts they received typically required substantial editing to meet their standards. Now, the team uses Writer to expedite keyword research, automatically generate detailed SEO briefs using a custom AI app, and efficiently review drafts with embedded style guides. This significantly improves the asset creation process.

“Our ability to create high-quality SEO content at scale was limited by the bandwidth of our in-house SEO team,” says Fresch. “With Writer, we’ve been able to speed up the production of SEO content by 68%. Our SEO experts spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on strategic work that only they can do.”

With Writer, Sprout Social has also been able to respond more nimbly to changing market conditions. “A competitor went out of business, and that created a gap in the market,” says Fresch. “Writer helped us quickly create a high volume of SEO content focused on alternatives to this competitor. We went from not ranking to being in the top three for relevant searches. We would not have been able to take advantage of this opportunity without Writer.”

Adoption

Fresch and Evans saw the opportunity for AI to be their team’s force multiplier, but its success would depend on their ability to drive AI adoption among their people. “We selected Writer for its usability — its friendly user interface and desktop apps make it easy for our people to get started easily,” said Evans. “And with custom apps, we’re able to put prompting best practices in place, ensuring anyone who uses them can get consistent, repeatable results.”

They also knew that the right technology was just one piece of the puzzle — people need the necessary training to make AI effective. Sprout Social partnered with the Writer customer success team to enable their people, setting up trainings, workshops, office hours, and Slack channels for ongoing support. “The Writer team is incredible,” Evans says. “They’ve made us feel confident in the platform’s capabilities, taught us the ‘skill’ of AI, and brought everybody along for this journey.”