One of the Biggest Missed Opportunities in SaaS Marketing

Key influencers are one of the most efficient channels for customer acquisition. This is not only true for Fortune 100 consumer brands, but also for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. While ads on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are incredibly fast at generating demo requests and trial sign-ups, they don’t usually produce the large-scale word-of-mouth impact that influencers can. Working with influencers is one of the easiest ways to drive both top-of-funnel awareness and bottom-of-funnel sales-qualified leads.

The big issue holding back SaaS marketers

Lack of investment in influencers is a symptom of a wider marketing problem: SaaS marketers continue to equate “target market” with “target customer.” This critical error causes you to undervalue or neglect strategic partners in the market and how you can create value for them. Given this mistake, SaaS marketing naturally leans towards direct-to-consumer marketing instead of leveraging intermediaries such as key influencers. It is far more efficient to focus your marketing on a handful of influencers than to reach out to thousands of prospective customers individually.

The problem with inbound content marketing

As effective as content marketing can be, it takes a long time to gain momentum. Inbound marketing initiatives may not become ROI positive until a year after launch. Many SaaS companies — especially those under $10MM ARR — just can’t wait a year to see if such campaigns are effective.

The first big challenge with inbound marketing is simply generating the content in the first place. Content is expensive, whether you’re investing labor time or paying contractors $500 for a blog post. That money could easily be reallocated to advertising or influencers, both of which produce much faster results.

The second — and most important — challenge is distribution. It’s one thing to produce a great white paper or blog post, but getting visibility is where the rubber hits the road. You either have to pay to advertise the content or spend a lot of time promoting it. When you factor in promotional costs, inbound marketing starts to look a lot less attractive.

Influencer marketing is the easiest antidote to both of these problems. First, influencers are professional content creators who already know what customers want to consume. Second, influencers have spent years — decades even — building massive audiences. It is far easier to push your message through influencers than to spend years trying to build a significant following. Unless you want to turn your SaaS into a journalistic powerhouse, you should consider influencer marketing before inbound marketing.

How to find influencers and quantity their clout

The bad news is that Klout — a tool for measuring people’s influence — was shut down. The good news is that a newer, better tool has taken its place. Founded by Moz’s Rand Fishkin, Sparktoro is a freemium website that makes identifying influencers easy and scientific. All you need to do is specify who your target audience is, and Sparktoro spits out a list of influencers across various channels including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, websites, and more. Sparktoro even tells you what percentage of your audience you can reach through these influencers.

You can also identify influencers manually by looking at the admins for Facebook groups, authors on Amazon, teachers at universities, consultants who work with a lot of clients in your target market, etc.

How to approach influencers

Once you have a list of target influencers, you should reach out to them with a compelling free offer, such as perpetually free access to your SaaS or $100 to watch a demo of your product. Email them, message them on Facebook, connect with them on LinkedIn, and send them a free package via physical mail.

Example of an influencer outreach email: “Hi, John, given your clout in the community, I’d love to get your input on our software and offer you a $100 Visa gift card to see a 20-minute demo followed by 10 minutes of feedback.”

You may need to follow up 4+ times before they respond. If you’re working with a lot of influencers, consider automating the outreach through tools such as Lemlist, Outreach, or Reply.io.

Once a notable influencer signs up, you have a precedent for others to jump on board: e.g., “Hi, John, just following up. We just set up [Celebrity You Know] with an account, and I was wondering if you’re interested as well! Let me know.”

Sometimes it is easier to get high-profile influencers interested in your product than mid-level ones.

How to compensate influencers

Research on how influencers want to be compensated suggests that they just want flat-out payments. Indeed, this transactional type of relationship is what some more established influencers expect. They may want $3,000 to sponsor a webinar or $1,000 for a post distributed through their social media channels. You can experiment with these to see if the CAC ends up lower than with your other acquisition channels. I’ve had success working with many mid-level influencers who didn’t expect a lot of money. Their combined effort didn’t cost a lot to me but did generate a lot of sign-ups for less than 10 cents each. I’ve also had success with tier-1 influencers who generated tons of FREE publicity. An influencer once reviewed one of my products on YouTube, garnering almost 15,000,000 views for free.

You can also build a partner program that includes incentives such as:

· Certification badge

· 15–30% recurring monthly revenue

· Co-marketing opportunities: be guests on each other’s podcasts, launch co-branded webinars, promote each other’s products via email, create Facebook live events, etc.

· Exclusive access to research or other data

· Training

· Prestige (e.g., VIP advisory committee to guide product development)

· Early access

Work with influencers who have disproportionate clout at key junctures

Many prospective customers couldn’t care less about your SaaS until some key trigger event such as a lawsuit, bankruptcy, merger, new website, or new partnership. At these inflection points, buyers put their trust in experts such as consultants, lawyers, accountants, and web developers. If demand for your SaaS aligns strongly with a trigger event, you should build an affiliate relationship with these professionals.

Conclusion

The fundamental challenge of marketing communications is persuasion — in other words, influence. You could spend decades building up your own influence or simply piggyback off people who already have it. Influencer marketing is one of the biggest missed opportunities to drive new users to your SaaS in a cost-effective, timely manner.