This blog will dive into why we think the answer is a resounding “yes”!
Like B2C consumers, even B2B organizations are more likely to trust consumers’ opinions about a brand rather than the brand talking about itself. If a SaaS organization can find the balance between selling the brand through an influencer while maintaining a neutral and unbiased tone, it can work wonders for them. Let’s dive into how this works!
Influencer Marketing For B2B SaaS: Does It Work?
While most brand marketers believe that influencer marketing helps target the right customer effectively, there are a couple of questions to ask:
- Can a parallel be drawn between B2C and B2B audiences?
- Is there some element of B2C influencer marketing that doesn’t hold for B2B?
B2B marketing relies less on emotions and more on rationalism. Customers are looking for options that help improve efficiency and ultimately boost revenue. B2B customers also consider additional factors like due diligence and service fees. Despite these differences, evidence suggests that collaborating with a niche influencer can help boost your growth. These influencers enjoy the trust of your customers and understand how to speak to them.
Why? Because ads tell customers what you’re offering. Influencers tell them that they’ve tried it and found it compelling.
Benefits Of SaaS Influencer Marketing: For Your Brand
Reach the right audience
Influencer marketing is the most effective way to get your service in front of a larger audience. Not only does it help cast a wider net, but it ensures the net only covers customers that are the right fit for your brand. Influencers are a great way for SaaS brands to amplify their messaging to the core audience. This occurs through the credibility and trust established by the influencer concerning your brand’s effectiveness because they’re an advocate of your brand.
Trust and credibility
Ask yourself what you would trust more — a SaaS brand advocating for and embellishing its effectiveness or a micro-influencer/nano influencer promoting a brand based on their experience with it. This is the primary reason to work with influencers. They have followers who trust them specifically for their judgment and expertise. Sending the correct message through the right influencer (micro, nano, or otherwise) reflects positively on your brand.
Engaging storytelling
Influencers are usually much better storytellers than brands – particularly SaaS brands. Take advantage of their skills and use the collaboration to your brand’s benefit. Feel free to pick their brains and use their creative abilities to generate efficient, entertaining, informative, and engaging messages. These messages align with the brand’s core values and what the audience wants to engage with. This also helps develop a character for your brand.
Benefits Of SaaS Influencer Marketing: For The Influencer
Engagement with their audience
Any content created by an influencer for a brand — SaaS or otherwise, is content for their social media channels. This content goes on their feeds and gets seen by their followers. And as this is a brand collaboration with a specific target audience, it has to be targeted content that engages the audience. Just as brands benefit from influencer collaborations, so do the influencers through consistent engagement.
Distribute valuable content
Any content is inspiring if it is engaging enough. Every time an influencer collaboration results in path-breaking content, it sets a new standard for excellence within the industry. In SaaS industries, every time a piece of content is engaging and goes viral, it changes the way other brand collaborations take place. This gives the influencers the incentive to chase excellence and become a trendsetter.
Networking
Influencers generate a substantial amount of their revenue from brand collaborations. Every collaboration is an invaluable partnership that helps the influencer grow. If the relationship between the influencer and the brand is positive, it can lead to long-term relationships and increased revenues for the influencer. And when the industry is as niche as SaaS, any influencer who can connect with the target audience becomes a known name and one that all associated brands chase. This helps influencers form a network of related branded partnerships to benefit from.
Where Can SaaS Brands Find The Right Influencers?
Organically — through social media blogs and forums
This is a more direct approach. Through keyword research and sentiment analysis, brands can search for specific content generated by creators online and shortlist them accordingly. But this can be a tedious and less accurate process than going through an agency.
Through an influencer marketing agency
You might wonder why you should invest in an agency when you could do it in-house. While some companies prefer to do it all themselves, most do it wrong and lose money. Here at AtisfyReach, we can help you find the right influencers to represent your brand to your target audience. We have a database of over 10 million influencers with over 10 billion pieces of content and over 30 trillion views. We can curate excellent, end-to-end campaigns for your brand so that you can focus on growing your business.
How To Select The Right Influencer For Your Brand
It’s not just about the money
Influencers, especially the more niche ones, care less about the money and more about how beneficial the collaboration is for their social media presence. It is crucial to design campaigns that are equally beneficial to all parties involved and give creative control to the influencer.
Aligned values
An influencer is a proxy for the voice, tone, and values the brand is trying to communicate. By personifying these values through an influencer, brands communicate their message to fans. Hence, the values of both parties need to be aligned. If there is a tonal mismatch between your brand and the influencer you pick, it sends out the wrong message to the audience.
Audience size and platform
Not all influencers have the same reach and engagement on all social media platforms. With different platforms supporting different content formats — each with a niche audience — brands need to cherry-pick who they collaborate with for other platforms and content. This means that brands need to start with the industry niche (SaaS) and then work their way to the platform niche and content niche next.
Budget
Budgets vary based on different classifications of influencers. Firstly, based on the scale of their reach. Micro-influencers demand a very different budget from mega-influencers or celebrities. Secondly, the platform. Brands sometimes need to pay more for YouTube videos or Twitch streams than Instagram posts.
SaaS Brands That Are Doing Influencer Marketing Right!
Canva
Graphic design software company Canva leveraged its freemium model to get video testimonials from satisfied customers. One of those customers? Guy Kawasaki – an original Apple employee and marketing guru who is also an advocate and user of Canva’s freemium platform.
Ceralytics
The key to prolonged customer loyalty and customer awareness is to have a rock-solid content marketing strategy. This is what Ceralytics does for its customer brands. To attract attention to their brand, they began curating content marketing advice from top agencies and marketers and promoted those lists to thought leaders. When they linked these articles back to Ceralytics, they benefited from the increased clicks and attention.
SAAS Brands, The Time To Jump On The Influencer Bandwagon Is Now!
The good news is that SaaS brands are increasingly adopting this strategy to get ahead of their competitors with stunning results. Selecting a marketing strategy for a brand is hard work, particularly in a niche field like SaaS where your customers are brands. If you’re a SaaS marketer, don’t think twice about collaborating with influencers!
With AtisfyReach, you can quickly scale your influencer marketing initiatives. The platform automates critical tasks like influencer discovery, contracts and payments, and campaign management, freeing your time to develop a truly remarkable brand.
