Can influencers bring you better ROI than Ads?

Some companies report up to 420% ROI

This post is kindly supported by PartnerStack, an all-in-one platform specialized for B2B SaaS. More than 500+ brands, such as Apollo.io Typeform, Zoom Info, PandaDoc, Thinkific, Freshworks, Vidyard, and many others, trust PartnerStack with their partnership management.

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💡 In this edition, you will learn:

• Proven ways how to pitch your product to influencers (even if you don’t have a large budget)

• A case study from Rows.com that got them 30 million impressions and 128,000 sign-ups in 7 days

• How to set up a measurable system for influencer collaborations

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Dear GTM Strategist

As we prepare for back-to-school 🎒 marketing and sales adventures, we are hedging our budgets for Q4 and betting on how to end 2024 super strong. 

Should you invest in inbound, new channels, ads, turning your company into a media machine, building in public 🤠, clever outbound, and sophisticated ABM strategy? 

So many options - so little time, bandwidth, and budget: 

These are proven ways how nowadays unicorns have gotten their first 1000 customers. Here is the OG article.

If you have been reading this Substack for a long time, you know what follows: 

You can do anything, but you cannot do everything. 

Do not scatter yourself too thin. 

It is mission-critical to focus your limited resources on a carefully selected number of bets where you can make a significant and measurable impact in the next quarter.

Most GTM companies have 3-6 months to make or break it. 

Choose your battles. 

(rant over) 

Today, we will explore cases where working with B2B influencers resulted in tangible growth traction and positive brand association.  

If you are just starting to think if B2B influencers should be a part of your GTM strategy, I’d suggest that you first read the post where I go through “B2B influencers 101”. It provides answers to the following questions: 

• What types of influencer collabs exist in B2B 

• How to select the influencers

• What types of collaborations can you do with them

• How to validate them 

But if you are ready to buckle up and work with B2B influencers Q4, let’s dive right in! 

In this Substack post, we will explore 3 modes of influencer collabs: 

1. 0-1: DIY for the launch - We will also discuss working with influencers even if you cannot pay them yet or can only pay symbolic amounts. I’ll share many pitching examples.

2. Booster: Ad-hoc collabs - I invited Henrique Cruz, Head of Growth at Rows.com, to share insights on how he and his team got over 30 million views on social media and more than 50,000 sign-ups in the first few days - with the help of influencers.  

3. Scaler: Systems for influencer collab - Learn how Hector Forwood, Chief engagement officer at Flooencer, shared specific data on serious influencer campaigns 5-20K budgets with ROIs and results per influencer. The data is so good!

We’ve work to do. 

Action 🎬

Mode #1 DIY: Can you convince me (or others) to share your product for free?

Yes. I have been working with some companies for more than a year now. These are very valuable relationships that create new knowledge, opportunities to collaborate on events, and we support each other on social media. Emilia Korczynska, CMO at Userpilot was the first who supported my book launch. She believed in my work before I had anything to really show to the world. For that and more reasons, she is one of my favorite people to work with and I am happy to believe in people myself. ❤️

Relationships between content creators and brands go way beyond money transaction

With a 40K network on LinkedIn and approaching 6K Substack subscribers, I am still a 🐬, not a 🐳. I give regular shoutouts to smaller companies pro bono if: 

• I am really aligned with their mission and a passionate user (and customer) of their products—such as Tella.tv—which I pay for, and I don't even want to register in their affiliate program to keep things clean. Example:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/majavoje_battle-royale-tella-most-activation-emails-activity-7215988476209483777-D2jH

• If a company has implemented the GTM Strategist methodology and would like to openly share its data and lessons learned as a contribution to the community - I am always very, very happy to hear this, but I will require evidence. Example:

https://gtmstrategist.substack.com/p/ai-is-changing-the-rules-of-the-game

• There are some cool community members on LinkedIn who have followed and supported my content for a very long time. When they launch, I will try my best to be there, like I am here for Alexandre, who is launching next week. Good luck, man! Example:

• Very interesting cold pitches - highly targeted products that I am actually interested in, with planned launch dates. Example:

• I also get invitations for content co-creation with other authors, Substackers, podcasters and service providers, and I love doing it as long as: 

  • There is a strong added value for the audience 

  • We share case studies, curate tools or give actionable advice

  Example:

https://gtmstrategist.substack.com/p/can-you-get-to-your-first-million

The best advice I can give you is to think about value exchange, and trust me - I eat my dog food 🤠. In the last three months, I had the privilege to do a content exchange with three fantastic authors: 

• Aakash Gupta (131K Substack Product Growth)

Tactical Go-to-Market 101: How to Go From 0 to 1

• Rubén Domínguez Ibar (43K Substack The VC Corner)

Is this the end of SaaS?🤔, Venture debt investments swell in Europe💰, Navigating Corporate Venture Capital💡

• Paweł Huryn (76K Substack The Product Compass) 

5 GTM Principles You Should Know as a PM

I learned so much from these excellent content creators. These collabs made me a better Substack writer. 

I will forever be grateful for the support and good faith that Aakash, Rubén and Paweł have shown to my work. ❤️ I hope I can give back big time with interest one day. 

OK - this mode was too long, but I wanted to thoroughly review it since I bet that 80% of the readers are at this stage. 

Now, let’s serve the other 20%.

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Mode #2: Ad-Hoc viral launches with influencers 

Head of Growth at Rows.com, Henrique Cruz, shared some secrets of the viral launch of AI Analyst✨ on X and LinkedIn. The campaign resulted in 30 million views on social media and more than 128,000 sign-ups in 7 days. 

He reflected: “A big part of it was an accident. One we can’t take credit for.

Part of the launch plan involved sponsoring a handful of content creators on Twitter to share the announcement. As luck would have it, someone came up with the hook “AI just killed Excel”. This was not part of the brief nor something we would have written, but it took off online.

The hook was provocative enough that it got people interested, and the launch video was compelling enough to convince people to try the Rows. That started a cascading effect. More than one year later, we’re still seeing the ripple effects of that campaign.”

One of the most viral tweets about Rows’ AI Analyst✨

Here is my mini-interview with Henrique: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/henriquemcruz/

Hey Henrique, thanks so much for doing this 🙏. 

I have three questions: 

1. How did you select influencers for this campaign? 

Henrique: I spent a few hours on Twitter and LinkedIn (especially Twitter) following people who posted about AI news and AI products. After a few days I had a good sense of who were the content creators I thought would be a better fit, created a shortlist and sent them all DMs. 

This was the content of the DM:

2. How many did you include, and what was the budget for the campaign?

Henrique: We sponsored 6 content creators across Twitter and LinkedIn, and spent $5k

3. How did you validate these collaborations as the Head of Growth at Rows.com? 

Henrique: “We didn’t need to do a lot of validation after the collaboration because the results were obvious. In the first couple of hours, we started seeing dozens of content creators organically posting about the AI Analyst, ranking up millions of views, and 128,000 signups in the first 7 days after the launch.”

Henrique is a virality wizard 🧙‍♂️

You can dive deeper into his viral methods (from billboards to avatars and cards) in this article & do follow him on LinkedIn, he is one of the G.O.A.T. - a stellar practitioner who shares great content. 

Once you have validated that influencers work for you through guerilla and ad hoc tactics, it is time to double down and build a system! Let’s get serious. 

Mode #3: Influencers as a money-making machine

OK - so it happened once and it felt like magic. 

The next challenge is: can you make it repeatable, predictable, and scale it?

What makes a good influencer collab: 

• Right content-audience fit and influencer selection ✅

• Great exclusive offer ✅

• Creative promotion asset - not a billboard ✅

• Multiple influencers engaged to create a snowball effect ✅

The average reported ROI is usually >400%. 

A study by InfluencerHub found that companies that invest in B2B influencer marketing see a $5.20 return for every $1 invested. 

If that were true, brands would pump all their marketing dollars into influencers instead of ads. But we all know this is not the case. 

Cumulative data is BS and we need to understand them case-specific. 

I asked my colleague Hector Forwood, who runs Flooencer, a business influencer marketplace, to share some better insights. And oh boy, did he deliver 🙌 - thanks a million. He shared some real campaign data and allowed it to be published ❤️ - huge Kudos, legend! 

You can clearly see that there was an investment and time to value was longer than the campaign itself - not within a week because a complex software solution is not bought like a loaf of bread 🥖. 

What is even more interesting to me is the next deep dive - results per influencer. You can see that they vary differently. It is not a one-shot opportunity - you hedge the risks by working with multiple influencers and double-down on what works well. 

Now, how can you do this: 

- DIY - scale your operations or hire an influencer manager/social media expert to join your time. 

- DWY (done with you) - tools such as Flooencer, Favikon, and PartnerStack.

- DFY (done for you) - agency, experienced freelancer, or consultant. 

What is the right choice? 

If influencer relationships are mission-critical and you will do them a lot, it makes sense to do them in-house. If not so much or if you are still validating this channel, outsource. That would be my best logic.

I DIY this for my launches because I work on long-term relationships, but I have 20 meaningful relationships, not a CRM of 3000 influencers to manage. I’m happy to exchange more good practices.  

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Establish a 360° partner collaboration system to do it at scale

Now that you know how to unlock successful influencer partnerships, it is time to scale it. We are talking about Influencers as a serious GTM Motion, not random campaigns.  

You want to create a system of finding, activating, managing, tracking, compensating, and optimizing collaboration campaigns in a single place. These are jobs to be done:   

Here are the inspirational results that you can expect by investing in a full-fetched system of managing your partners, resellers and affiliates: 

• Apollo.io earns 10% of its revenue through its partner program

• PandaDoc grew monthly recurring revenue by 47% YoY

• Vendasta drove over $1.8M in affiliate program profits in less than 2 years

These examples are taken from PartnerStack, an all-in-one platform specialized for B2B SaaS. More than 500+ brands, such as Apollo.io Typeform, Zoom Info, PandaDoc, Thinkific, Freshworks, Vidyard, and many others, trust PartnerStack with their partnership management. G2 awarded PartnerStack the top-rated Partner Ecosystem Platform.

Here is how it looks in practice.

Even if you are not there yet, please watch the video because it will inspire you to take your system to the next level beyond timely and ineffective email correspondences. 

If you have the audience or clients yourself that use SaaS solutions listed in PartnerStack Marketplace, you can even consider applying for becoming a partner yourself. The service is free and if you recommend this softwares anyway, why would you not make some money for promoting it too? 

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Voilà! 

Now, it is your turn to implement this! 

What can you do in September to test if B2B influencers would make sense for you? 

• Pitch a selected influencer relevant to your audience? 

• Find 3-5 influencers to support your next launch?

• Measure ROI and time-to-value of your collaborations? 

You decide.  

Congrats on finishing reading another GTM Strategist Substack 👏

• If you liked this post, hit ❤️ on Substack so I will know that I should create more content like this for you. 

• If you have questions 💬, I reply to every single comment and email

• Share this Substack with a team member or a friend who can benefit from it - just forward the email. 📧

• If you want to support my work, head to https://gtmstrategist.com/ and purchase our solutions 

Happy back to school! Buckle up for another value-packed Substack next week in which we will explore what GTM Engineering is and how to change your GTM ops into a well-oiled machine. 

Make sure you are subscribed!

Till next time

Maja