8 Winning LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Strategies for SaaS

all right hello everybody Welcome to the session around LinkedIn influencer marketing and the strategies to win on LinkedIn in software so first off I want to have some fun today I mean a lot of these sessions were very focused on financial projections and revenue and influencers are inherently fun especially in software so let's dive in so the first thing I want to ask the crowd here raise your hand if you're on LinkedIn and everybody should have their hand up because we work in software right keep your hand up if you run

LinkedIn pay dos okay so a couple hands went down now keep your hand up if you've ever done anything around LinkedIn influencer marketing okay so we have I see a half a what was a half a hand right there half a hand okay so you could see we have one person in the front so the first thing that I want to talk about today before we talk about the executional how and the winning strategies I want to talk about the wide openen opportunity that there is on LinkedIn right you saw everybody in the room here imagine this was times 10 one

person in the front row raise their hand that they've done LinkedIn influencer marketing so the opportunity is untapped everybody is competing in this red ocean in software whether it's through webinar strategy email marketing and those are all great but they're not working as well as they used to and there's something new emerging in this blue ocean that your competitors are not doing and it's wide open untapped and it's still extremely inexpensive compared to influencer marketing on other platforms so you might be asking

yourself well who am I I I'm the founder and CEO of Creator match my name is AJ Xin and we match brands with LinkedIn creators and we're going Allin we're going one inch wide a mile deep Allin on LinkedIn Creator or LinkedIn influencer marketing and we have the first ever platform to match brands with creators and manage the entire process end to end from sourcing to Discovery to actually managing the campaign and also looking at all the analytics as as we all know on LinkedIn even if you're a Creator analytics are horrible on LinkedIn so

we're changing that and these are some of our brand Partners right here you can see we've worked with some smaller startups as well as some public companies like HubSpot so you might be asking okay well what experience do I have in and I'm going to say Creator and influencer interchangeably today so bear with me you might be asking what experience do I have well I've done my sponsorships for my own Creator brand as a Creator and I've also run through Creator match hundreds of sponsored posts with hundreds of creators we've paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to different LinkedIn creators and I've worked with the leading Brands and here are some of the different

creators that you can see and the first takeaway that you can see these these don't look like paid ads right could we get a nod could we agree that this doesn't look like your typical SAS ad creative right it looks like a normal post on LinkedIn but it's a sponsored post so I know everybody here the first objection that we always get around influencer marketing on LinkedIn is well tell me about the ROI right we all want to go back to our sales team to our leaders and say okay well what dollar amount did I return because I spent a dollar with this Creator but before we

talk about Roi we need to talk about other benefits that you get with influencer marketing aside from typical ad creatives with paid ads you also get to humanize the brand so we all want to follow people right we don't want to follow Brands so when a Creator or influencer talks about your brand it's super organic and you're able to follow a person the next part is that you leverage trust a lot of the people here raise your hand if you're part of a startup you're either a founder or you're an emerging company great I hate to say it but nobody knows about you yet

right so it can be a long road a long journey and the best way to FastTrack that is to leverage the trust that the audience already has with that Creator let's say 100,000 followers and now the audience trust you because the Creator influencer trusts you as well and they're talking about it the next part is that you break through the noise we talked about the red versus the Blue Ocean strategy and all your competitors are competing on very difficult platforms Tik Tok Instagram YouTube cpms are going up ad costs are going up and

there's so much noise there is such little noise on LinkedIn even just organic content on LinkedIn only 1% of the 1 billion users on LinkedIn create organic content and of that you saw one person here in the front row who's changing the game one person here has actually dived in to LinkedIn influencer marketing the next one here is that you turn followers into fans so instead of going out and building an audience for your brand you can actually tap into an already existing audience that's Niche

that you identify with a Creator or influencer and turn those followers into fans the last two here is you Rebrand the Bland so raise your hand if you think that software is inherently boring I mean come on a lot of the stuff here and I'm not saying everybody here but a lot of software is boring right and I see a little come on you definitely agree it's it's it's boring so how can you make it sexier right how can you follow the Playbook that b Toc companies do that make it so exciting like there was just a campaign that was run with lift right everyone here probably took a

Uber or lift to get here even lft athletic greens not just the typical software companies are coming on to LinkedIn so you have to start thinking about rebranding the Bland the last part here is fast tracking brand visibility we spoke that a lot of people here are from new startups so instead of trying to get Mass visibility and awareness where you would typically work with a PR agency that's just awareness how can you get the right awareness in front of the Right audience so now that we spoke about the why let's talk about the how

and let's talk about really how to implement the best winning strategies to win on LinkedIn and these are all through real world examples and case studies that we've run with our brand Partners so the first thing and the first strategy is you cannot compare apples to oranges another big objection that we get is well I'm running Tik Tok ads let's say at a $15 CPM or I'm working with influencers on another platform but let's be honest if you're Doom scrolling through Tik Tok even if you're a decision maker you're probably

not ready or looking to buy so people on LinkedIn are inherently in that work mode and they're looking to make decisions so you can see some different CPM benchmarks right here we've been able to compete with these other platforms and even beat out the paid ads team at these companies and say okay well let's say you're running LinkedIn ads at a $33 CPM we want to use that as a benchmark or even beat that paid ad spend because not only are you getting awareness trust and clicks but you're also building trust and ads do not build

trust nobody here likes ads the second winning strategy is that you need to identify the right influencers so let's say that you leave today's talk and you say okay great we're going to dive in and we're actually going to build out an influencer strategy and we are a mtech company we're going to find the biggest marketing creators on LinkedIn the issue is that LinkedIn does not give you good audience demographics you can also not sift through posts and see what's working with these creators what they're talking about other than going one by

one in a very manual process so we built internal tools at Creator match where you actually can search by metadata keywords to see what keywords they're talking about so someone if you can I want to throw if you can throw out the name of your company anybody throw your company out okay and what Niche or industry are you in GPU CL hosting okay GPU Cloud hosting great those are all keywords right so let's say that you identify you think the perfect influencer in Ai and Tech and

you type in those keywords and nothing comes up they're probably not the right influencer for you but somebody else might have a smaller audience size they have hundreds of posts that match that keyword in the last 30 days and you can sort high to low likes and see all the post formats that you want so a big thing that we see is people are working with the wrong influencers and actually get the wrong idea of influencer marketing it all starts with identifying the right partner to be that advocate in the right Community the next strategy is

you have to build a detailed campaign brief this is the framework this is the backbone of the entire campaign and and you think okay well this is not that sexy and why do I have to document this you have to assume that the Creator that you work with knows nothing about your software all of us here we can agree that we know everything right we might be the founder I see a smile in the front row the CEO we know everything you can come up here and give a cold pitch about our brand but we cannot assume that anybody knows anything especially if we're early on so you need to build a

super robust campaign brief and not just outline the features of your software but what features do you want to talk about what's on limits what's off limits what are your competitors doing that we should talk about right so building a really detailed campaign uh campaign brief will set up the campaign for Success the next one here and this is a big one is so many brands that we work with think that this is the same process as your typical ad creative that you're running paid ads the issue is that you will lose a bit of control working with

influencers but the reason why you work with influencers is they are the creatives they're building the creative right so don't come to an influencer and say okay well we are XYZ software and we want you to only post videos video content but you didn't do your research you didn't do that keyword research that we talked about in the beginning and you didn't see that maybe they don't post a ton of videos but their image posts are on fire right now right so we also identify not just their total Post in a certain time frame but you also can see

what post format they're posting so instead of going to a Creator and saying Hey I want you to post carousels because I've heard I went to the session and carousels are popping off on LinkedIn they've never posted a Carell this is a screenshot from someone's profile they've never posted careel so why would you tell them to do something new to shock Their audience double down on what's working so with that campaign brief you can outline okay you want image Carousel and video you choose what's best for your audience and that's giving them creative control right and

again if you want 100% control use paid ads but you lose the trust the next strategy is invest in long-term Partnerships the best and the biggest Creator programs in the world are the ones that are always on and the ones that are longterm and you turn those creators not into a transaction but true sales teams and advocates in that right Community you also unlock discounts because instead of paying for one off post you actually say okay well

I'm going to pay you for 10 posts over the period of five months two posts per month you can unlock discounts another big thing I guarantee you hopefully I'll be speaking at the next SAS open a lot more hands are going to go up around LinkedIn influencer marketing and testing it out so how can you block out your competitors there's something called category exclusivity where you can say okay well if I'm web flow and you're working with me you cannot work with WordPress or any other competitor in this certain category you have to pay a little bit of a premium but it pays

dividends because when the other company or your competitor wakes up wanting to do the same strategy you locked in the best Creator set using all of these tools so start to think longterm you don't have to invest longterm today you can always start with a test or Pilot campaign but think long term and think how you can you block out the competitors and it's an offensive and defensive strategy and I just reached out to creators this morning for a campaign that we're running and two responses said I'm sorry I can't I'm locked into another Brand's campaign

imagine that on a wider scale number six we have three two more here so many Brands want to work with creators that have the biggest audience size right because let's say again everybody here I want to get a head nod if you work with a creator that has one million followers how could it go wrong right you might assume that right and I see Smiles in the background but follower count is just a vanity metric we go deeper especially when we're doing rate negotiation with creators and influencers and we look at things like engagement rate we look at

things like average likes per post but we also look at median likes per post because let's say that you average 100,000 Impressions per post and one post got seen by a billion people that average is going to get skewed like crazy and it's not the true average so we actually look at median likes per post to account for those viral outliers as we've seen some of the of those LinkedIn posts go crazy viral right so when you're looking you're sourcing this Creator set don't just focus on follower count think about the engagement rate

how often they post the median likes or median comments or median shares per post not just those averages and most brands don't do this and they overpay like crazy number seven everybody here wants to sell right and every brand is going to say I want brand awareness as the goal but the true goal is always going to come back to Roi I want to get more Revenue but if you're working with the Creator especially for a brand that people have not heard of and it's the first time that that creator has ever mentioned your brand it should not be to

sell even if it's a campaign not focus on brain awareness but focus on conversion we all know the marketing rule of seven you have to have multiple touch points so instead of focusing on okay here's my discount code use it when you're purchasing my monthly software you have to think about easing your audience or easing the Creator's audience into this brand and into your orbit so a lot of the the successful campaigns that we've run have not been about purchase here but lead magnets right especially if you have an entire

email funnel built already you just need more people in the funnel that are really high quality leads can be things like lead magnets signing up for your newsletter going to your website even just learning more about you and you can have ctas to purchase down the road especially longer term campaigns or on post five post six but post one with a new Creator in that Creator set should never be to purchase because as we all know deal Cycles especially B2B software are incredibly long and imagine we meet for the first time in the hallway and I say hey here's my brand here's the link

to purchase you're going to say you're crazy right here's my card let's connect on LinkedIn let's chat let's follow each other let's build that relationship make it warmer and then sell down the road so here are some screenshots from some campaigns that we ran and you can see we collect everything around top of funnel brand awareness Impressions down to audience nurturing engagements likes comments shares even broken out by the individual creators and the last part here is everything around conversion so link clicks CTR and CPC link clicks is

something that you cannot track today on LinkedIn so we created basically bitly internally through a Creator match uh URL and UTM so you can track link clicks not just in total but per creator for every single sponsored post and the last one here and this is probably the most exciting takeaway that I would love if you guys see some pictures coming out here to make sure you grab some pictures raise your hand if you were aware that you can white a creators sponsored post on LinkedIn so I see one here and that makes sense

because I know you've done you have experienced this I see half a hands I'll say one and a half okay so again we spoke about the wide open opportunity a huge strategy that we're doing for instance with notion one of our brand Partners is let's say we run a campaign in a month with 10 sponsored LinkedIn posts of those 10 let's say that there's five creators two posts each of those 10 posts let's say three of those posts crush it out of the park I mean like crazy viral tons of clicks you know it resonated on the left here is a

screenshot that I grabbed from the ads manager from notion it looks like a typical ad creative right not from a human from a brand account with no face and it looks like a cool creative but it looks like a company it's a brand selling to you what you can do now as of two months ago on LinkedIn for linkedin's new addition to their thought leader ad type is you can now put ad spend and boost a post on LinkedIn from a Creator so what does that mean you can see here on the right that one of the creators that we partnered with is Jade

Jade is a marketing leader at Google so let's say that you're a no-name startup nobody knows who you are you have very few customers you're instantly building trust because someone at Google is basically referring you on the platform and when you put ad spend and boost this post in the feed it shows up like a typical post it's very hard to see the sponsored label and this can we agree that the right side is way more organic than the left and our hunch is that these ad creatives will go down and you'll see way more sponsored posts in

the feed and such few brands are doing this so not only is influencer marketing untapped on LinkedIn but whitelisting which is incredibly common on other platforms any marketers here you know whitelisting is basically a guarantee when you work with an influencer on Tik Tok Instagram Etc that is unheard of on LinkedIn and the creators love it because it's no extra work for them it's just ad spend behind their post so those are the eight strategies the winning strategies to win within LinkedIn influencer marketing the last part here

is that you might be wondering okay I want to get started right what do I do and yes it costs money to work with us of course right we're not a charity however we built an incredible new LinkedIn Chrome extension a lot of the screenshots that I showed you this is a screenshot that's a screenshot earlier in this deck is 100% free through our Chrome extension so you can kind of dive in start to Source the best LinkedIn creators for your Brands campaign and we're currently in private beta so if you go to our website creater Match.com and sign up for our newsletter we're giving all of our newsletter subscribers

Early Access or if you grab me outside in the hallway I'll directly add you and give you access today to our Chrome extension so those are the eight winning strategies and thank you so much for the time today [Applause]