SaaS influencer marketing with Brand24

Marta
August 12, 2019 ・ 4 min read

You developed your software, and you’re ready to show it to the world. You’re looking for a marketing tactic that will help you promote your product across multiple channels, audiences, and yield the results in no time. The holy grail you’re looking for is influencer marketing.

A carefully curated influencer marketing campaign will give your software much-needed credibility.

Consumers tend to trust recommendations. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, 49% of consumers depend on influencers’ recommendations.

Social media endorsements are a powerful tool you should implement while promoting your business.

To run a successful campaign, you need two things:

  1. Find the right business influencers to work with. The best influencers for your SaaS are not necessarily the hottest names in the industry. The best fits have dedicated following, social authority, and will vouch for your software.
  2. Monitor the results of your campaign. Depending on the goal, you have to take a look at different metrics.

How to conduct an influencer marketing campaign for SaaS?

Start with establishing the goal of your campaign. What do you want to achieve?

Influencer marketing goals include:

  • Raising brand awareness
  • Increasing traffic to your website
  • Generating new sales leads and conversions
  • Boosting your social media engagement
  • Earning a good reputation

No matter which goal you want to achieve, you have to choose the right influencer.

How to choose the right influencer for your SaaS business?

The most suited influencers are probably already in your business niche. Use media monitoring to find them.

1. Set up a project

To find the right influencer, you need to monitor the industry you’d like to target.

In the project creation wizard, from the type of monitoring, choose topic / hashtag.

project creation wizard where you can enter the keywords associated with your project

As your keywords, type in keywords related to the industry you’d like to target.

For example, if you offer a cutting-edge social media scheduling software, and you want to target fashion bloggers (as you know, they post tons of content on social media), your keywords should include “fashion” or “fashionista,” etc.

From that moment on, Brand24 will start to gather online mentions.

2. Go to the Analysis tab and take a look at the list of influence of social media authors

The goldmine of knowledge is in the Analysis tab.

First, scroll down to the Influence of social media authors table.

The list contains ten business social media accounts you should investigate further for your influencer marketing campaign.

table showing the most influential social media authors

The list is accompanied by two metrics — the share of voice and the influence score.

The share of voice tells you what part of the online discussion was started by a given account.

Influence is an estimated number of views generated by the selected author.

The metric is based on many variables, including the number of mentions, the number of followers / subscribers / friends, and the average visibility percentage for the selected social media channel.

You can narrow down the list by filtering the results according to the platform you’d like to focus on.

You’ll find all the filters on the top right corner of the page.

print screen from Brand24 showing where you can filter the results according to a social media platform

3. Vet the candidates

You have a list of candidates for your influencer campaign; now it’s time to vet them.

To do that, you have to examine the applicants in greater detail.

Create a project for every person you think is a good fit for your campaign.

As keywords use their name, social media handle, and their branded hashtag.

After the tool gathered the data, take a look at two metrics:

  • Estimated social media reach
  • Sentiment analysis

You’ll find both of them at the top of the Mentions tab.

a graph showing the volume of mentions and sentiment analysis

Estimated social media reach will indicate how many people might have heard about your software.

Sentiment analysis will help you determine the reputation of your potential business partner.

A high number of negative mentions should raise a red flag.

An ideal candidate for the influencer marketing campaign will:

  • Have high estimated social media reach
  • Have a prevailing positive sentiment
  • Generate a high share of voice

4. Assess the results of your influencer marketing campaign

Once you’ve completed the campaign, it’s time to assess its results.

Brand24 will help you:

  • Determine the changes in brand awareness
  • See the difference in social media engagement
  • Track sentiment analysis over time to spot alterations in brand reputation

To find all the data you need, go to the Summary tab.

On the top of the page, you can choose the periods you’d like to compare.

metrics showing changes in social media reach, sentiment, and the number of mentions for a given keywords

Once you set the dates, the tool will automatically calculate and compare metrics such as:

  • Social media reach
  • Interactions
  • Positive and negative sentiment