“What’s the best growth channel for AI SaaS companies?”
“We just raised our seed. should we start running ads?”
“Our competitors are saying the same things as us; how do we stand out from all the other AI tools?”
Having advised multiple AI SaaS companies in the past year, I often hear questions like these.
A great number of AI SaaS tools have come on the market. Everyone is trying to stand out, and, ultimately, grow.
However, paid media will continue to get more and more expensive, with less ability for precise targeting due to privacy regulations and user behaviors.
SEO has become a table stakes that everyone is doing, which makes it harder to outrun competitors significantly. The evergrowing adoption of AI chat tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity is impacting click-through rates and traffic (you should still do it, but it’s a topic for another post).
The challenge for AI tools is even more prominent, as the need to differentiate and grab market share quickly is ever more urgent than traditional SaaS companies.
What’s the next frontier for growth for AI SaaS companies?
One of my clients, an AI creator tool, used micro-influencers from Tiktok to grow 2500% within six months and reached $1M ARR in 9 months.
The product is powerful, but the founding team didn’t have an extensive existing network and had little budget. To acquire the initial customers, they turned to AI influencers.
Initially, they contacted influencers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. They noticed that Tiktok, especially microinfluencers, offered the best ROI. A micro-influencer with 10K-100K followers typically has a laser-focused and engaged audience. They’re still very motivated to work with brands and are open to negotiation. Moreover, the TikTok algorithm allows for wider discovery, so they sometimes get pleasant surprises where an influencer with 10K followers generates 100K+ views, with just a few hundred dollars of investment.
They doubled down on Tiktok and saw growth soar.
This story is not uncommon. AI tools such as HeyGen, Gamma, Veed, and many others used influencer marketing to drive impressive user and revenue growth. Other SaaS tools such as Notion, Canva, and Airtable all used influencer marketing effectively.
(Disclaimer: It’s important to note, however, TikTok doesn’t work well with all audiences and products, especially very niche and complex SaaS products. Some recent algorithm changes seem to have impacted the effectiveness of content discovery, and we’re observing that the channel doesn’t seem to work as well as before for some clients. So, whether to invest in this channel needs deeper analysis before jumping in.)
A few key reasons:
PLG self-serve enables high volume and high velocity, leading to direct conversions. This contrasts with traditional SaaS companies that rely on a sales-led approach with long sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders. Influencers on social media platforms bring the benefit of volume, making them ideal for products that cater to a large audience. It’s also easier to notice the lift in engagement and conversions.
Traditional SaaS companies have product marketers create messaging frameworks, thought leadership, and sales enablement materials. Much of the content uses business-speak and relatively formal language that tends to be dry and requires a certain level of mental energy to understand, like ‘Leveraging actionable insights for scalable operational efficiency’ or ‘"Optimize cross-functional collaboration through comprehensive, multi-tiered platforms."
Influencers, however, are not bound by these corporate rules. They use their own language to interpret the product’s value and communicate to their audience in a way that’s easy to understand, often with fun commentary, examples of how they use the tool themselves, and drawing parallels and analogies. Something like: ‘With x, there’s no “Wait, did you do that?” moments. I just open it up every morning, I see exactly who needs to do what, and stuff actually gets done.’
Because they have limited time, the videos tend to be succinct, to the point, and often with intrigue. That intrigue drives their audience to search for and learn more about the product.
(This speaks to one of the key principles of influencer marketing: don’t expect the influencer to explain your product fully like your own website; their role is to create intrigue so that people come to your website to learn more.)
ChatGPT shocked the world overnight. Everything is about AI now. So many tools came on the market quickly. Many of them look similar and tell a similar story, or promise great things but underdeliver, like the hundreds of AI customer support chatbots or AI sales outreach tools. People have a strong interest in learning about AI tools, but not everyone has the time and expertise to know the differences and digest the amount of new information.
AI Influencers came on stage at the perfect timing and market conditions. They help distill information and filter the noise. They’re trusted voices so the audience doesn’t have to spend time experimenting with every tool, potentially waste time and end up in disappointment. They became the guides in a noisy world, just like what consumer influencers did with beauty, fitness, travel, and e-commerce.
Influencer marketing works great for some types of products and less effectively for others. When you decide which growth channels to prioritize and which influencer platforms to prioritize, consider the following questions:
Go where your audience hangs out. The stereotypes often still apply:
These are generalized views. The actual targeting also depends on the specific influencer’s audience. If you’re a SaaS tool for a specific and narrow audience, you’d want to understand the detailed audience breakdowns of a particular influencer.
For example, Substack is an excellent platform for tech and media professionals. But to decide which influencers to work with, you’d look into the specific writer’s target audience: marketers, early-stage founders, CFOs, etc., to determine who to work with.
In the early days, it’s helpful to start with the top 3 potential platforms to see what results you get, then decide to either double down on one if that one platform shows outsized ROI or switch things up.
If you’re a PLG company with a quick, seamless sign-up journey and a self-serve motion, you benefit the most from working with influencers. Tracking and measurement are a lot simpler, too.
If you’re more on the enterprise side with a sales-led growth motion, you’ve got to be clear about what impact to expect. With those longer sales cycles, influencers won’t be your magic wand for instant conversions. They’re just one step in a long, winding journey to nurture leads and move them down the pipeline. Measuring their incremental impact can be tricky, especially with limited volume. You will probably have a more visible impact by nailing your content marketing, SEO, and performance marketing first before bringing in the influencers for that extra boost.
Traditionally, influencer marketing is considered as a brand awareness channel and is measured by reach and impressions. However, influencer marketing may serve multiple different goals:
Prosumer AI SaaS tools do this best. The audience is already primed by the influencers, and they convert at a higher rate, often higher than organic search and performance marketing.
Vertical AI SaaS tools are a better fit for this. Vertical SaaS products typically target specific audiences and require more education and convincing - trust is the primary currency. YouTube allows for long-form education and explanation, LinkedIn allows for social proof, and Substack allows for precise targeting.
Instead of working with hundreds of influencers, vertical SaaS companies may want to start with 10-20 high-impact influencers who have industry cred and high trust to design higher touch programs, such as a choreographed LinkedIn storm during a product launch, inviting them to speak at webinars and conferences, hosting them or guest-appearing on podcasts, co-authoring whitepapers and long-form content, embedding shoutouts and special offers in their online courses, etc.
We still need to mention brand awareness because influencers are best at driving awareness in certain use cases. For a pre-public-launch product, the buzz from design partners and beta users can drive intrigue, and start building a waitlist. For a product that achieved traction in certain segments but not others, a targeted influencer campaign can seed awareness, even though one may not expect immediate conversion.
Regardless, measuring influencer marketing solely by reach and impressions is simply not enough. To drive real growth, you need to assess the ROI of influencer marketing with the same rigor and precision as you do for SEO and performance marketing. (Tracking and measuring influencer marketing impact deserves its own post.)
Influencer marketing is no longer only a brand awareness channel; it’s becoming a key growth channel for many AI SaaS products, and its importance will only grow and apply to more SaaS products. However, you’ll need to assess your unique situation to decide whether it can work for you and how well it can work for you.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve dabbled in influencer marketing for your SaaS products. Whether it’s success stories, unexpected hurdles, or just swapping strategies, I’m all ears. Drop me a message or leave a comment—and if you’re looking for a strategic discussion to level up your approach, I’d be more than happy to chat.
