How Hootsuite drove $1m pipeline with LinkedIn Influencers

How Hootsuite Drove $1m Pipeline with LinkedIn Influencers

A couple of weeks ago, Hootsuite - a leading social media management tool ran a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign in partnership with 10 LinkedIn creators.

First, I am currently working on a B2B influencer marketing resource, and in my research process, I am noticing the rise in this trend. I will be my in-depth resource next week.

The team at Hootsuite worked with creators who met the following criteria;

- Creators Involved: 10 (Founders and Social Strategists to Content Directors)
- Audience Size: Mixed - from 19K to 270K
- Creative Freedom: Full freedom
- Post Format: All text + image

Post Template Examples

The ‘freedom’ to create the post is one interesting move from the Hootsuite team. An example is Sophie’s post, in which the Director of Pretty Little Marketer highlighted a core trend from the magazine.

You can check out the posts from the creators and learn the text content approach.

- Gabriel Gomez - https://lnkd.in/gveDt4Sh
- Bri Reynolds - https://lnkd.in/g4UudEKg
- Jayde I. Powell - https://lnkd.in/geexz_4v
- Sophie Miller - https://lnkd.in/gixtRWfm
- Olivia Mae Hanlon - https://lnkd.in/g-7ZqTZB
- Grace Andrews - https://lnkd.in/gD4_RW7S
- Keira Penney - https://lnkd.in/guaj6jkk
- Karla McNeilage - https://lnkd.in/gHeHcgu5
- Brandon Smithwrick 🧠 - https://lnkd.in/g-dxjCJx
- @elfried samba - https://lnkd.in/gkG2myE6

The Campaign Results

→ 50 media mentions.
→ 5,000+ engagements.
→ 66% of downloads came from social media.
→ Cost per lead? Just 1/8th the price of their regular ads.

And of course, the attributed $1m pipeline as mentioned by the CEO of Hootsuite.

The LinkedIn Influencer Campaign Template

Matt Swain recently shared his template on how Hootsuite executed its LinkedIn influencer marketing efforts. Here is the summary from the template above.

The ICP: Hootsuite zeroed in on top social media creators building on LinkedIn. This included Founders of social media creative agencies, leaders in tech companies like Lyft and LinkedIn personal branding experts like Karla McNeilage

Storytelling posts: They encouraged the 10 creators to write creative captions. The content had the creator’s flair, tone of voice, and formatting befitting themselves.

The Engagement: I noticed some of them added a comment with a different visual holding the The Hoot Post magazine to drive engagement.

Scaling with TL Ads: I’ve seen Hootsuite is running Thought Leader Ads for some of the creators. The goals are to amplify the brand and drive pipeline through engagements.

Proven Growth

Scaling with Virality - Nathan Latka Webinar

Nathan Latka hosts seasonal webinars covering proven growth tactics to help SaaS companies scale. The recent webinar covered several insights worth sharing.

PandaDoc, & Convertkit (Kit)’s viral growth moves

The visual above shows how PandaDoc used its esignature product to sign more users. The team noticed that to scale the efforts, they had to get the user to invite someone in the shortest period.

For Kit, Nathan Barry, the CEO shared that adding ‘ Powered by Convertkit ‘ to free users’ email accounts, it drove 14-15k clicks per week.

Clickup’s compare page template to $10m ARR

Speaking to your customers who switched from your key competitor and adding it on the page is a great move to leverage - moreso if you are going against existing giants.

Click Funnels’ 6.3k backlinks strategy

I have written about using free tools to drive organic traffic and conversions in the past [ Ahrefs does best ]. Click Funnels has leveraged the same strategy and build business tools.

The results from Nathan’s slides: are 6.3k backlinks, 91 domain ranks, and the revenue that comes with it.

As a startup founder or marketer looking to scale your organic SEO efforts, tap into building free tools for your users. You can get a freelance developer from Upwork or Fiverr to do it affordably.

Metadata io, & Founderpath’s digital events strategy

Metadata io team runs demand digital events and shares them with their community for free.

However, Nathan shared that the team has one shortcoming - they don’t squeeze all the value through repurposing to multiple formats and content assets.

Nathan Latka’s Founderpath does it better - converts the webinars into; courses, databases, slides, playbooks, podcasts, and viral social media posts.

Founder Story

How Guillaume Moubeche, Lempire CEO Scaled to $28m ARR

I have been following G. from when Lempire hit a $150m valuation and learning from his growth tactics on LinkedIn.

G. recently shared his journey from his $1,000 to building a $28m revenue software portfolio.

My learnings from G.’s founding journey:

• Be willing to fail, to succeed

• Eat your dog food if you want to build products customers love

• Document your learning as a startup founder (Founder-led brand)

• Embrace hand-to-hand combat to get your first 20 customers ( learn sales)

Build with Social

Reddit Ad Case Studies

I spend a ton of time on Reddit, and recently I have been looking at their Ads case studies. Thus far, the results are a huge disappointment. Here are two examples that were shared on the platform.

The Redditor in this post was sharing a comparison with Google Ads. The later results converted at 16% while Reddit resulted in zero conversion.

Case study two

Here is the post excerpt on the steps to run a Reddit Ad.

1.Choose the best-performing organic post on your social media and use it as an ad.

2.Don't start with a full budget, try spending $10 a day for 5 working days and see how that performs, make adjustments, and find a sweet spot where you seem to get above-average conversions

3.Do not accidentally click on broadcast ads, that will just spread your ad to users with various interests. I made that mistake. Instead, you can choose a target ad and specific subreddits where your ideal customer exists.

4.Do not select all countries to target your ads. My sweet spot is the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Denmark, United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg and Norway.

5.I noticed conversions on weekends are usually very low

Proven Startups

Codefast -build in public

Marc Lou, the founder of Codefast - edutech for people to learn coding is constantly making waves on X, thanks to ‘ build in public ‘ moves.

As of this writing, Codefast has scaled to $200k/mo by Marc sharing his journey building the course and delivering customer success on X.

Taskmagic - beef as marketing

Zapier kicked out Taskmagic (like an automation virtual assistant) out of their store after considering them a competitor. The founder Jeremy Redman shared the experience on an Indiehacker post, but what stood out for me was the beef marketing strategy.

Jeremy shared that talking shit about Zapier generated $2 million in revenue under one year.

After being kicked out of Zapier’s connection store, Jeremy created a YouTube video taking them on; ‘ We are coming for your Zapier! Here’s Why with Taskmagic, You No Longer Need It. ‘

Also, they set up  moveyourzap.com to build awareness around how you can move your most used zap for free; unlimited steps, and unlimited apps for free.

Another example that I came across is Adam Robinson, CEO of RB2B taking on their established rival - 6sense on LinkedIn.

ConTech B2B SaaS Startup - pricing lessons

I came across this Reddit post sharing some pricing and sales strategy lessons enterprise startups would learn and implement. These learnings are from a $750k revenue and $550k ARR.

That is all for this week.

Which section stood out for you today?

-Okerosi