🤳🏼 A Masterclass in UGC and SaaSfluencer Marketing

Get hyped, this is the first edition of the SaaSfluencer Newsletter!

The goal: help early-stage SaaS brands learn some neat marketing tactics, and showcase SaaS influencers who can shed light on the best tactics for partnerships and influencer campaigns. One happy family.

What to expect on the regular:

• The newsletter will go out try-weekly, meaning I’ll try to send it out once a week 😝

• Twice a month we’ll do a recap on some amazing marketing going on in the SaaS space (like this edition).

• The other two weeks of the month will be a podcast episode. It will feature either a SaaS brand that’s done some awesome marketing (organic & influencer partnerships) or a SaaSfluencer, aka, an influencer in the career space who’s well suited to pitch SaaS products, rather than CPG products and lifestyle brands that we’ve all seen a million times over.

Are you ready? LFG! 🚀

Was this email forwarded to you?

First up, the Singing SaaSfluencer

This SaaSfluencer campaign from @Farbsy with Scribe is gold 🥇 

This is a video promoting Scribe, an app that helps you turn screenshots of anything you do on your computer and turn them into a guide (faster than your boss can ask “how do I turn this word doc into a PDF?”). This video is an excellent example of influencer marketing done right.

🔴 It’s done in the creator's authentic style and tone. Max, who goes by "Farbsy" is known for creating these fun little ditties about work, and other relatable topics, even recently- the stress of parallel parking.

🔴 Audio hook: it uses the Microsoft Teams call ringtone which is a truly jarring trigger for many corporate professionals who hate getting that unexpected call from their boss.

🔴 Painpoint: everyone can relate to the rage they feel when their boss calls and asks them to do something simple for them that's way above their pay grade.

🔴 It ends with "and back to work I go" which is likely one of the value propositions for Scribe- the ability to quickly share a guide with your team so they can learn how to help themselves, and you can get back to your own, more meaningful work.

All around great ad, lots of creativity, authenticity and hopefully conversions to their tool. A really cool thing happened when I posted the snippet of this ad on LinkedIn - the influencer marketing manager from Scribe reached out and we’ll be having her on the podcast soon! Stay tuned 😋

This is a video promoting a match-making app aimed at college students, to “help you find your marriage backup plan.” This video is a great example of organic marketing and UGC.

UGC = User-generated content, or brand-specific content created by users, that reflects genuine user experiences and opinions. It's usually published on the brand’s organic social media channels at no cost to the brand (although this is a space that’s changing).

If you look at the TikTok account for Marriage Pact, you’ll see that a lot of the same video snippets that were included in this video are also parts of other videos. It’s possible the founders asked some friends to participate in these videos by sending clips of themselves opening their match email, or that they paid influencers to film these college-esque style of videos to look organic. My guess it that it’s the former.

Something unique about this example of UGC is that the brand looped together lots of UGC videos to make one branded video that looks, well… really fun and engaging. UGC can take lots of different formats, sometimes influencers are contracted to make UGC content for brands, meaning they create a video that goes on the brand’s social media pages, and never goes on their own. Some UGC is truly organic - people trying a new product on tiktok that they love and the brand sees it and asks to feature it on their social pages. More on that in a future edition.

What's great about this organic video:

🔵 The hook is framed as if finding your “optimal backup plan match on campus” has been a long-standing UVA tradition. And I didn’t go to UVA…but I’ll take one guess as to whether this is truly a tradition or not: it’s not.

🔵 The “once a year” timing conveys urgency and builds FOMO because theoretically if you’re seeing this video, you’ve already missed out.

🔵 The format is highly attention-preserving - it stitches together multiple video clips, all around 1-2 seconds long, showing different relatable scenes of UVA students in their dorm rooms, at the library, in lab, doing their hair, in class, etc.

🔵 The video is paired with trending audio, and extra brownie points because the song also relates to the app’s main value prop: “please please please don’t prove I’m right” - Sabrina Carpenter (….with the subliminal undertone: “please please please” don’t tell me I’m supposed to marry the guy in my friend group who I find so totally unpalatable right now).

🔵 The very authentic sounding voiceover of a “real student just using the app” toward the end (although I suspect it’s a member of the founding team) “I didn’t know mine [my match] but I heard some crazy stories like people matching with their siblings.”

🔵 The pure choas and hyped up hysteria- showing the reveal of the matches is honestly so exciting, nostalgic, and looks embarrassingly fun. People want to interact with brands who share their values or provide relatable entertainment in some way.

💌 If you enjoyed this inaugural edition, forward it to someone you know who enjoys learning about SaaS companies and influencers doing amazing organic and influencer marketing! 💌

Send it to your coworker, your co-founder, your head of marketing, your cousin’s friend that’s an influencer, you get it.

Thanks for reading!

-AB

P.s. Next week’s edition features the first 🎙podcast episode🎙 with Colin Rocker, Tiktok & IG career content creator with 340K+ followers. Follow the podcast on Spotify or Apple and take a listen to the trailer below!