How Bonjoro Created A SaaS Affiliate Channel That Drives 30% Of All Signups

Time and time again SaaS businesses talk about building affiliate programs. After all – who wouldn’t want someone else doing the legwork for you in return for a small commission?!

The problem is, most people don’t know where to start. They have questions like:

• What tools do we need?
• How much commission shall we provide?
• How shall we promote this?

Luckily for you, we’ve interviewed Oliver Bridge from Bonjoro and picked his brain to learn how they use their affiliate channel to drive 30% of their signups and paying customers. Enjoy!

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Our guest for this show:

Oliver Bridge, Head of Marketing and Growth at Bonjoro

Oliver has been leading growth and marketing at Bonjoro since 2016. During this time they’ve grown to become one of the top ten fastest-growing apps on Zapier and are consistently driving thousands of signups every single month. He’s a pretty cool guy too ????

Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t automate your affiliate programme from the outset. When you’re smaller and have the time to do so make sure you go super personalized, it’ll pay off in the long run.
2. Be selective with who you approach about your affiliate programme, go for the most active users and people who really love your product first.
3. Podcasts are a great way to get the word out about your product, Oliver and his team are really doubling down on this.

How Bonjoro Created A SaaS Affiliate Channel That Drives 30% Of All Signups Transcript

Please note: We edit the transcript below for a better reading experience.

Dylan: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode of The SaaS Marketing Show. Today, I’m joined by Oli Bridge, who is the Head of Marketing and Growth at Bonjoro. Bonjoro is a platform that allows you to send perfectly-timed, personalized videos to help better convert, onboard, and support your customers.

I hope I’ve got that right, Oli. I think I have because I’ve used platforms like yours fairly frequently. Welcome to the show.
Looking forward to talking with you today.

Oliver: [00:01:56] Thanks very much, yeah. Good stuff. Good to be on. Yeah, you got that perfect. I had some notes down here, and you got it word for word.

Dylan: [00:02:02] I’m sure like most people listening to this will know about video tools, whether it’s like from a sales perspective, from a marketing perspective, people using tools like Bonjoro, Loom, maybe Drift video, whatever people choose to go with. I’m excited to hear a bit more about how you guys are growing the business, positioning against some of those people to see what the differences are.

The main focus that we agreed on for today’s episode is super valuable because I see this question asked time and time again in The SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group, for example. I had a call with a friend of mine who’s Head of Growth at an early stage startup two days ago, and he was asking me, “Hey, how do I build out a referral or affiliate program?”.

I see these questions all the time, and today our focus is going to be how you guys have created, you said to me, a B2B, a SaaS B2B influencer channel app Bonjoro. Which I find interesting. I want to talk about that too because most people don’t necessarily call it an influencer channel within B2B.

Before we deep dive into some of those areas, maybe you could share with us a quick top-level of Bonjoro, what you guys do and, and then we’ll just talk about some numbers and some of the growth that you’ve had recently.

Oliver: [00:03:15] I think you put it pretty nicely. Bonjoro, in its simplest terms, is a video email tool at the moment. But it goes a bit deeper than that. We plug into your CRM, your marketing automation tool, whether you’re in sales, whether you’re working in CS, to help you send personal videos at the perfect moment to engage your customer.

Whether you’re a salesperson looking to maybe convert more customers by doing something a little bit more personal and engaging them in that way, or you’re in CS, and you want to give a better onboarding experience to make sure we get that activation. Or if you want to do the job of customer support, so your customers get a deeper experience with you and your brand and feel valued, so people stick around more.

Simply, it’s video email, but it’s more than that in a sense that, yeah, plug it into your CRM, your marketing automation tool, and you get pings, notifications to send videos at the perfect moment. And you can send those videos from a web application. You can send them from a mobile app.

We’re really big on the mobile app side of things. I think in terms of the marketplace for video, like, mobile apps, like way ahead of everything else. I think, as a company, we’ve always been fully remote, and we have a culture and an ethos, which is to connect with customers in a way that you’re comfortable with.

I don’t think everybody is comfortable in an office recording a personal video in front of all of their colleagues and stuff being over her. So, yeah, we do a lot of hours. We’ll go for a lunchtime walk and we onboard at the moment, a hundred signs a day and we’ll go and do a lunchtime walk and send onboarding videos.

The driver behind what we’re trying to solve with Bonjoro is making the whole personalized video thing scalable. A very quick example is that we give you, you can pull in your CRM data into the Bonjoro app so that you can see it at the time of recording, so you’re not having to circle back, look back at the next Excel spreadsheet or look back at your CRM.

We want to enable you to sort of connect with your customers wherever you are in the world.

Dylan: [00:05:18] That’s awesome. I’m a big advocate of technology like this because when I worked at HootSuite, it would have been maybe three years ago now, three and a half years ago, I can’t remember exactly. But, we in the sales team were starting to use video back then.

A few of the senior product people spanned off from HootSuite and created Vidyard, which is one of the other video tools that was out there. At that time, when I was pretty heavy on outbound sales, using video in our sales cadences, three and a half years ago, when nobody else was doing it was a huge differentiator between us and anyone else. It worked well.

Interestingly, what you said. Back then, I know not everyone on the sales team used it, and I think for the reason that you said, a lot of people were nervous about people being around, and I was nervous about that too.

What I would do is I used to go and book a phone booth or meeting room for like half an hour or an hour and batch my videos while I was in that room so no one else could see. It’s interesting that you say that.

I think the use case that you talk about with the CRM connections and everything like that is really interesting to me because I use a video tool. I use either Drift video because we’re a Drift Partner. I use it every so often, but I’ve gone back to using Loom more recently just because the video quality on Drift is struggling a little bit at the moment.

But for my personal use case, I don’t need to use it too much. I’m using it to communicate with people in our team on quick tasks and then sometimes if our customers. For any reason, we do not have our weekly call, or they’re traveling or something. I just need to share something quickly. I’ll send them a quick update. I don’t need it tied into my CRM system for something like that.

When I was at Leadfeeder, if our signups were coming in, they were automatically being categorized so that we can then make that process of reaching out to them very, very easy. I think that’s really cool.

Are the competitors doing that too, or is that something specific to Bonjoro, or how does that work?

Oliver: [00:07:15] We set out to do the whole sort of scaling it thing with something that we set out to solve very early on.
Other competitors are sort of doing the video thing, but integrations are at the heart of what we do. It’s helping you send it at the right time and having the right information to do it. That’s one of the big things, obviously, sort of the mobile stuff, so you can do it from anywhere is really big as well.

There were a lot of, you’ve touched on a few of them. There are a lot of videos that are lots of like little nuances of working in it, and we’ve been doing this since we launched beta end of 2016 and went paid January 2017. There are a lot of little nuances that you don’t see until we started using it.

Like the one about people not being that comfortable recording in front of their desk, so they might not use something like a Loom. All of that stuff is all the stuff we’re picking through and figuring out at the moment. Like any good sort of marketing or product building is about this, listening to your customers and then tweaking and tweaking your products until it’s perfect for your particular use case.

I’ve got this mental model for how people can use video as well, which I’d like to share. In terms of where Bonjoro fits in, I say there are three types of places you can use video as a marketer, salesperson. We’re really about high touch. I look at high touch is when you want a response from someone or whether you want to drive action from that person.

In my opinion, if you want one of those two things, you should be doing something personalized. Whether that’s a very personalized email or a personalized video, then you should be going that route. Down a step, medium touch for me, this is about maybe you want to educate your customers or just update them about something so that for that, you could do something like a screen recorder, like a Loom.

We’re just about to launch our own screen recorder on Monday so that you could use Bonjoro’s screen recorder for that. Insert link here to that.

Then below that, low touch is transactional. You could use any other platform for that. Bonjoro sits very much in the high touch part of things and then also in the medium touch side of things, but we’re not interested in the low touch sort of transactional side.

Dylan: [00:09:26] That makes a ton of sense to me. At a time like the present, one of the most important things is having that additional layer of personalization with our communication with each other.

I’m seeing even some of our customers that we work with at Hey Digital; there’s one in particular, a company called Document360, a SaaS business who we support. When we first met, of course, we were always camera’s on Zoom calls or whatever. Over time he kind of strayed away from doing that even though I’d always have mine on. And then just like last week, he had his camera on for the first time in a few months. People want that extra contact.

Oliver: [00:10:12] I think there’s a big play in asynchronous as well at the moment.

A lot of people are going after that. You could call it. A lot of people at the moment are talking about remote working. For me, the more interesting part for remote working isn’t remote working; it’s tools that allow you to do things asynchronously as a team or with your customers.

Bonjoro plays into that. There are lots of other tools at the moment that are playing into that that are interesting. I think people want to get away from having to be on the thing with their team members because their team members might be in a different time zone.

We’re across five different countries at Bonjoro, lots of different time zones. We were founded in Sydney. I’m based in London. We’ve got people in the US, South Africa, so we can’t be on the same thing all the time. So we need that sort of asynchronous communication tool.

Dylan: [00:11:00] Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay, cool. Before we jump into some kind of tips and tactics around building out that influencer marketing channel for you guys at Bonjoro, let’s just talk quickly about some of the numbers.

I know that we can’t share specific MRR and ARR because of some conversations that you guys are in at the moment. We can say that Bonjoro is one of the top fastest-growing apps on Zapier. Is that right?

Oliver: [00:11:23] Yeah, in 2018, we were in that top 10 list of fastest-growing, and we were in it again last year. This is Zapier’s list they publish every year, which is top apps for work—basically looking at all of the Zapier’s customers. Who is being connected to the most? Bonjoro was number 10 on the list last year.

We’re growing very quickly, and it’s really good for us cause we want that. We talked about Bonjoro being deep on the integration side of things and bringing in all that data and sort of helping do things at the right times. Zapier is very much a big play on that side.

Dylan: [00:11:56] Awesome. That’s really cool.That’s really good to hear. Congratulations on that, because I know that getting those first few, even just the first few connections when you are building on the Zapier marketplace can be pretty difficult.

I remember when I was at Leadefeeder when we first began that process because you have to get to certain numbers before the team at Zapier gives you additional support and things like that. I know that it was a pretty scrappy process to try and get as many as quickly as possible, and you’ve done that. But then you’re continuing to grow good because it means people are using the tool rather than like you kind of forcing them to quickly connect on Zapier.

Oliver: [00:12:32] Early on, it felt a bit sort of laborious cause they’re very specific, aren’t they, with their language and what you can say, how you construct your sentences. It’s clever the way they built out, so everybody’s doing it in the same way. But yeah, once you’re in there and we’re now like a platinum partner, we get a lot of support from them. We love the team, and yeah, it helps. It’s helped us grow is a real sort of foundational aspect about being connected with Zapier.

Dylan: [00:12:57] I know that you said to me when we were prepping for this that the affiliate marketing influencer channel that we’re going to talk about was one of the big levers behind the early growth that you guys had at Bonjoro.

I want to go deep on that, but I also want to ask you before we do that, how big a portion of the kind of marketing activity or new user acquisition is coming from that channel still and what are maybe just top-level a couple of the other things that you’re doing or you’re having fun with at the moment to help you guys acquire more customers.

Oliver: [00:13:26] I would say the affiliate channel has grown from something early on where it’s difficult to track it. I think at any early-stage business back in 2017, we were all sort of hacking out, tracking, trying to figure things out, get attribution going. But it’s gone from being a smallish part that we couldn’t track that well to nowadays being something where trackable, we know that it’s about 20% of our traffic, but we also know that there’s a sort of non-attributable element of that, that comes from word of mouth, from, people hearing about it from affiliates and influencers. That’s probably another, 10% on top of that.

I’d really say it’s probably sort of 30% of our traffic signups and paid customers. It’s a big part. Other things we’ve done and one of the most recent things we’re doing is as a business were really trying to help the marketplace, customers arriving at our site or hearing about us.

Understand us beyond just being a video tool that you can use to send video emails from customers and more go into what are the jobs that they’re trying to achieve? What are the goals, what are the objectives of these people?

I wrote a few months ago, three months ago, this thing called the video funnel playbook. Which is basically 35, 36 different plays of how everybody from sales, CS, marketing, can use video specifically in their existing funnels. I’m really trying to get us to a point, and this is the moment, this has just been a marketing thing, but we’re building it into the product. To get us to a point where if someone arrives at our site, they’ve almost arrived from the thing that they’re trying to solve, the pain point, that job they’re trying to do and they know they can solve it with video, personalized video. Moving us away from just being a tool to this thing that solves your problems and all sorts of different ways.

A big part of that has been the video funnel playbook, and we’re going to productize that. We’re working on that at the moment.

Dylan: [00:15:21] Awesome. That’s really cool. It’s clear to see, even just from the way that the site is laid out at the moment, like the home page. I was actually gonna ask you about that anyway because I can see that there’s been some work going on in the messaging because it’s very easy to default to talking about the tool, right.

And exactly what the tool does rather than the use case. I can see the use cases structured very well on the site. Yeah, that’s cool.
Okay, let’s get into this influencer marketing, affiliate marketing channel. I know we have a few tips and tricks that you want to share. I want to start though by asking you, and I know this could be a really long answer, so let’s try and keep it as concise as possible.

For all those people that are in the SaaS growth hacks Facebook group, they’re messaging me, they’re on LinkedIn. They’re saying, “Hey, how do we start an affiliate marketing channel?” What are maybe the first couple of steps that they should take, or things that they should consider?

Oliver: [00:16:11] First step is don’t go looking forward. Don’t Google affiliate platforms or whatever. That’s not gonna work in the B2B SaaS space. You know, that’s very B2C focused, consumer product focus. First thing to do is think about your customers. What you want to do is think about how you identify very early on customers or signups or early adopters that are coming into your product that have some level of influence, and that might also be someone that could be an affiliate for you.

That’s the first thing. Focus on your customers. Early on, I’d say you can do that manually. So don’t try and set up automations and stuff around this.

Back in 2017, the first six months of Bonjoro we were getting, you know, a low enough level of signups for us to essentially research everybody that was coming in. Figure out who they were, what their influence was, and engage them on a personal level and the fact that we’re a personal video platform gave us a bit of an advantage anyway cause we were sending a personal video to everybody that signed up. When we send that video, we could say, “Oh, by the way, I see you do this. Yeah. We’d love to work together in this way” and try and say, “We’ve just started up an affiliate program and you’d like to be part of it.”

Focus on your own customers. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Walk before you run.

Dylan: [00:17:40] Awesome. That’s a really good tip. Yeah, you’re right. I often see the question that people ask is, “What tool should I use to set up my affiliate program, or what commission should I offer for the affiliates?” or things like that.

Of course, those are important at some point. I see one big mistake, from posting a lot of SaaS content. I have SaaS experience in the background too. I ended up getting quite a few tools that reach out to me asking me, “Hey, will you do a YouTube video for us?” or, “Hey, we’ve got this affiliate program”

One of the things that pisses me off when someone reaches out to me like that is usually I’d never heard from them. I’ve never spoken to them before, and the message says “Hey Dylan, I like what you’re doing at Hey Digital and your content. We have an affiliate program where you can get 30% off. Let me know if you want to get on a call.” Things like that I can’t stand.

How would you recommend that they initiate that conversation without just coming off like a canned email or not actually caring about what they’re saying?

Oliver: [00:18:52] I think we’ll come back to how you can do the cold outreach stuff cause I think you’ve got to walk before you can run.
I don’t think you can do that before you’re ready to do it and you’ll know when you’re ready. Focus on your early customers, focus on those early adopters because they’re the ones that are saying, yes, we’re interested, we like what you do.

We’re probably going to be your word of mouth engine. What you want is word of mouth engine, right? The affiliate thing, it’s just a way of supporting that and giving them something back. So it’s not like you’re leading with affiliate. You want as much word of mouth things to get going quickly and affiliate is a way of rewarding those people that are going to be your biggest advocates. Start manually.

We got very lucky early on that some of our early signups were people with quite a high level of influence, like Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income podcast, James Schramko, another big influencer in Australia. We really went hard to engage them on a very, very personal level.

Do everything possible to make them feel like we want to support them. We could tell that we’re getting value with our product as well. If they’re getting value with the product, even better.

That’s the second thing I would say is to start with the manual stuff. I think your first automation as you have landed those first few developed and cool relationships with the first people, got them onto your affiliate program, you going to be figuring out all the messy bits of setting up an affiliate program.

Like getting it as the signup triggers working and the commission, figuring out what commission level you want, figuring out how to pay people, payouts. You don’t want too many people in your programs to start with and you want those people to trust you and like you anyway.

The second thing I would say once you’ve done that and you’ve experimented and you’re ready, set up your first automation.
It’s really about identifying customers that are getting a lot of value. So whatever your product is. For us, it was customers who had sent 200 Bonjoro videos and had 80% plus open rates.

We set up an automation, go out from Matt, our CEO saying, “Hey, you know, do you have a blog, podcast or whatever? I’d love to talk to you.” We already knew they were happy, getting value because of the automation. We got loads of responses and they led to conversations and those conversations lead you to more affiliates and more influences and that word of mouth stuff.

Dylan: [00:21:24] Do you think a mistake that some people make when they’re trying to build influencer programs is that they try it too early?

Oliver: [00:21:29] Yeah, I think so. My view of any type of growth is to grow through your customers first, and once you’ve exhausted all of those, massive, ready-made advocates, then move on to the other stuff. We’re completely inbound, so we don’t have a sales team. It’d be different for those sort of sales-driven organizations, but anybody inbound when you get in those signups, go deep on your, and this applies to ads as well. I know loads of SaaS companies that don’t even do cold ads. They just purely retargeting because you want people to feel like you’re bigger than you are.

The best way to do that, it’s like retargeting because you’ve got this sort of echo chamber effect. Then with that, the word of mouth engine goes again because they’re seeing you everywhere and they’ll talk to other people. One of the sorts of things that people do to wrong in growth is trying to jump ahead of themselves and go too fast.

Dylan: [00:22:31] Yeah. Thank you for sharing that so far as well. I know we have a few other points to cover. One that I’m interested in touching on if you think it makes sense to talk about this now too, is you said we could run through a few tips on once they’ve got those initial early customers and they’ve started to build out that initial affiliate program.

Where do they go for some quick tips on running an affiliate channel with maybe limited resources. If you are going to use the platform, which one do you use? Are there specific platforms you would recommend? Where would you go once you’ve got that proof of concept, I guess you’d call it the affiliate program.

Oliver: [00:23:07] I use Tapfiliate and I still use that to this day, and I used it early on because price-wise it’s much better than a platform like the ambassador, which is I think built more for people that are in that later stage, getting tons and tons of signups.

Maybe have a team managing the affiliate program. I really liked Tapfiliate and one of the other things about Tapfiliate, is you can build your affiliate landing page, you know, sort of instructional stuff, getting people signed up, how much commission they’re going to get, all of that just with the Tapfiliate programs.

You don’t have to build a separate landing page. Once you’re at that point, look at a platform like Tapfiliate, in terms of getting more people signed up as well. Once you’ve gone through those sort of early adopters, build it into your platform, so the profile drops down within your platform when someone logs in, put your affiliate program in there. That’s a big one.

We did that, and overnight I think I got a 60% increase in applicants pretty much overnight. That’s a huge thing. You’ve gone from sort of figuring out your program and then all you do is put a little tab and you don’t even have to build it into your platform. Just put a tab and you can just redirect it to the affiliate landing page that you’ve already built with Tapfiliate and overnight you’ll get more customers signing up. You don’t have to approve everyone.

You can look, are these going to be the right sort of people for my program? Be hyper-personal with affiliates. Don’t let any of them go to waste. Send them all a personalized video, whatever it might be, and give them ideas as well.

I think ConvertKit is probably one of the leading people in the last five years to create an amazing affiliate program. I think about three years. Got about 10,000 affiliates. So I essentially stole, not word for word, but their idea of how to inspire people to talk about you.

On that landing page, you want to give them ideas quickly. So it’s like, list us on your resources page. You can write a blog about us, podcast, whatever it is, but when you send your personalized video, your personalized outreach, when they’ve signed up. Reinforce some of those that look at their business and make it even more personal.

I will go, “Oh, by the way, I saw you’ve got a podcast and here’s a great idea. We’ve done podcasts with these people. It could be about X, Y, and Z.” It’s really hyper-personal.

For someone like you that’s going to work much better than some of this other outreach that you get, you’re really going to listen to that one versus the other stuff.

Dylan: [00:25:27] Yeah, 100% so it’s not an affiliate partnership as such, but we’re an agency partner with Drift, they’re the only company that we’ve partnered with. That’s because it’s as part of our service offering with some of our customers, helping build out those conversational marketing workflows and bringing that into the ads.

I’ve never had a relationship with an external company where I felt so much attention and love, even though knowing that we’re such a small portion of their wider business, you know? And they do that very well. It’s like we have this master partner resources deck, whether it’s like hundreds of different things that are just ready-made that we can use or that we can slightly edit, there’s ideas if we want to do webinars with them or podcasts or whatever.

I totally agree. Those are the only companies that I work with from that kind of angle. I talk about them all the time as a result, even if I’m not, as you said, this is where the untrackable thing comes in, right? I’m not sharing a link. I probably mention them in every podcast interview so far, and I talk about it with other people.

If people ask me for examples of good marketing assets or something like that, it’s always my go to.

Oliver: [00:26:38] They’re always intangibles and I think you shouldn’t be scared. I know about Dave Gerhardt who moved from Drift recently but I remember him putting out a tweet about a year ago saying something like. “Don’t get caught up that everything has to be a threat response. You have to be able to attribute everything.” There are certain intangibles that you will be able to sense. I think one big thing we do here actually is we listened to anecdotal feedback coming back from customers.

If you have customers coming in, signing up, saying certain things, share that with your team. We have a Slack channel where if anybody ever heard anything from a customer about where they heard about us. They put it in there, so if we can’t track that, it might be that, you know, we couldn’t track that. It’s not coming up on our Google Analytics, but we’ve got a channel where anecdotally as a team, we can feel, that word of mouth engine and feel what’s really happening with it.

That’s a big thing. here in the conversation, you’re probably like a year or two in or 18 months in, you’re figuring out your affiliate program. You then work through all of that stuff. You’ve got these early adopters, you’ve got customers coming in and signing up to your affiliate program. At that point, you’re probably getting big enough and talked about in enough places.

Then you’ve got that credibility and you can probably flip to outreach and trying to get people interested in the use of this is the point where someone came to you. You might go, Oh, right, interesting. they’ve done some interesting stuff. They’ve been on tons of podcasts. They’ve got a massive backlink profile of other blogs talking about them.

I don’t think you can do that stuff until you’ve gone through your best early adopters first.

Dylan: [00:28:12] That’s how we ended up having this conversation. I’ve been connected with you for a long time on LinkedIn as we were just talking about with Casey from your team.

I know that he reached out to me a couple of months ago talking about the program, I think. I said it probably wasn’t right for me at that point. Then when we launched the podcast, he reached out again and because I’ve had that contact with you guys before, I know who you are, I see the social proof on the site and everything else. It just organically turns into a conversation like this.

Oliver: [00:28:42] This is one that actually I haven’t heard anybody else doing. Thinking about identifying people that have influence in the B2B space. One hack that I came up with, it’s really simple, but I haven’t heard anybody talk about it, is use something like Ahrefs.

If you go into that, put in a search for a competitor or a related company to you. I’ll give you an example. I could put in clickfunnels.com and then when that search comes back. I can look at all the backlinks to ClickFunnels, go into the little advanced search and put it in the word affiliate or like Tapfiliate or some sort of identifier that might be in that backlink. What you’re doing there is looking up that brand and essentially finding all the backlinks that are being sent to that website and then filtering through for people, blogs, whoever it might be, influencers that are sending them traffic who are existing affiliates of them. That’s then a high likelihood that if they’re in your space, in your niche, you can then build that into a list of people that you might want to reach out to. Rather than looking for these B2B influencer platforms, use something like an SEO tool or keyword tool, like Ahrefs.

You can get a $7 trial for seven days. You can do your research quickly there, and you’ve almost got like a readymade, affiliate radar of your competitors. I would say give that a go. It’s worked really well for me.

Dylan: [00:30:07] That’s a really good point because just to echo that as well, I would say that even if you did set up one of those influencer search platforms or whatever it might be, to be honest, like not throwing shade on too many people, but a lot of people within the B2B space, what you would classify as like an influencer on social by those tools is usually like engagement rates or follower numbers.

Within B2B, everyone’s been through the growth hacking phases of just growing a Twitter account to loads of followers or constantly reposting those different things or whatever it might be. Actually a lot of the time, or even if you look at those articles where it’s like top 10 B2B sales influencers or top 20 or whatever it might be.

People often don’t realize that you can just pay and get in one of those articles, or you have a friend that works and you can get them to one of those articles.

Dylan: [00:30:52] It’s very simple to do that kind of stuff. So, that approach that you mentioned makes a lot more sense cause I think you’re actually gonna find, as you said, not only relevant people but people that actually have an audience already or are actively promoting things already.

To add onto that too, obviously, I haven’t done this myself, but when we’re doing the paid research and paid ads for a lot of our customers, we’re actively targeting competitor keywords.

If we were working with one of your competitors we might target an ad on Bonjoro alternative or Bonjoro comparison article or something like that. What you could do is actually just go and search your competitor comparison and see, because often there are lots of bloggers or other affiliates that will write comparison articles and rank them number two or three on Google to help out that company. That could be another good way to find some relevant people.

Oliver: [00:31:44] Totally. I love that you touched on those influencer platforms might just have a social following that’s sort of false or misleading.

With Ahrefs, Moz or whatever you may use. You’re able to see the strength of that backlink. How much traffic does it get? Is it legitimate? Is that going to send any traffic back to you? Is that person really going to have a proper influence for you and your brand?

Dylan: [00:32:14] That’s awesome. That’s a really great tip. What is your favorite tip that you have left that you think would be beneficial to everyone watching, listening or reading to this?

Oliver: [00:32:24] In terms of B2B influencers at the moment, I’d say there’s no other channel bigger than podcasts. It’s crazy. Podcasts are a huge, huge channel now. If you’re thinking about influence, really try and develop a structure around how you approach podcasts. How you reach out to them.

When we brought Casey on, you mentioned him earlier in this chat. He’s come on as a growth manager. He’s going to go into sort of a role called Head of Growth because he’s amazing, but he came in essentially just to build up our podcast channel and outreach on that.

What we did early on, we identified that listennotes.com is a really great place to look through because you can put in particular keywords and within Listen Notes, it’ll then filter down podcasts that are around a particular keyword or a person or whatever you have put into there.

It genuinely has the contact details in there for them. He’s done tons and tons of reach to podcasts. Some of these people might become affiliates. We’re not running that relationship. This is a marketing thing where we’re talking about value is for the audience, but some might be affiliates and you know, he’s got a really crazy structure around that.

I’d say, a site like ListenNotes is interesting. You’ve got to be really serious about it. Casey spends six, seven hours a day going through crafting hyper-personal outreach to people to do this.

You can’t do it halfheartedly. You’ll fail. You’ll send out a hundred messages and get nothing back. Like I said earlier, the mental model of if you want high touch, if you want to drive action, or get a response, do it hyper-personalized otherwise it’s just going to fail.

Dylan: [00:34:02] Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s really good advice. I know some people are scared to put that work in five, six hours a day, seven hours a day, whatever it might be. You wouldn’t have Casey doing this if it wasn’t working. Right. People should take note of that too.

I really liked the tip because the listennotes.com that you mentioned. I didn’t even know that existed until just now. I’m gonna check what that is too because it could be useful for me.

Thank you for doing this. Thank you for sharing so many actionables about how you’ve actually done this yourself too. How you guys have built out this SaaS influencer, B2B influencer channel at Bonjoro. I really appreciate it. Some really good stuff in here.

Is there anything else cool that you guys have going on at the moment that you would want to share with people? I know you mentioned you had that playbook that you created in the past.

What would be something useful that people could go and take a look at if they wanted to find out not just more about you, but more about how they can bring video into their personalized outreach.

Oliver: [00:35:00] Yeah, I think that’s probably the main one. Bonjoro.com/videofunnelplaybook is the big one. That took us three months of work. Since you’re going through interviewing tons of our customers, hundreds of our customers and figuring out exactly how they’re using video.

When you create a product, you don’t know how it’s going to be used by the marketplace. People went out and started doing stuff that we had no idea they’d be doing with video. We then had to go out and figure out what it was they were doing better than us. We were doing onboarding videos. I’d send videos to my new affiliates, but other people are out there doing amazing things that we never thought possible.

We had an eCommerce company in Denmark that had gone from pretty good Trustpilot rating, but they went to number one in the entire men’s fashion category and the whole of Denmark by sending personalized videos, showing people the products that they’re sending out.
They’d send a video saying it’s on its way, it’s being delivered now, and then like two days later, they’d send a typical their normal “Will you leave us a review” and from putting the video in between, here’s your delivery coming out and then the review asking going out. They’d triple their review response.

Their reviews just went crazy. That’s one of the things we put in the playbook. We really interviewed everyone around that. If you’re in sales, CS, marketing, in SaaS, everything you’d need to know and lots of different ideas that are ready-made templates for how you could use video within your existing workflows.

The second thing is we’re just about to launch a screen recorder. There are lots of screen recorders out there. There are some great ones, you know Loom.

For us the play here is really going to be about, fitting in with if anybody out there that’s listening has used Bonjoro, we’re all about that flow of using video at the right times. This is helping us when a one-to-one video isn’t the right thing. If you want to educate your customer. I’m talking about a more medium touch thing or sending a message to a group of customers, educating them about something.

We really wanted to have that screen recorder so people could do that educational element. One-to-one hyper-personalized driving action, getting responses is great. But further down the funnel when you want to educate your customers and update them on stuff, sometimes that isn’t always scalable.

We’re releasing this Chrome recorder alongside to do that. That’s going to be free when we launch it. Unlimited videos, HD recording, so yeah, check that out.

Check out the free Bonjoro Chrome Extension here.

Dylan: [00:37:33] Awesome. That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for sharing all of those tips. Oli, it was really good to have you here.