Micro-influencer marketing on YouTube
Tags: saas
Published: 2020-09-08 15:16:57

For the last few months, I’ve been reaching out to “micro influencers” on YouTube, with the hope of driving targeted traffic to my product, http://discordbotstudio.org. I’m classifying micro influencers as having between 1,000 – 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. The benefit of reaching channels of this size is that they have dedicated audiences based on a certain niche (in my case this is Discord Bots and the creation thereof).

# Background Info
Discord Bot Studio (DBS) is a visual programming tool I released on Steam on May 12th, 2020 (2 months prior to writing this). It’s a utility that lets users create Discord bots without needing to write any code, a task that usually requires programming knowledge. Up to this point I have sold about 1,000 copies of DBS, all through Steam. My only marketing efforts to this point have been SEO, through the landing page I’ve had setup for almost a year, and through Steam itself, where DBS is sold. I also grew a decently sized mailing list from the landing page, but I saw very poor conversion from that list. I’m content with the traffic I’m getting through SEO alone, but I recognize that I need to explore other marketing channels to continue to grow.

# Strategy
The basic strategy I followed was searching YouTube for channels that pertained to Discord bots, and the creation of Discord bots. I preferred channels that had some upload regularity, and consistent view counts. I would send these channels an email if I could find their address, and offer them a free copy of Discord Bot Studio in exchange for them hopefully creating a video about it. Most of the responses I got were positive, and many were open to at least trying out the product.

# Stats
- 📫 **Emails Sent**: ~55
- 💌 **Response Rate**: ~60%
- 🎥 **Videos Created**: 4 at the time of writing this
- 📈 **Video Views**: ~4,000
- 💰 **My Costs Incurred**: $0.00
- 💵 **Sales Generated**: Unknown. DBS is sold on Steam. Unfortunately Steam analytics and conversion tracking is super limited. They say this is because most purchases are made in the Steam desktop client, even if traffic originally arrives at the web page for the product. Anecdotally, I have spoken to a few customers who’ve told me they found DBS through the videos.

# Was it worth it?
It’s hard to tell at this point whether my efforts have, and will pay off. My hope is that these videos provide nearly evergreen marketing, since they will forever be on YouTube accruing views. I am happy with the amount of sales I’m currently making through organic traffic coming from Google and Steam. That being said, the traffic from those channels has leveled off, and I’m open to experimenting with new strategies to look for more growth opportunity. I think I will stop reaching out to YouTube influencers for the time being, and focus my marketing efforts elsewhere to find a strategy that sticks.

# Next Steps
Being a low cost, one-time purchase product, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where any sort of paid advertising is going to work for DBS. With that in mind, I will continue to experiment with free, and low cost marketing channels which I haven’t tried yet. I believe the biggest potential opportunity is content marketing. Creating content obviously takes a lot of time, but it’s generally free, and therefore low risk for my young business.