We Spent >$1 Million Sponsoring Creators. Here’s What We Learned About B2B Influencer Marketing

We’ve spent over one million dollars and sponsored hundreds of creators, educators, and influencers, even including big names like Linus Tech Tips and Lenny Rachitsky:

All of this work is done by our tireless Partnerships Manager, Igor Gorbenko. I spoke to him to extract everything he learned about partnerships.

sponsored podcasts, we spent $14,000 on five podcast campaigns. Like any good data-driven marketer, we set up landing pages and tracked visits and signups.

Our results were horrendous:

Results from our first podcast advertising campaign

The truth is that nobody’s rushing to buy your product just because they heard about it on a podcast. And one that costs thousands of dollars to boot. So, sponsoring creators and expecting immediate impact is a fool’s errand.

But spending that much money and banking on improved brand awareness is a game not many companies are willing to play. We can’t throw money at creators and hope that one day Ahrefs will become a household name. Let alone one with a name that gets the SEO world debating how it’s supposed to be pronounced.

So, even for a company notorious for not measuring marketing ROI, we wanted to see some results. That’s why Igor settled on a sweet spot for all our creator campaigns: promoting Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT).

AWT is a free version of Ahrefs that allows you to audit your website for technical SEO issues, shows who’s linking to you, and what keywords you’re ranking for. While not everyone needs a complex tool like Ahrefs, anyone with a website can instantly benefit from AWT.

It has everything we’re looking for in a campaign: it promotes our brand, showcases our product, and is free to sign up, making it an attractive offer.

The best part about doing this is that it also expands our audience. Since we’re now targeting website owners, we don’t have to narrow ourselves to SEOs. We can partner with any creators who have audiences that work with websites: content marketers, affiliate marketers, entrepreneurs, tech professionals, and more.

Site Explorer and look at their estimated search traffic, their history, and the keywords they rank for.

Estimated search traffic for Ahrefs
Keywords Ahrefs rank for

You can also simply reach out to the creator and ask.

In the end, there is an element of trusting your gut. No matter how hard you vet, sometimes all you have to do is to run a smaller-scale campaign with the creator and check the results.

Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, he posted across four platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn.

An example of a cross-platform campaign we worked with

Since they’re custom, you can always adjust the deliverables to fit your budget. Simply ask them if they can do more for the same amount you’re paying, e.g., adding an extra ad placement, shoutout on social media, etc.

personal outreach drums for years. Still, even looking at my inbox, I’ve been getting irrelevant emails with fake personalization that’s been formatted for scale.

Igor has never used automated outreach tools or lists for compiling potential partners. He only uses a personalized approach. It makes sense after all; in partnerships, the scale is smaller, open rates are higher, and responses are typically positive.

You just need to find a way to contact the right person and make sure they see your message.

After working with so many partners, Igor has some outreach tips.

First, keep it short. Like really short. Just send a brief introduction followed by explaining what you want. Your goal is to start the conversation. You can discuss everything else later on.

Igor's DM outreach to a creator

Second, always start with the best communication channel. Igor’s first choice is email. Yo can find their personal email address or find one that’s dedicated to partnerships/sponsorships, typically found in the “Contact Us” section of a website.

His second choice is LinkedIn, as they allow you to add a short note to the connection request. There is a 300 character limit and the preview doesn’t display the full message. So, make sure your intention is clear from the start.

A connection request on LinkedIn

To keep it short, you can skip your introduction. Your LinkedIn profile should make it clear who you are anyway.

X and Facebook DMs are less ideal, as they send your messages to the “requests” folder. These may sit anywhere a day to a year (or never), depending on how often it gets checked. Comparing between the two, X is still better as you can tag the person you want to contact in a post.

Website forms are the least efficient. Response rates are low and it takes ages to get a reply. It’s also difficult to track as most websites do not send a confirmation email. Igor only uses them as a last resort.

Finally, ask for introductions. Creators often know each other. So, the more partnerships you have, the higher your chances of knowing someone who can make the necessary introduction. Look for mutual friends or followers, and you should be able to find a person you can ask for an intro.

Web Analytics. The issue here is when I do that, I take the money out of my monthly budget and now I’m responsible for the money I’ve spent. I have to make sure they deliver. And if their post fails, I’ve basically sent the money down the drain. If the posts works, then well, that’s an expected result.

Now change that one person we worked with before to 20 people per month whom I’ve just met and their offers to run campaigns for $2K to $20K. I have to decide which offers I like and want to proceed with. Every month, I’m sending $100K into a black box and all I can do is hope it works out. A lot of things are out of my control.

My week starts with several offers like that sitting on my desk. I have to think if I want to proceed or if I have to go tell them it’s not a good fit. Both are difficult decisions to make. If I turn down everything I’m hesitant about, then I will have only three campaigns running per month. That’s not much better than occasionally having an underperforming campaign.”

Igor Gorbenko

Igor’s solution for this fatigue was a mental one. Recognizing and accepting that it was part of the role made the job easier. The other step he took was to change his thinking from “How do I respond to this email?” to “What decision do I make here?”

While nothing changed (in practical terms), it gave him more agency and made him feel more in charge.

Final thoughts

Like most budgets, our partnerships budget is limited. So, we want to get the most out of it.

That’s why we constantly try different things and change our approach several times a year. We’ve tried different price ranges, different mediums, and different messaging.

But we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. There’s still a lot to explore:

  • Do long-term partnerships perform better than one-off campaigns?
  • Is a pre-roll ad in a video about AI tools better than a dedicated video explaining how Ahrefs works?
  • Will people in France engage with swag giveaways more than people in Germany?

The answer to these questions lies in trying different things and checking the results. No matter whether your experiments fail or succeed, you’re still improving your brand awareness as long as you manage to reach your target audience. 

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