Building Relationships With Group Owners

This article was written by Aaron Krall, founder of SaaS Growth Hacks, the #1 Facebook group for SaaS founders. His group has over 29,000 members, and every day many marketers are trying to get in front of all those eyeballs. Aaron shares his multi-year experience, shows common mistakes, and explains exactly how to succeed. I took the liberty of inserting a few screenshots that I took myself. -Michal

Influencer marketing

The fastest way I know to grow your business is through leveraging other people’s audiences.

If you do it the right way, you can leverage an audience that’s already been created and build a great relationship with someone who can really help you in your business AND allow you to provide a lot more value - a lot faster.

As a founder of a group with over 20,000 people, I’ve been approached by dozens of people wanting to promote their stuff and get in front of my audience.

Most people do it the wrong way.

Today, I’m going to show you how to do it the right way.

Getting to know the group and its founder

I’m going to go over a few things that will help you build a relationship with group owners. The strategies I’m going to show you are focused more on Facebook, because that’s where my experience is, but it also works for groups on Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc.

It doesn’t matter what group it is, the strategies work for you.

Identifying who the owners are

Identifying who the owners are

Firstly, pick the group you want to utilize and join it. Make sure you go through the group and read the rules and identify what the goal is of the group owner. They started the group for a reason. If they’re starting it just because they love the community and they’re trying to bring value to the community, you have to know that. If they started the group because they have a program, a course, or a book - buy the program, book, or the course (if you can).

I’m telling you, the fastest way to get into the world of the person that you’re trying to befriend is to buy their stuff.

Trust me, I will listen to almost anyone who’s bought my stuff, because they’re a customer and they’ve spoken with their money. Money talks, right? That is a huge “in” to get into the world of anybody you want. Really. If you can’t afford their stuff, read their articles or blogs, watch their videos, and start to understand their philosophy.

What do they talk about? What’s important to them? Find their Instagram accounts. Look to see if they have kids, if they have pets, if they like hiking, etc. Do some cyberstalking, basically, to get to know them a little bit.

Remember, your goal here is not to manipulate the group owner into giving you access to their audience so that you can make a lot of money.

The goal here is to make a friend and to build a connection with someone.

Frankly, there are times when you will go to a group owner who is just not a good fit for you and you’re like, I just don’t actually like this person. If that happens, don’t try to build a relationship with that group owner (or anyone for that matter) if you don’t really want to have a relationship with them.

Once you identify and look at all the great things that they’re doing, the next thing you want to do is praise them to their audience.

This is genius. I can’t tell you how effective this is because group owners love being made to look like the hero in their group.

There are a few ways to do that.

Taking the right action

First, talk about them in their own group. Tell the audience how great their video was and what you learned from it. Tell them that you bought their course and it was awesome and that everyone should buy it, or that you bought their book and it was great and link to it (NO AFFILIATE LINKS! *yet)

Talk about the insight you learned from the content. Praise them to their audience, and then help them get more of what they want - which in this case might be helping more people, book sales, course sales, watching their video, subscribing to the YouTube channel, subscribing to their podcast, whatever it might be.

Then if you really love their stuff, I would do a video testimonial, or written testimonial, and message them something like, “Hey, I don’t know if this is helpful for you but I loved your stuff so much and I implemented this and it really works and I want to leave you a testimonial about your book/podcast/YouTube channel (whatever it might be).”

The goal here is to give without expectation, so you’re giving and giving and giving without this hidden agenda that eventually they’re going to give you something - because it might not happen right away… or not at all.

(You can “like” his/her pictures all you want, but she doesn’t owe you a date. All you can do is be the best version of yourself and cross your fingers!)

It's actually very easy if you already have an article about it

It's actually very easy if you already have an article about it

The more that you give, the more you receive

This is universal law. Even if you give and give and give, and you don’t receive anything from this particular group, it will come back to you in other ways. So just give.

Next, go into the group and start providing value.

Value is hard to quantify, but the best way that I can describe giving value in groups is giving actionable helpful advice that moves people further ahead in their growth.

DON’T say: “Hey, I think I can help DM me for more details!” That’s terrible and annoying. Group owners hate you for doing that, and everyone else reading your comment now hates you too.

Yeah, nah

Yeah, nah

There is a time and a place for this, and it’s NOT now.

The point of the group is to create a database and a resource where people can go in and find answers to their questions.

If you don’t freely give the resource and instead tell them they have to DM you for this amazing secret answer, it just makes people think you’re a) a fishy scammer trying to make money, and b) you’re not helping the group owner. You’ve hijacked their page for your own agenda.

So, let’s say somebody posts a question that you’re an expert in.

First of all, go through the group and search for people that have specific questions about whatever it is that you’re an expert in, and then go and start answering them.

Say, “Yep, here’s exactly how you do this! In fact, here’s a free template! Happy to help!”

Or even better, if someone has a question that the group owner can solve, you can refer them to the group owner. Post a link and say, “That’s the problem GROUP OWNER solves, check out his book, or his video, etc.”

Be a helper for the group owner - make him feel like you’re GIVING him business, not TAKING business. Trust me, the group owner will notice that you’re doing these things. They’ll get notifications and they’ll see what you’re doing, (especially if you tag them in it *hint *hint).

Sometimes you’ll leave a lot of comments and engagement and the group owner won’t know, so it’s a good idea to send the group owner a message and say something like, “Hey, looks like a lot of people are having this question around this, I answered this question for you. I put it in the comments. I just wanted to make sure that you saw it, so that if you wanted to you can share it with your audience to help you build more value.”

The whole goal is you want to help the group owner provide more value and build more value to the community and also make them look like the hero.

What can you do next?

Now that they know who and you made them look like a hero, then depending on the relationship, there’s a few things you can do.

For instance, if you’ve already had some conversations, they might reach out to you and say, “Hey, thank you so much for being involved with the community! What can I do for you?”

You’d be surprised at how often this happens.

It’s magical.

It’s exactly what you want.

But DON’T expect it.

Then you can say, “Well actually, based on what I’ve looked at in your company, there’s a huge need for somebody to come in and solve this problem. I’d like to solve it for them. And I’d like to do all the work for you, so that you don’t have to do anything.”

OR

“Hey, I’ve been in your group for a bit. I love what you’re doing. I’ve noticed a lot of people in the group asking about XYZ topic, and that’s actually a problem that I solve. Would you like me to go through the group and find all of the questions people have asked about this, put it together, schedule an AMA, and go live in your group to answer these questions? I’ll promote it. I’ll send you all the questions, you don’t have to do a thing. All you’ve got to do is show up and introduce me - I’ll even write the intro out for you. My tool solves this problem so if you’d like I can give a 60 day license out to the entire group?”

Most group owners will be all over that. They still get to look like the hero, introducing a way to solve the problem for their community members - even if that solution is giving them YOU. They have nothing to lose here, and you’re also doing all of the work for them!

EXTRA BONUS TRICK: You can go live in anyone’s group with Zoom.

You don’t even have to be an admin in the group to go live in someone else’s group.

Set up the Zoom, go live at the time you set, send the group owner the zoom link, and they just hop on your live stream.

Then the group owner can introduce you and let the community know who you are and what you’re here to do for them.

Record the Zoom so you can post it on your profile, and ask the group owner to share it on his.

Ask if you can offer a special offer (60 days free, 90 days free) as a bonus JUST for their group. Make it an affiliate link so if anybody buys the group owner gets a percentage of the sale.

Do you see how effective this is? The group owner has to do almost NOTHING and they get an expert answering questions in the group, they look like the hero, AND they get compensated for it.

But…

Ok, so here are a few questions you might be asking:

Aaron, this looks like a lot of work! Isn’t this a gamble?

Yeah, but isn’t prospecting 1-1 a lot of work? Isn’t getting turned down over and over again doing cold email? This strategy, I’m telling ya, is SO fun and rewarding. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you can have an assistant, your marketing person, co-founder do it. It takes time, giving of yourself and energy but the payoff is HUGE.

What if the group owner doesn't want to promote my stuff?

Russell Brunson tells the story of him trying to build a relationship with Tony Robbins. It took him TWO years. Two years!! But you know what? The ONE deal they did together was worth millions of dollars. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have 10-20 million dollar relationships in the pipeline than a list of 10,000 people on a cold email list.

The point? Don't give up until you get an answer from them. Group owners are busy. They get reached out to a lot. Persistent follow-up focused on helping them is the biggest secret of this whole process.

So they promoted my product to their audience! Now what?

This is where it gets interesting. See, you just went on a first date with the group owner. Most people stop after the first date and say "That went well, thanks! Talk to you in 10 years!" No, no, no, no! Don't do that.

This is just the first step in building a long-term relationship where you contribute articles for them, you can become an admin in their group, provide a free resource that they can add to their course or program where you BUILD yourself into their offer.

Good stuff right?

You excited to go build a relationship with a group owner?

Cool, now it’s your turn. Find a few groups, follow these steps and watch as you get access to thousands and thousands of your potential customers.

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