There’s a conversation happening more and more in the SaaS marketing world right now. I see it from peers, in newsletters, on podcasts. The pressure to keep scaling bigger while also keeping things efficient. New channels popping up constantly, AI tools reshaping the landscape, paid acquisition costs climbing, and this general sense that the playbook everyone relied on for the last decade is starting to crack. Most marketing teams I know are stuck somewhere between “spend more on ads” and “we need to be doing something different but we’re not sure what.”
The companies that are actually building durable advantages, the ones where customers come to them, where partners proactively recommend them, where the brand carries real weight before a prospect ever hits the pricing page, are doing something different. They’re investing in their ecosystem.
I spent nearly three years as Head of Marketing at Narrative, a SaaS company that makes an AI-powered culling product for professional photographers. During that time, ecosystem marketing went from a vague idea to the single most important thing we did for brand and growth. Not because we read about it in a playbook. Because we figured out, through a lot of trial and error, that the traditional SaaS marketing channels weren’t going to get us where we needed to go.
What ecosystem marketing actually is
Let me start with what it isn’t, because this is where most people get confused.
Ecosystem marketing is not partner marketing. It’s not affiliate marketing. It’s not influencer marketing. It overlaps with all of them, but it’s a different way of thinking about your market position entirely.
Partner marketing is transactional. You have a formal agreement, maybe revenue share or co-selling motions, and the relationship is structured around mutual commercial outcomes. Affiliate marketing is even more transactional, someone drives a click, they get a commission. Influencer marketing is typically campaign-based, you pay a creator to produce content about your product for a defined period.
Ecosystem marketing is about your entire network within your niche. The relationships you build with the people, companies, communities, educators and creators that orbit the same customers you serve. And the critical difference is that it’s not transactional, it’s relational. You invest in your ecosystem, you show up, you’re visible, you’re active, and you build trust over time. The returns compound, but you can’t shortcut the process with a contract and a commission structure.
Emily Kramer at MKT1 has a useful framework where she maps growth into six engines, and ecosystem is one of them alongside inbound, outbound, product virality, events, and community. What I’d add to her thinking is that for a SaaS company in a niche market, ecosystem isn’t just one engine among six. It’s the engine that makes all the others work better. It touches awareness, trust, conversion and retention all at once, and it creates a compounding advantage that paid channels simply can’t replicate.
Why we had to find a different path
When I joined Narrative, the product was excellent. It solved a real, painful problem for professional photographers. The AI culling product was faster and smarter than anything else on the market, and it kept the photographer in creative control rather than automating everything away. That last point mattered enormously, because our competitors were going in the opposite direction. They were trying to remove the photographer from the culling process entirely. And frankly, the AI doing that work wasn’t good enough. Photographers would end up spending more time fixing the AI’s picks than they would have spent culling manually. So our positioning was clear and our product was differentiated.
In theory, you should be able to just run ads and let the product sell itself.
In practice, our first year was largely about figuring out what didn’t work. We inherited some paid channels that looked reasonable on the surface, but when we dug into the unit economics, the efficiency wasn’t there. Meta ads in particular were expensive relative to what they were delivering. So a big part of my early focus was on CAC efficiency, killing the channels that weren’t performing, and figuring out where growth was actually coming from.
When we looked at the data, word of mouth kept showing up. Not in our attribution dashboards, of course, because traditional analytics can’t track someone hearing about you from a friend at a photography conference. But when we started asking customers directly how they found us, the picture was clear. The community was doing a huge amount of the work for us, and we weren’t doing nearly enough to support and accelerate that.
There was another layer too. Narrative wasn’t just selling a better version of an existing product. We were creating a category. The idea that AI could assist a photographer’s culling workflow without replacing their creative judgement was new. That meant we needed to educate the market, not just advertise to it. And education doesn’t happen through banner ads. It happens through trust, through community, through people your audience already respects saying “this is worth paying attention to.”
Professional photographers are a tight-knit community. They trust recommendations from other photographers far more than they trust ads. You can run the best Meta campaign in the world and it won’t carry the same weight as a respected photographer saying “I switched to this tool and it changed my workflow.” The purchase decision is emotional as much as it’s rational. These are creative professionals choosing a tool that sits at the heart of their artistic process. They need to trust the company behind the product, not just the feature set.
That’s where ecosystem marketing came in.
How we built it at Narrative
I’ll walk through what we actually did, because the specifics are more useful than abstractions here.
Events as the anchor
We noticed early on that the professional photography world revolves around a handful of major industry events and conferences. These are global, but the US was our primary focus because that’s where our target market was concentrated. These events are where the most influential photographers, educators and brands in the space all converge in the same building for a few days.
Our first instinct was just to show up with a booth. But we quickly figured out that how you show up matters enormously. Our competitors had bigger budgets, but they also had more complicated products that didn’t lend themselves to quick demos. We had an advantage there. You could sit someone down in front of Narrative for five minutes and they’d immediately get the value.
So we invested heavily in our physical presence. Our booth was designed to be impossible to miss, fully lit up in our brand colours, taller than regulation height, large iMac displays running the product so people could touch and feel it immediately. And we leaned into the fact that we were a small team from New Zealand. Turns out everyone loves Kiwis. The accent, the friendliness, the fact that New Zealanders are generally associated with being good, down-to-earth people. In a market dominated by US companies, that warmth and approachability became a genuine point of difference.
People were drawn to the booth. And because we could do live demos and even close sales on the spot, the events became a direct revenue driver as well as a brand-building exercise. But the real ecosystem play wasn’t the booth itself.
Community events and the underground approach
This ties into a bigger brand decision we’d made at Narrative. We had deliberately pivoted away from positioning ourselves as a software brand. We didn’t want to look, feel or sound like Adobe. We wanted to exist in the world of photographers. The brand needed to taste like creativity and their work, not like tech. Our visual identity, our tone, the way we showed up at events, all of it was designed to feel like it came from within the photography community rather than being imposed on it from outside. Ecosystem marketing was just another expression of that same philosophy.
So around every major conference, we’d organise smaller, more intimate community events. Photo walks, creative meetups, informal gatherings at interesting venues. The kind of things that felt like they were by the photography community, not by a software company trying to sell something.
The key was partnering with the right people. We’d co-host with influential photographers or educators who shared our values around creative control and craftsmanship. The authenticity had to be real. These weren’t paid endorsements. We worked with people who believed in what we were building and who would legitimately use the product in their own workflow.
This created something you can’t buy with ad spend. We were seen as a company that actually cared about the industry, not just one extracting revenue from it. When a photographer sees you investing time and energy into the community, not just showing up to sell, it shifts the entire relationship. It builds the kind of trust that turns into organic word-of-mouth. And in a tight community, that’s the most powerful acquisition channel that exists.
Making ambassadors feel like insiders
Our competitors’ approach to creator relationships was predictable. Big fancy dinners, standard sponsorship deals, logo placements. Very corporate. We never went down that road. We wanted something that felt more personal and more fun.
One example that sticks with me: we were in Las Vegas for a trade show, and instead of the standard sponsored dinner, we hired a limo. Drove our ambassador photographers around the Vegas Strip, stopping at iconic locations so they could shoot. Everyone had drinks, everyone hung out, everyone got to know each other and our team on a personal level. It didn’t cost a fortune, but it created a shared experience that no amount of fancy dinners could replicate.
Then we dropped everyone off at a partner’s event, a big creative party hosted by one of the brands in our ecosystem. Our partners loved it because we were bringing high-profile photographers to their event. The photographers loved it because they got exclusive access. And we deepened relationships across our entire ecosystem in a single evening.
The result was that when we got back to New Zealand and needed to collaborate with these photographers on content, campaigns or product feedback, the relationship was already warm. We weren’t cold-emailing a creator with a brief. We were reaching out to someone who’d hung out with us, who trusted us, and who actually wanted to work together.
How it compounds
Each event, each community gathering, each ambassador relationship doesn’t just deliver a one-time result. It builds on everything that came before. The photographer who saw our booth at one conference, then came to our photo walk at the next, then saw a few of their peers posting about Narrative on social media. By the time they hit our website, the trust is already built. The conversion is almost a formality.
This compounding effect is what separates ecosystem marketing from campaign-based thinking. A campaign has a start date and an end date. An ecosystem just keeps getting stronger.
Measuring ecosystem marketing (honestly)
If I’m being straight with you, ecosystem marketing is hard to measure with traditional attribution. If someone discovers your brand through a photo walk, then sees an ambassador’s YouTube video, then hears about you from a friend, then Googles your name and signs up, your analytics will attribute that conversion to organic search. The ecosystem did 90% of the work, but your dashboard will never show it.
At Narrative, we found that HDYHAU tracking (How Did You Hear About Us, a self-reported attribution field on the signup flow) completely changed our understanding of what was actually driving growth. Without it, we would have credited Google and direct traffic for conversions that the ecosystem had earned.
I’d push hard on this for any company doing ecosystem work: if you’re not asking customers directly how they found you, you’re almost certainly undervaluing your ecosystem investments and overvaluing your paid channels.
Beyond HDYHAU, the signals that matter are more qualitative than quantitative, at least early on. Are partners proactively mentioning you? Are you getting inbound requests to collaborate? Is your brand sentiment shifting in community forums and on social media? Are prospects arriving warmer and converting faster? Over time, you can build a more structured measurement framework. But if you wait for perfect attribution before investing in ecosystem, you’ll never start. And that measurement gap is actually something I’m working on solving right now, but more on that another time.
Building your own ecosystem approach
If you’re at a SaaS company and this resonates, here’s how I’d think about getting started.
Talk to your customers (seriously)
This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it well. Before you map your ecosystem, talk to the people already using your product. Run regular customer interviews. Find out what they read, what events they attend, who they follow, which communities they’re active in. At Narrative, our marketing team did customer interviews regularly, not just for product feedback but to understand how our users think, what they care about, where they spend their attention. That insight is what lets you build an ecosystem strategy grounded in reality rather than guesswork.
Map your ecosystem
Once you have that foundation, map out every meaningful entity in your market. Complementary products and tools your customers use, industry events and conferences, key educators and content creators, community spaces like forums, Slack groups, Facebook groups and subreddits, industry publications and newsletters. You’re looking for every touchpoint where your target customer spends attention and builds trust.
Show up before you ask
Your first interaction with anyone in your ecosystem should not be a pitch, a partnership request or an ask. It should be you showing up, adding value and being present. Go to the events. Engage in the communities. Share other people’s content. Be visible and be generous. This is the investment phase, and most companies skip it because it doesn’t have an immediate ROI. That’s exactly why it works.
Partner on values, not reach
When you start building formal relationships with creators, educators or complementary brands, prioritise values alignment over audience size. A smaller creator who loves your product and shares your ethos will deliver far more value than a large creator who’s clearly doing a transactional sponsorship. The audience can always tell.
Create shared experiences
Events, community gatherings, co-created content. These are the building blocks. But you’re not putting on a show for your audience. You’re creating something together with your ecosystem partners that benefits everyone. The best ecosystem events feel like they belong to the community, not to your company.
Set up measurement from day one
Add HDYHAU tracking to your signup flow before you start any ecosystem activity. Without it, you’ll never make the case internally for continued investment. A simple dropdown or text field is enough to start.
Where this is heading
I think ecosystem marketing is going to become the default approach for niche SaaS companies over the next few years. The economics of paid acquisition are getting worse across every channel. AI-generated content is flooding search results, making it harder to differentiate through content alone. And buyers, especially in tight-knit professional communities, are increasingly resistant to traditional marketing and increasingly influenced by peer recommendations and community trust.
Emily Kramer makes the point that as inbound and outbound lose effectiveness, ecosystem becomes relatively more powerful. I’d go further. For companies in niche markets with strong professional communities, ecosystem isn’t just relatively more powerful. It’s the only approach that builds a durable competitive moat.
The companies that invest now, while most of their competitors still treat ecosystem as a “nice to have,” are the ones that will have an unfair advantage when everyone else catches on.
If you’re starting from scratch, start by mapping your ecosystem. Then just show up. The rest follows from there.