These influencer marketing platforms offer a wide range of capabilities and features. Some are suited to brands while others are more suited to bloggers and small businesses.
As a trend, influencer marketing is becoming an established practice for most brands as they seek to harness the power of influencer and their ability to attract a sizeable number of followers.
These influencer marketing platforms are the backbone of any brand that is planning to develop an effective influencer marketing campaign.
Finding influencers, communicating with them and building relationships takes time. However, with the right influencer marketing tools, you can develop efficient workflows that save you time.
A further reason to use the right tools is to align your goals and metrics with the right influencer marketing platform.
In my other post – influencer marketing statistics – I pointed out some of the key trends in influencer marketing. Despite criticisms, influencer marketing budgets are growing, the ROI on spend is healthy. Additionally, brands are realising other benefits, such as more targeted, efficient and relevant content generation.
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A few tips when planning your influencer marketing campaign
#Tip 1: If you are just starting out then work with influencers who will offer guaranteed engagement and clicks instead of those who offer a guaranteed number of posts.
#Tip 2: Use influencers as a channel to test and learn your audience, messages and frequencies. Leverage the results of your initial test to scale your budget to get better results.
#Tip 3: Use analytics to hone in on the best content and then repurpose this across your other digital channels. This is a huge cost saver and proven method to amplify campaign results.
#Tip 4: Choose influencers whose personality and values align with your brand is absolutely crucial. The engagement with their audience will be significantly better. Crunch the data to find which influencers have the greatest ‘brand affinity’ and therefore are most suited to your campaign goals.
#Tip 5: Find influencers who are authentic followers of your brand will result in better chances of them creating highly engaging content.
#Tip 6: Before you start, get your legal team onboard and run through everything so that you have a clear template that isn’t too restrictive but at the same time covers the essentials. Setup a clear process for authorisation and any adjustments that happen during negotiations. Quick turnaround time is essential for onboarding influencers.
#Tip 7: Investing in building a long-term relationship with influencers. Just like a partnership between a brand and agency, it takes time to build trust, communicate your brand values and learn how and what works with audiences.
The Guide To Influencer Marketing Platforms
Influencer Marketing Platforms make life easier for both agencies and brands when managing and working with influencers.
An influencer marketing platform is an essential tool designed to manage influencer marketing campaigns.
As the marketing technology evolves so do the tools. Many of these tools are now incorporating sophisticated AI and machine learning algorithms. As a result, they are able to move intuitively to refine the search for influencers and bring back more tailored results for your brand.
Another element is the ability to mine the audience data of influencers. You want to be able to marry up your brand psychographic profile with that of your audience. Demographics do not do that much.
The initial influencer marketing platforms provided influencer discovery tools. However, the more recent influencer marketing platforms now include relationship management, campaign management, influencer marketplaces, analytics, and influencer content amplification.
Influencer marketing can’t be fully automated according to 96% of marketers. But leveraging tools can help you execute your influencer campaigns more efficiently.
Types of Influencer Marketing Platforms
The functions and features of Influencer Marketing Platforms vary enormously. There are platforms for large brands as well as tactical self-service ones for bloggers.
What you find is that some platforms started life as referral marketing platforms and have evolved to include influencer marketing. Others have moved from being more social media marketing tools. Then you have the platforms that are startups and have purely focused on influencer marketing from day one.
As you would expect, the more sophisticated the platform and the more they include, e.g. predictive-analytics and AI, then the more expensive the price. However, these higher end platforms save you lots of time and are particularly suited to teams working on influencer marketing campaigns.
The self-service category are relatively low cost two-sided markets where influencers can connect with marketers.
Top Influencer Market Platforms
The following are some of the largest and popular self-service influencer market platforms.
The following influencer marketing platforms are aimed at brands and agencies. Although they vary in their features, they all have a suite of tools to manage an influencer marketing campaign from end-to-end.
Influencer Marketing Platforms For Brands and Agencies
They differ in the level of influencers they focus, the number of influencers in their database on, market sectors and the level of technology they apply – e.g. AI and predictive analytics.
#1. Famebit
FameBit is a platform that helps brands find, connect, and collaborate with influential content creators on YouTube. FameBit makes its money on each transaction between brand and creator. They charge a 10% fee to brands on top of what they pay to creators. And they charge a 10% fee to creators, deducted from their earnings.
#2. GroupHigh
GroupHigh enables you to find bloggers easily for your outreach campaigns through their real-time blog search and filtering interface. Data includes topics, localization, blog information, social accounts, fan and follower data, organic search authority (from Moz) and traffic stats from Compete.com and Alexa.
#3. Traackr
Traackr is an all-in-one solution that helps you to efficiently discover, manage and communicate with influencers. It also provides detailed analytics on campaign performance. You can use it to scale your influencer marketing campaigns based on testing and learning through the data-driven insights.
#4. IZEA
IZEA is an end to end influencer marketing platform. IZEA covers pretty much everything you could ask for and it does it well. The main features include:
- Influencer/Creator Discovery
- Influencer Management
- Campaign Management
- Content Creation, Curation, and Distribution
- Payments
- Integrated Facebook Post Promotion
- FTC and WOMMA Compliance
- Reporting and Analytics
#5. Hypr
Hypr is aimed at brands who are targeting audiences across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.
They have a substantial database of over 12 million influencers as well audience profiling features to help you match your brand to an influencer’s audience. Essentially, they have a sophisticated search engine collecting data across social media and measuring popularity.
#6. Klear
The strength of Klear is in its analytics. They have a massive database of influencer profiles and the billions of data points associated with all them. As a result, you are easily able to find the most relevant content creators for your brand. Additionally, you can use Klear to do extensive competitor research.
#7. Julius
Julius lets you search across Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, and Youtube. The search feature is easy to use and more importantly has several useful filters to help you narrow your search.
The filters cover over 50 different points of data that can be utilized so that match your campaign on more than just simple demographics.
#8. AspireIQ
AspireIQ is a self-service platform that searches across Instagram and YouTube. It has a database of over 150,000 influencers who have been vetted against their criteria. AspireIQ provides an extremely thorough range of campaign tools to assist with every aspect of campaign management.
#9. NeoReach
NeoReach has a database of over 3 million influencers across the main social media platforms. Their powerful search engine allows brands to filter searches across multiple criteria, including brand affinity, social engagement and their follower demographics. You can then manage all their influencer relationships through NeoReach, including the communications, negotiation of rates, creating campaign briefs, approving posts, and managing payments.
#10. Curalate
The Curalate platform works by connecting visual content (images, art, etc.) to products and services. Curalate works on all types of media, ingesting and monetizing images, videos and 360 content from various platforms. Once the content is tagged, Curalate can then distribute it. As an example, the platform integrates with email, social channels, on-site, blogs, and paid media.
#11. HypeAuditor
HypeAuditor gives you an incredibly detailed view of an Instagram influencer. The platform has a rich set of features aimed at helping you to weed out influencer accounts that are fake or have low engagement rates. There are 28 different metrics and scores, giving brands a detailed understanding of who they’re dealing with. It all starts with the Audience Quality Score (AQS).
#12. JustReachOut
JustReachOut is more of a PR tool than a classic influencer tool. However, I have included it in the list because journalists are indeed influencers and a required part of building a brand involves engaging with journalists in your niche.
JustReachOut helps you identify reporters who have written articles about topics related to your startup. The service will then look for those and come back with a list of recent articles about the topic and the names of their writers.
#13. Lefty
Lefty is an influencer marketing platform with a huge database of influencers and a comprehensive search capability.
Easily pinpoint individuals, personalities, and professionals who can help you reach out to their target markets and audiences to promote your products, services, and brand.
#14. Tagger Media
Tagger Media provides research and analytics tools combined with a complete workflow for efficient content marketing management and measurement. With a database of more than 3 million global influencers, Tagger allows its many clients such as Jaguar/Land Rover, P&G, Diageo, Olay, Warner Music Group, Twitter, Mediacom, and Ketchum PR to identify the best influencer partnerships and effectively measure their campaigns’ success to maximize ROI.
#15. Mavrck
Mavrck has over 12 million micro-influencers in its database and hundreds of millions of social profiles. Mavrck focuses on micro-influencers, often people who don’t recognise themselves as influencers.
Mavrck takes a different approach to most other platforms. Their goal is to turn a brand’s best customers into influencers who then generate a lot of positive word of mouth about the brand. The main benefit of this approach is that these people are often already enthusiasts of the brand.
Mavrck has built an impressive client roster, with big-name companies like Gillette, Dunkin’ Donuts, Universal Studios, New Balance, Proctor & Gamble, Sears, and JetBlue.
#16. Lumanu
Lumanu acts as a dashboard for all your influencers content. It empowers marketers to buy media through people who create content at scale to drive measurable ROI.
Additionally, you can actively promote/advertise content directly within the platform. It optimizes the distribution of your media based on your objective, taking into account the influencer data you. This means finding lookalike audiences for each channel and advertising directly to them.
#17. Popular Chips
Popular Chips allows you to monitor influencers and competitors on Instagram and gives you unique demographics data.
The Influencer Discovery section works like other platforms and is intuitive. You can specify categories/interests, minimums and maximums on followers, locations, and the demographics of the influencers’ audiences.
SEO / Basic Budget Outreach Tools
Some of the tools I have listed below were created mainly for blogger outreach. For this reason, many of the tools have a good basic level of features and still have their place in the market. They are more suited to SEO and link building than influencer marketing in its broader term.
#18. Influencer marketing platforms – Buzzstream
BuzzStream automates a lot of the legwork involved with outreach and in that way it saves you a lot of time. You can do all of your outreach in one place. It’s particularly suited to doing outreach to influential bloggers for guest posting and link building.
#19. Influencer Marketing Platforms – Pitchbox
Pitchbox is an outreach tool designed to help you target influencers and find other outreach opportunities. One of the key features is its ability to act as CRM (customer relationship management) tool for outreach. The platform has goof email management features to keep track of communications at each stage of your outreach.
#20. Influencer Marketing Platforms – Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach is one of the key tools allows you to quickly automate and scale your outreach efforts for link building, content promotion and relationship building with influencers and top industry bloggers.
The platform has a huge database of active link targets, complete with SEO signals like PageRank, Domain Authority, Alexa Rank etc… so you can easily sort and prioritise your outreach lists.
#21. Influencer Marketing Platforms – Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is one of the top social media analytics tools. It comes with a very powerful social media search engine that helps you find and analyze the best performing content related to a specific niche. The search engine is responsible to sweep the web for the required content and listing the content sources based on their success rate (number of likes and shares.)
#22. Tomoson
Tomoson provides you with a powerful search engine that allows you to quickly narrow your results down to the influencers who will be the most relevant and effective for your business.
The primary benefit of using Tomoson, as opposed to conducting your own blogger outreach, is the built-in audience. You don’t have to search influencers, as they are already using the system. You simply need to decide which ones can have the biggest impact on your business.
Summary of Influencer Marketing Platforms
The landscape for influencer marketing tools is constantly changing. I will be adding more tools to the startup tools section of my website as well as writing about influencer marketing strategies and tactics.
Let me know what tools/platforms you use and what makes them a good fit for you.
