In today’s rapidly changing digital marketing landscape, influencers are becoming increasingly vital for brands to boost their image, reach, and conversion. Because of that, influencer marketing is now a billion-dollar industry thanks to its escalating demand in the past couple of years.
This continuous growth created a competitive landscape that prompted brands to seek more advanced solutions to stand out. Aside from partnering with the right personality, marketers are employing the help of influencer marketing platforms to conduct various processes, including influencer discovery, content management, and more.
In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into the complex world of influencer marketing platforms. Learn why you need them and how to choose the right one for your brand. Plus, we’ll provide some of the best tools you can start with.
Key Takeaways
- The influencer marketing model continues to be one of the best options brands leverage to elevate their engagement and conversions.
- Today, many influencer marketing platforms help brands optimize their campaigns for better results.
- These tools help brands find the right influencers, manage their campaigns better, and track their performances, among other services.
- When looking for the perfect tool, brands must prioritize various factors, including influencer database, campaign management functions, ease of use, and thorough analytics.
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A Refresher on Influencer Marketing
The influencer marketing model stems from the complex field of social media marketing. It leverages influencers or individuals with significant online following to promote a brand’s product and services.
People often perceive these individuals in their chosen niche as influential personalities or experts. Generally, they provide demonstrations, endorsements, recommendations, and other valuable content that help their followers make more informed buying decisions.
More often than not, we’re used to seeing these personalities as Instagram influencers. However, they’re also prominent on other platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitch.
Partnering with social media influencers is an excellent way to build brand awareness, trust, and conversion. Their content can serve as effective forms of social proof that help humanize a brand and attract potential customers.
There are various types of influencers brands can partner with today. These are nano (fewer than 1,000 followers), micro (1,000 to 100,000 followers), macro (100,000 to one million followers), and mega influencers (above one million followers). Each influencer type offers different solutions to brands, primarily depending on their online following.
On the other hand, regular online users can also be considered influencers. Through user-generated content (UGC), brands can leverage their customers to attract more people and improve their conversion.
Influencer Marketing vs. Affiliate Marketing
Many people confuse influencers with affiliates. This misconception is understandable, considering these two marketing models utilize individuals with significant online followings. However, that’s where their similarities stop.
Generally, brands don’t pay for an exclusive partnership with affiliates. Instead, these individuals join programs to earn a commission by promoting a company’s products or services. That means they gain financial compensation after converting their target audience successfully. Because of that, this model is primarily focused on driving traffic and conversion to a specific brand.
On the other hand, influencers are more focused on achieving long-term key performance indicators (KPIs), including brand awareness, engagement, and authority.
Companies partner with them to establish credibility and build trust with their target audience. Aside from monetary compensation, influencers can receive exclusive deals, product seeding or gifting, and other significant rewards.
Understanding Influencer Marketing Platforms
Launching an influencer marketing campaign seems straightforward. However, there are various steps to ensure success. Besides identifying potential influencers, brands must set their goals, determine their target audience, and select a campaign type for their partner influencer.
To guarantee success, brands need a careful approach when creating an influencer marketing campaign. They need the right tools to be more organized and effective when executing their strategies.
Influencer marketing platforms are online tools or services that brands can use to collaborate with influencers seamlessly, among other valuable solutions. Often, they provide a centralized space where marketers can streamline different processes and boost their influencer marketing efforts.
To further understand what influencer marketing platforms are, we’re listing below how they can help brands optimize their campaigns.
Find the right influencer
One of the biggest challenges brands face with influencer marketing is looking for the right individual to partner with. As mentioned earlier, there are various types of influencers to consider, each serving a different purpose than the other.
For instance, micro-influencers are perfect for building relationships with the target audience, while mega-influencers are excellent for achieving brand awareness.
Without the right tool, marketers must manually look for these individuals across various social media platforms, which is tedious and unnecessary. Instead of spending all their efforts on crafting an effective campaign, they will exhaust their time and energy on such an irrelevant task.
Through an influencer marketing tool, brands can eliminate all the manual processes hindering their campaign creation, particularly when finding a brand’s potential influencers. These platforms allow brands to search for ideal partners based on various criteria, including keywords, locations, industries, and audience demographics. This process enables them to find the perfect influencer that fits their campaign.
Streamline influencer campaigns
Aside from looking for the best influencers in any industry, these tools support brands by streamlining various processes, from planning to execution, to make their campaigns more organized. For instance, most of these tools enable brands to create customized workflows to track every stage in their strategy.
Moreover, these tools also allow brands to collaborate better with team members and partner influencers. Because of that, they can develop an effective campaign that the target audience will find relatable.
Better content creation
Content is at the forefront of an effective influencer marketing strategy. Mishandling them throughout a campaign could cost brands an effective connection with their target audience. In worst cases, they lead to unnecessary legal issues after failing to acquire the proper rights from creators.
Through an influencer marketing platform, brands can organize their content in a more streamlined way. Doing so is vital because it allows brands to keep track of their influencer content, primarily their ownership rights. This strategy is important if brands want to use materials like user-generated content.
Moreover, brands can use these platforms to sharpen their content and make it more relevant to the target audience. Through features like social listening and trend analysis, marketers can gauge which topic is more effective for potential customers today.
Track performance
Finally, the best influencer marketing platforms provide brands with thorough analytics that allow them to track the performance of their influencer marketing program. It enables them to determine how effective their campaigns are in terms of various factors, including engagement, reach, and clicks.
Through such data, brands can make more informed decisions with their strategies moving forward, allowing them to optimize their influencer campaigns better. They also provide an opportunity to determine if their partner influencer is the right fit for their brand.
Choosing The Right Influencer Marketing Platform
Brands can choose from a wide selection of influencer marketing tools available today. However, it’s worth noting that these platforms don’t offer a one-size-fits-all solution to marketers, meaning some of them play with specific strengths, like influencer discovery, content research, and analytics.
The key is to determine your campaign requirements and select a tool that’s perfect for it. That being said, there are certain functionalities that brands must prioritize when looking for the best influencer platform.
To help get you started, we’re listing below some of the most common features to look for.
Vast influencer database
As mentioned above, discovery and outreach are crucial before launching an influencer marketing campaign. With the right platform, brands can discover the right partners to meet their objectives.
Many quality platforms offer an extensive database of influencer profiles with an expansive content library across various social media channels, providing brands access to millions of potential partners globally.
In addition to that, these tools offer advanced search functionalities that allow marketers to determine potential partners based on location, audience size, engagement rates, content style, and more.
Moreover, these tools provide an excellent opportunity for brands to vet influencers effectively. Vetting is when companies thoroughly evaluate potential partners before creating an agreement with them.
Gathering enough information from an influencer marketing platform will help brands ensure they partner with the one that aligns with their image, values, content, and target audience.
Aside from influencer search, these platforms help brands nurture their relationships with these individuals. They provide gateways for better communication, negotiations, and partnership management with content creators.
For instance, many of these tools provide payment solutions between brands and influencers, eliminating issues by offering a secure and transparent financial process.
Campaign management
Handling influencer marketing campaigns can be overwhelming, especially since they involve various moving parts to become successful, from the content team to the budget department. The good news is that many influencer marketing platforms support brands by streamlining many procedures in their campaigns.
For instance, most influencer campaign management tools, which we’ll discuss below, allow brands to define their workflows so that every part of their efforts knows what steps to take during executions.
Brands can organize their teams through these platforms so members know who to work with and get approvals from. Plus, they allow brands to automate various tasks to make their campaign executions more efficient and seamless.
Furthermore, these tools must enable brands to tap directly into various social media and e-commerce platforms and acquire influencer content from these channels. They must also allow brands to secure rights to avoid any copyright friction with content creators.
Ease of use
User interface (UI) is a critical area that all digital marketing platforms must prioritize, including those dedicated to influencers. The perfect tool, whether centered around influencer discovery or campaign management, must be easy to use for any team members who will handle them.
The interface must have straightforward navigation that allows users to execute different tasks in a few clicks. They must also work across multiple devices, from laptops to smartphones, to let members conduct their procedures wherever they are.
Finally, influencer marketing software companies must provide a thorough training or onboarding process that assists beginners in using their solutions. They must also offer responsive customer support to help users address any concerns.
Analytics and reporting
As discussed, one of the many benefits of using an influencer marketing tool is that it helps brands track their campaign performance in various stages. It must provide multiple insights on metrics like brand awareness, engagement, reach, and conversions to help brands gauge their efforts from start to finish.
Aside from the abovementioned factors, the ideal tool must provide insights into a company’s brand mentions online, social media traffic, and audience growth. Although there are platforms dedicated to measuring an influencer partnership’s success, you can also find some of these metrics in most tools available.
Additionally, these platforms must provide thorough reporting to help brands understand all metrics related to their campaign. These reports must be customizable and can be shared easily within the organization. Plus, generating these reports should be conducted in a few clicks.
Reasonable pricing structure
Budget plays a pivotal role in helping brands decide which influencer marketing platform to consider. The right tool doesn’t have to be cheap, but it must offer a reasonable pricing structure that makes sense for its services.
The key is to prioritize what your brand requires. This prioritization is crucial because you might end up paying for features you don’t need. So, you must determine which services you find necessary to your campaign: influencer search or content management. Then, compare various platforms in terms of pricing and features offered.
Moreover, when choosing the right tool, you must take advantage of a platform’s free trials or demos. This is an excellent way to gauge if your desired tool matches your brand’s influencer marketing requirements. More often than not, these free versions provide enough insights into how the overall platform performs.
Best Influencer Marketing Platforms To Consider
With many options available for brands today, we’re listing below some of the best examples of these influencer marketing platforms you can try.
Grin
Grin is one of the most popular all-around influencer marketing platforms available today, offering a wide database from platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, containing over 100 million influencer profiles.
Aside from that, this platform provides various integrations with known online shopping platforms, including Shopify. It offers quality influencer collaboration, user-generated content management, payment tools, analytics, and more.
Creator.co
Creator.co is an influencer marketplace that aims to promote micro-influencers and help small businesses everywhere. This platform offers nearly 300 million influencers in its database, complete with a thorough influencer search feature that allows brands to determine the best ones for their campaign.
They also provide an intuitive dashboard that’s easy to use, even for beginners, advanced analytics, and incredible social listening tools.
Traackr
Traackr is among the oldest influencer marketing platforms available today, surviving decades in the market for its continuous evolution. Today, this platform focuses on influencer relationship management with various options for brands to look for influencers in their database.
This tool also provides an excellent social listening tool that allows brands to track influencer content in real-time. Aside from that, Traackr provides incredible workflows, automated payments, and robust analytics.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an excellent platform with a great social listening tool to help brands determine the best content creators with significant credibility in their field. Through BuzzSumo, they can identify influencers and affiliates based on shares, comments, and other factors.
This platform also enables brands to conduct a thorough trend analysis, allowing them to hop on the current topics relevant to their industry. This is crucial when creating content that potential customers will find relevant.
Archive
Archive is a newcomer to the industry, but it’s getting a lot of traction from various brands because of its quality social listening and influencer discovery. It provides one of the best content acquisition on Instagram and TikTok, allowing brands to seamlessly capture user-generated content, from reels to stories to posts. This platform also allows brands to gain usage rights in a more straightforward way.
Upfluence
Upfluence is an all-in-one influencer and affiliate marketing platform that offers affordable services, making it perfect for small to medium-sized businesses. It provides a massive database containing 500 million items from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Pinterest. This comprehensive data guarantees that brands can find influencers that match specific criteria.
Other notable features Upfluence offers include relationship management, payment tools, and influencer tracking. They also provide an AI-powered ChatGPT assistant.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch offers an all-inclusive array of influencer marketing solutions, helping brands handle various tasks, from influencer discovery to relationship management. Its discovery tool provides a database with 30 million creators on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
This tool allows brands to filter their searches and identify influencers based on previous work, credibility, and interests. Other notable features of this platform include streamlined workflows, real-time reports, and more.
Pro Tip: As mentioned above, customers can become excellent influencers that elevate the brand image. User-generated content provides an opportunity for relatable promotion that builds a company’s credibility and trust. That means when you receive positive user-generated content, take the chance to boost your brand awareness by publishing it on multiple outlets.
Boost Your Campaigns With the Right Influencer Marketing Platform
An influencer platform is an excellent addition to a brand’s marketing arsenal. The key is to choose the right one based on your campaign’s specific requirements, from objectives to content to budget. That way, you can determine which tool to use to elevate your influencer marketing efforts.
Among the many functions these tools offer is thorough social listening, allowing brands to acquire the best user-generated content that can further elevate their image and trust. Maximize your brand’s user-generated content through Archive.
Customers make excellent influencers. Don’t miss out on their quality user-generated content by using Archive today. Visit us to learn more.
FAQs on Elevate Your Brand: Choosing the Right Influencer Marketing Platform
Are influencers and brand ambassadors the same?
On the surface, brand ambassadors and influencers may seem similar. However, a partnership with brand ambassadors could be longer than influencers. They’re also deeply committed to the brand, often acting as a company representative who embodies their values and goals.
Influencers can also act as brand ambassadors. However, more often than not, they typically engage in a short-term collaboration or partnership with a brand for specific campaigns. They may also work with multiple brands, unlike ambassadors, who usually collaborate with only one.
What industries should be partnering with influencers?
Influencer marketing is a reliable strategy used by multiple sectors. Before, it was used by companies in select industries, mainly retail, including beauty, fashion, and lifestyle brands. However, influencers have become more prominent across different fields, including tech, travel, fitness, and more. They’re also becoming more available to B2B brands.
Does influencer marketing help with search engine optimization (SEO)?
Influencer marketing is an excellent off-page SEO practice, helping brands increase their website traffic to gain an excellent placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). For instance, having a credible influencer behind your brand effectively builds quality backlinks from other authoritative sites, boosting your online credibility and, ultimately, your ranking.
