Amidst the social media frenzy in the last few years, there has been a massive rise of influencers. Sites like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn have a large number of influencers with expertise in a specific niche market who have the power and vast follower count to help you take your business to the next level. This is why influencer marketing is catching up a lot lately. According to a report, the influencer marketing industry is expected to reach around $16.4 billion in 2022. And that’s where influencer marketing platforms come into the picture. Let’s understand what they are and how they can help you before discussing the best influencer marketing platforms for your campaigns.
Who is an Influencer?
Before we go deeper into influencer marketing, let’s first define who an influencer is. An influencer is a real person with a good follower count in a specific domain or niche where they are active and engage constantly. Their opinions, thoughts, and work are directed in that niche, which influences people who become their followers. Influencers express their views and work actively to feed their followers’ expectations who resonate with them, feel connected with them, and may take their advice or recommendations. For example, an influencer with thousands of followers on Instagram can create content such as posts and Reels featuring a product they like and recommend it to their followers. This, in turn, can help the brand of that product reach a big audience and increase the conversion rates.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing or influence marketing is a social media marketing technique that encompasses product placements and endorsements from influencers, organizations, and people with a social influence or expert-level knowledge in their domain. Influencers have the power and position in the market to affect consumers’ measurable actions, buying habits, or other people through sponsored or non-sponsored content. They usually influence people by uploading some kind of original, uncopied content to social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. They are active and have a good number of followers. In influencer marketing, a brand approaches influencers with established audiences and credibility on social media and enrolls them in their marketing campaigns. They request influencers to mention their products or services in a post, which their followers can view and engage with. This opens a window where the brand gets wider recognition and visibility online, and it also increases the conversion rates. There are many reasons why influencer marketing is lucrative for modern businesses:
Increased visibility and reach among your targeted audienceImproved brand awareness and reputationBetter conversion rates and sales Enhanced ROI
Why use an influencer marketing platform?
There is a sudden rise in influencer marketing. It has become a part of every lifestyle or consumer brand’s checklist, irrespective of the industry. This means competition is increasing, and to stand out, you must connect with the right influencer who can help you reach your goals. To make this easier, there are many influencer marketing platforms available in the market that help you pick the right influencers for your marketing campaigns. Here are the reasons why using them is beneficial.
Quick access to genuine profiles
You can’t just believe or judge someone solely by looking at their posts. When it comes to working with an influencer, choose someone professional who knows what they do and is responsible for their actions. Beware of people who write or post good stuff on their profiles but are involved in shady practices.
But how would you know who you can trust?
Influencer marketing platforms vet influencers by checking their backgrounds before adding them to the database. This will help you choose the right influences who can truly help your business grow. It also saves time and resources spent on influencers who can later mislead you.
Easier collaboration
There are hundreds and thousands of influencers on various social media platforms, and connecting, onboarding, and collaborating with them can be tricky and time-consuming. But if you use an influencer marketing platform, many influencers are registered there already and are available to collaborate. This makes collaboration easier and faster, and you don’t have to spend unnecessarily on onboarding them.
Niche-based selection
You will find influencers in different niches. This is why it’s important to discover those who are relevant to your niche. If your marketing campaign focuses on a particular niche, check the influencers’ profiles from that domain on social media platforms with the help of an influencer marketing platform. For example, if you are a brand offering lifestyle products, the tool will help you find influencers in that category who can best represent your brand and products and talk about them on social media platforms.
Compare influencers effortlessly
Influencers are of different types, mainly four:
Mega influencers: Their follower count is 100k+, and they are expensive to collaborate with. Macro influencers: Their follower count ranges from 10k to 100k; they are more affordable than mega influencers.Micro-influencers: Their follower count is between 1k – 10k, less costly than the above two/Nano-influencers: Their follower count is less than 1000, and they are the most affordable to collaborate with.
Without the knowledge of these tiers, you will have big trouble comparing the best influencer for your marketing effort. But an influencer marketing platform can help you compare them based on different tiers.
Efficient result tracking
Influencer marketing platforms come with an advanced reporting feature that will help you track the success of your campaigns easily. You can literally have all the statistics from its dashboard to understand who is on board with you, conversations, sales, engagement rates, and more. You can even send these reports to your investors so they know the effectiveness of your campaigns with better clarity. Now, if you want to avail yourself of these benefits, let’s talk about some excellent influencer marketing platforms that can help you connect your brand to the right influencers.
Impact.com
Impact.com is an excellent influencer marketing platform that will help you discover potential influencers to grow your business. It lets you automate your partnerships and is scalable to support your growth. With Partnership automation, you can expand your programs, including your affiliates, business partners, influencers, publishers, mobile apps, etc. You can find influencers from anywhere on the globe with its massive database and recruit suitable ones with automated campaigns. It’s easy to contract new partners, negotiate payouts with them, and pay them easily. In addition, track the traffic your influencers have driven on different platforms and sites across devices. You can also train and engage better with the influencers to increase their productivity and drive revenue and awareness with consistent efforts. Furthermore, protect and monitor your marketing programs from harmful agents that can defraud the programs and check whether the influencers are following your guidelines. You can also optimize influencer management by calculating their contributions to adjust your moves and motivate them.
Grin
The all-in-one influencer marketing platform – Grin helps you manage your influencers and grow your business. It has the trust of top global eCommerce brands like L’Oreal, and it can help you create a household name for your brand. You can choose from 32+ million creators to discover the perfect creator for your marketing campaign. You can even import your current influencer list to this platform and synchronize your data in one place. Additionally, Grin offers multiple ways to find and invite creators to uplift your brand. Nurture relationships with influencers by emailing them, providing your affiliate codes, shipping products, and so on using just one platform. You will also get notified when the creators’ posts are live. In addition, you can leverage reports to analyze your campaign levels, KPIs, and creators’ metrics, costs, sales, revenue, and ROI. Grin can manage all your logistics of transferring the right products to the right place using its eCommerce integrations for services, such as Shopify, Salesforce, Magento, Slack, PayPal, etc. Don’t worry about payment issues; Grin will send payments to your creators, analyze ROI for each individual, track their payment history, and more.
Mavrck
Mavrck is a complete influencer marketing platform best suited for enterprise consumer companies and brands. Over 600 marketers trust this platform which has activated 2.7+ million consumers with the power of influence. In fact, Mavrck was named a “Leader” by Forrester in its Influencer Marketing Solutions Report for Q2 2020. It’s trusted by big brands such as Netflix, Disney, Oreo, P&G, Reebok, etc. You will get a clean and easy-to-use software to streamline the search, collaboration, and reporting with influencers. Interestingly, it can efficiently assess and detect influencer fraud and offer a customized, 360-degree view of all your influencers. You can also evaluate the safety risks of your brand and leverage its performance measurement and forecasting features. Mavrck gives end-to-end relationship management and workflow automation.
CreatorIQ
Enhance your influencer marketing strategy with CreatorIQ, which will help your business reach new heights in this Creator Economy era. It is trusted by brands from the likes of H&M, Sephora, Unilever, Yeti, and more. Find the most genuine influencers, connect with them easily through this platform, and keep cultivating healthy relationships with creators. You can use their data science efforts and industry-standard models to have complete clarity into your campaign’s performance. Whether you wish to boost your reporting or create complex and predictive models, you will get various measurement solutions to analyze your goal. In addition, scale your marketing campaigns with valuable industry insights to convert your loyal advocates into potential brand partners. No matter how many creators you work with, you can customize and manage creators’ data and records in a single place. The platform also offers outcome-driven planning, control over your campaigns, campaign success measurement, and forecasting. You can also build configurable and captivating reports to analyze metrics. Some of the features it offers are:
Seamless onboarding and recruitment Automated and safe creator payment to elevate efficiency and ease. Automatic allowlisting for paid advertisementsSynchronize data and develop custom solutions with unlimited possibilities through the CreatorIQ API.
CreatorIQ will help you find suitable creators for your campaign and brand with its robust database, which is data-driven and smart. It’s unique, so you can assess and find the perfect influencers in your domain to represent your products, services, and brand.
#paid
Get better visibility among your target audience and increase your sales with # paid’s, a creator marketing platform. It will help you launch campaigns quickly, find the right creators, and allowlist creators’ content easily. Allow #paid to accelerate growth at different stages of your buyers’ journey and match with those creators who actually like your brand. You don’t have to use any search tools; try Handraise, which finds creators that are the best match for your ongoing marketing campaign. Convert your content into paid ads on social media platforms using the creators’ social handles, which will perform better compared to the usual ads. In addition, #paid will help you analyze the performance of your content and creators to understand where you are heading. If you want to know how #paid works, run a free test campaign now. You can set it up easily and cancel whenever you want.
Aspire
Drive your revenue with Aspire through influencer marketing. This platform is best suitable for high-growth eCommerce companies looking to connect and collaborate with relevant influencers and creators. You will get access to the biggest creator marketplace in the world with unique proposals within seven days, without commissions or fees. It will also help you engage with your brand’s fans by mentioning you on their social media handles. You can do it through social listening software and boost your loyal customer base. Search from a vast community of 6+ million influencers easily by interest, keywords, aesthetics, demographics, etc. Aspire works in three simple steps: discover, manage, and analyze. You will start by finding the right influencers for your campaigns, connecting and collaborating with them, managing their profiles, and analyzing their performance. It’s a kind of an influencer CRM where your entire relationships with customers, influencers, affiliates, and ambassadors can be stored and managed. You can also customize your workflows and guide the influencers with the next steps. Furthermore, invite fresh talents and onboard them with branded, custom landing pages. You can also drive your sales and track them by creating top-class promo codes and affiliate links in bulk and paying them easily. You can measure growth with this platform and optimize campaigns through allowlisted content that can drive ROI at an affordable cost. Additionally, funnel data analytics will help you track your real revenue, from brand awareness and consideration to purchases.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great influencer marketing platform for finding the right fit for your campaigns. It will save you from getting blinded by vanity metrics that many influencers want to show you. Instead, the platform will help you identify truly influential people who can drive your business growth. You can find and connect genuine creators and authors with real, engaged audiences along with authority on the web, Twitter, and Instagram. BuzzSumo has a massive 8+ billion articles to help you provide content ideas and find and connect with thousands of available influencers. To find the right match, use their Content Analyzer to search for a relevant topic for your campaign or brand. It will give you a list of useful and most shared articles where you can view the top sharers on their Twitter handles. You can also view people who have retweeted it after two or three days of publishing the article. As a result, you can measure average retweets – a powerful influencer marketing metric. Hence, you can prepare a list of those influencers sharing the content so you can collaborate with them in your campaigns. Furthermore, you can use the Twitter Influencers tool to search for a specific topic and find relevant authors and journalists from a list of 500k+ people. You can also view their content performance statistics and review their profiles. Also, with the help of Content Analyzer, you can filter journalists and validate their relevance to your brand. Try BuzzSumo for 30 days for free.
Influence.co
Connect and join hands with real creators and influencers using influence.co. It can help businesses reach more audiences, boost brand awareness, and increase their followers on social media. Influence.co will help you create more engagement and interest with the help of authentic stories. The platform features a top-notch influencer discovery where you can access unlimited social profiles to choose from. In addition, you can create your campaign’s brief so that influencers can find you and apply to engage with you. Track the progress of each of your influencers, from when they first applied to joining and posting. The platform will also help you reduce the time taken to manage campaigns and drive success. In addition, you can analyze the results and optimize your strategies to achieve better results.
Captiv8
Captiv8 offers the world’s biggest database containing authenticated creators and influencers. You will get 500+ Discovery Filters to build culturally relevant and personalized storytelling for you. Captiv8 offers an excellent AI engine that allows you to find relevant influencers and develop brand reputation at scale. It will make your search seamless and offers many useful features to grow your business. Visualize your ROI using AI-based sentiment analysis, detailed engagement data, and EMV. You can create reporting dashboards in real-time with performance data specific to your goals. You can also access the verified reporting feature to protect your brand from fraud. Track your competitors by analyzing their social activities. The platform simplifies payments by letting you manage everything in a single dashboard and allows you to take cations on the best-performing content. You can also launch paid ads directly to increase the impact.
Influencity
Get everything you need for onboarding and managing your influencers in Influencity. You will have complete access to all your data, processes, and tools in a single platform to fuel your influencer marketing strategy. The platform automates your processes and saves you time and effort. You can collaborate with the right people to drive your campaigns to success each time. In addition, you can find relevant influencers by analyzing their stats from an intuitive database. You will also get campaign results within seconds to analyze the performance.
Upfluence
Power your brand with Upfluence, where you can find potential creators and influencers for your campaigns, nurture relationships, drive sales, and manage affiliate networks. It will help you identify influencers having a vast number of followers and engage them in your affiliate programs. This will turn them into authentic brand ambassadors and advocates to boost your customer base. You can manage all your influencers in a single place and build better relationships. Create automated campaigns that will help you develop custom workflows, coupon codes, and affiliate links and manage seeding and creator payouts. You can send payments in a few clicks and collect tax documents and invoices easily. You can even check your payment status to ensure your creators are paid on time. Measure campaign success using advanced analytics to know your ROI, media value, reach, impressions, and media engagement summary. You can check the individual performance of your creators and how many sales they have driven with links and eCommerce integrations.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is growing big and has a lot of potential to enhance your marketing efforts and bring better sales and conversions. The influencer marketing platforms mentioned above will help you choose the right influencers and collaborate with them to avail of the benefits for your business.
