Influencer marketing has now become part and parcel of social media marketing strategy for every brand and business. The kind of definitive hike in reach and brand visibility it garners can hardly be compared to any other marketing strategy. And to tackle the immense task of managing influencer marketing, marketers often turn to influencer marketing tools.
And why wouldn’t they? The estimated return on $1 spent on influencer marketing is $6.50.
Although influencer marketing brings in great results for marketing objectives, it’s not a one-man task. And to do it manually and get the desired results is definitely not recommended.
Influencer marketing tools take a lot less time to check off all the tasks involved.
Not convinced? Let’s get to know these tools a bit better.
What are Influencer Marketing Tools?
Influencer marketing tools are, in essence, tools that help streamline all the activities involved in influencer marketing with their advanced features. They save a lot of time and effort on the marketer’s part by taking over and optimizing the manual tasks and performing them with higher efficiency and accuracy.
The whole journey of influencer marketing can be broken into certain steps, which require a lot of research and close monitoring. They are:
- Establish campaign goals
- Influencer discovery
- Outreach and onboarding
- Collaboration
- Campaign management
- Performance monitoring
- Reporting
- Payment
Most of these steps require in-depth research and data collection to make the right decisions. Influencer marketing tools, with their ability to dig deep into social media channels and give you relevant information, are why most marketers go for these platforms.
What are the Benefits of Using Influencer Marketing Tools?
Influencer marketing tools play a pivotal role in enhancing your influencer marketing. They empower you to automate tasks, streamline processes, and leverage business intelligence for more effective influencer marketing campaigns.
They assist in pinpointing the most suitable social media influencers, overseeing campaign management comprehensively, and assessing your return on investment (ROI).
Influencer discovery:
These tools serve as a cornerstone for identifying influencers aligned with your business or project. Recognizing that each audience and influencer is distinct, it’s crucial to find relevant influencers whose audience and style resonate with yours.
Influencer Campaign Management:
These tools excel in facilitating efficient and profitable campaign management. They often offer features such as inbox organization, campaign progress tracking, and overall organization to ensure smooth operations.
Stay attuned to industry trends
Keep up with current trends by staying informed about popular topics, music, challenges, and hashtags in your industry. This awareness allows you to create viral content in collaboration with appropriate influencers.
Analyze competitors’ influencer marketing
Perform competitive analysis by closely examining the strategies employed by your competitors in influencer marketing. This involves studying their approach to collaborating with influencers, tracking their campaign performance, and evaluating their overall success.
Measuring ROI:
Influencers aim to drive tangible results, which necessitate measurement. Influencer marketing tools enable you to gauge your campaigns’ effectiveness through campaign analytics, encompassing metrics like reach, engagement, and sales.
In this article, we have compiled a list of influencer marketing tools that specialize in streamlining different activities of influencer marketing campaigns.
Influencer Marketing Tools: Influencer Search Tools
In this section, we have mentioned some tools that focus on influencer research and discovery, collecting data on prospects according to your needs and brand niche.
This tool to find influencers is built for the exact purpose of filtering out leads and contacts from all over the internet. BuzzStream proclaims to be a “Build relationships” kind of tool and that is exactly where influencer marketing starts from.
You can conduct influencer research from all available sources, whether it is for link building, PR, or influencer marketing. The Discovery feature is a key functionality that lets users search influencers by topic or keywords, bringing up relevant profiles with all the contact information of the influencers.
The results can be sorted on the basis of the number of Twitter followers, last activity, domain authority, etc. Now, all you have to do is add all suitable options to a list. BuzzStream comes with a downloadable Chrome extension that can sniff out the contact information of any website you are on.
Pros
- Can handle campaign management as well as influencer discovery.
- BuzzMarker helps track any ongoing campaign from your browser.
- Users can create custom email templates for influencer outreach.
Syam S.
With a wide range of features, including customizable email templates, automated follow-up reminders, and integrations with popular CRM platforms, Buzzstream makes it easy to manage and track all of our outreach efforts in one place.
Cons
- Sometimes the results it comes up with are outdated.
- The tool slows down when being heavily used.
- Can seem expensive to small businesses.
Dane D.
Unfortunately, Buzzstream’s platform is slow. And I mean REALLY slow. As someone who uses mass email regularly, the fact that even with automation software it can take up to two minutes to send an email (dealing with contact conflicts and custom variables), the platform is far too slow to handle that kind of work. I’ve also had Buzzstream lose contacts & data on my email campaign and it has frozen in the middle of mass outreach.
Modash is considered to be a comprehensive influencer search tool that helps users look for and connect to creators from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. The platform boasts a vast database of creators and the capability to track related metrics and manage relationships.
Being a versatile platform with multiple integrations, Modash is used by marketing agencies, brands, and e-commerce businesses for their influencer marketing ventures.
With over 1 million influencers in its database, Modash makes it a hassle-free experience for users to find the perfect collaborators from your niche, giving you multiple options to choose from. Furthermore, you can ensure an ideal match with more than 20 filters to apply while searching.
Pros
- Enable the search for nano-influencers.
- In-depth influencer analytics to help brands gauge their effectiveness.
- The communication features help streamline negotiation and influencer onboarding.
Jake D.
We’ve been using Modash for over 6 months and it’s been a huge unlock for sourcing high-quality influencers that fit the needs of each of our brands (well over 100 brands). The UI is extremely intuitive, the functionality is expanding every week, and the team at Modash has been incredible to work with. We’ve been able to identify hyper-specific influencers, monitor the collaborations, and keep track of and store every piece of content.
Cons
- The feature-loaded platform has a considerable learning curve.
- The 14-day free trial might not be enough for users to make the best decision regarding the tool.
- There might be occasional data discrepancies.
Romain T.
The thing I like least about this software is that you have a lot of redundant profiles in your search results (for now, they are working on a fix).
Although an all-rounder when it comes to influencer marketing, Upfluence functions greatly as one of the best tools to find influencers. With a huge reserve of influencer profiles in its database, the platform updates its data all in real time so users access accurate information.
For Instagram in particular, Upfluence indexes all the profiles to provide audience demographics to show metrics like age, gender location, etc if the influencer has authorized the data. The influencer marketing tool covers all the major social channels like YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, TikTok, and as mentioned above, Instagram.
A remarkable quality of Upfluence is its integration with e-commerce platforms Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Klaviyo, and Zapier. It helps businesses identify influential creators within their own customer list, is case they are interested to pursue a collaboration.
Pros
- Provides real-time influencer analytics.
- Users can compare similar influencers side by side to pick the better fit.
- Has a Chrome plugin that allows users to analyze influencers right from the browser itself.
Verified User
Upfluence makes is really easy to manage my IM campaigns and even easier to scale the successful ones. I enjoy having things all aligned in one place (outreach, communications, shipping information, commission tracking, results, contracts, payments, etc.).
Cons
- The plugin does not support campaign and relationship management of influencers.
- There is no mobile version of the app.
Constance R.
Sometimes when searching for influencers, we see the same ones repeatedly and not enough new ones.
Influencer Marketing Tools: Influencer Outreach Tools
Influencer marketing software simplifies your outreach process and campaign management. It aids in finding content creators and micro-influencers effortlessly. In this section, we will mention some of the tools which specialize the outreach part of influencer marketing.
Despite being new to the industry, Affable.ai has developed into a sophisticated influencer platform for medium-sized businesses to enterprises. It is rich in data on each influencer profile it has indexed, from demographic to psychographic elements. It also has the in-depth metrics of a great search tool like followers, mentions, suspicious followers, etc.
A unique quality of the tool is its ability to take into account negative criteria that the users feed. This enables you to avoid seeing influencers in your search results who have worked with your competitors or have negatively mentioned your brand.
The communication management is seamless on this AI-powered tool, helping you invite suitable influencers to your campaigns. You can also monitor their journey, assign cost, assign ratings, or send emails directly from the CRM.
Pros
- Bulk emails can be sent to influencers, which are customized as well.
- Unique reach for influencers can be determined by identifying overlap.
- Users can run separate campaigns with different influencers simultaneously.
Jia Yi N.
It’s a very efficient tool for discovering new influencers; I like that I can just enter some category keywords to find relevant influencers. I also like that I can create campaigns and automatically track brand-related coverage on influencers’ feeds. As IGS are saved directly on Affable’s servers, this helps to prevent missing coverage on our end.
Cons
- Limited features are granted for use at lower-tiered plans.
- Influencer monitoring on new social channels incurs add-on costs.
Verified User
It is challenging to find many of the influencers we are looking for that have a smaller following. The team has been really helpful in assisting, but it would be great if it didn’t need to happen manually.
Showcase is an innovative UGC marketplace designed to support brands in executing user-generated content campaigns seamlessly. Tailored to cater to niche UGC creators across various social media platforms, it offers direct access to a curated network of content creators.
This facilitates effortless collaboration with influencers and UGC specialists. With transparent pricing and streamlined communication channels, Showcase ensures efficient coordination for social campaigns.
However, it’s essential to acknowledge that while Showcase excels in UGC, its focus may limit its applicability to broader digital outreach requirements beyond social media content creation.
Pros
- Tools available for streamlined communication and collaboration between brands and creators.
- Users can access verified user-generated content to use for their influencer marketing campaigns.
Julujana H.
stands out as an exceptional UGC platform and agency, delivering enticing offers directly to my inbox at favorable rates. The customer support is top-notch, ensuring a seamless experience. Its user-friendly interface and effortless integration enhance efficiency in my day-to-day tasks.
Cons
- The platform is limited to UGC only.
- Lacking in regards to influencer discovery.
Katle E.
It was a bit confusing dealing with more than 1 rep while I did the job, and I felt that communication could have been a bit clearer at times. But for the most part, it was good.
HypeAuditor is one of the most versatile names in the influencer marketing sphere, giving a well-rounded experience to all users, starting from discovery to analyzing your campaign’s performance.
With the help of advanced filters, users can conduct their thorough research for the perfect creative collaborations, vetting profiles from 253 countries. And you will be given alternatives for every influencer you choose, which are also known as look alikes.
After you have vetted the most suitable influencer profiles for your business, you can add them to the CRM integration of the platform. You can start your outreach by messaging them right from HypeAudit’s dashboard, tracking their status. You can also send bulk emails to a bunch of creators in a list.
Pros
- The platform can successfully analyze the authenticity of an influencer profile.
- The Influencer discovery tool works with several platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Twitter.
- HypeAudit generates premium reports that can be directly shared with customers.
Ella S.
What I like the most about HypeAuditor is that the platform actively listens to the feedback of it’s users, and releases new features or tools that address our concerns and help us execute better campaigns. The platform is constantly evolving and improving, and our Customer Success Manager Victoria is extremely helpful and responsive.
Cons
- The platform is not always able to give equal quality to creators from every country.
- Users have often encountered problems with the API of the platform for generating reports.
Aquib I.
The campaign management tool is really complicated. As per our previous experience, we had trouble with including influencers in a campaign which led us to miss insight.
Influencer Marketing Tools: Social Listening Platforms
Listening tools basically monitor the internet to pick up relevant chatter about the topics you are interested in, filtering out the profiles that might have some potential as an influencer. They prove extremely insightful tools to find influencers.
Audiense stands out as a premier tool for gathering intel from audience conversations with exceptional precision. This social listening software is instrumental in comprehending the demographics of your audience through precise segmentation. Each segment is categorized by age, gender, location, interests, and brand mentions, empowering you to plan targeted campaigns effectively.
Moreover, Audiense aids in identifying relevant influencers within each segment, enabling you to leverage their assistance in amplifying your brand presence. Its AI technology analyzes vast datasets to offer insights into the mindset and psychology of your followers and target audience.
Furthermore, Audiense provides real-time notifications about your competitors and their current status, offering invaluable insights to refine digital marketing strategies and bridge gaps effectively.
Pros
- The listening capability helps marketers connect actual public opinion with statistical data, uncovering their brand reputation among the masses.
- With the basic plan costing $0 per month, Audiense is one of the free tools to find influencers.
- Users can define an audience persona and then find influencers they have an affinity with, making the discovery process all the more streamlined.
Rodrigo F.
It helps us to have a numerical base to justify our strategic proposals, it also allows us to know what media our user is interested in and what type of influencers and content creators are most suitable for their personality and interests.
Cons
- The platform can seem a bit difficult to get used to for beginners.
- Audiense is only limited to Twitter.
Verified User
Demographics and sociographics can be misleading, due to its inferential nature, and while I can use other sources for demographic information, I have to make sure clients don’t read too much into the demographics/sociographics sections when I send them the public version of the report.
BrandMentions is a specialized platform designed for brand monitoring, social listening, and reputation management. This social media listening platform empowers users to continuously monitor the internet and social media for visible and veiled mentions of any business.
The platform is an ideal solution for marketers and businesses seeking to stay attuned to trending industry topics, relevant influencers, social media metrics, and unlinked brand mentions. With intelligent alerts, BrandMentions provides users with peace of mind, offering easy access to top platform reviews and sentiment analysis.
It allows you to track trending topics and strategically engage in conversations related to your brand. BrandMentions offers historical monitoring across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora.
Pros
- Easy filtering of brand mentions all over the internet.
- Intuitive UI
- Particular social profile monitoring to keep watch over influencers users are interested in.
Verified User
I like that I find so many mentions, which normally I wouldn’t stumble upon ever. Even leads (potential clients) that mentioned us in very far away sources/forums and these get shared with the sales team.
Cons
- The platform often slows down due to heavy usage.
- Advanced features unavailable in lower-priced plans.
Verified User
There are lots of options and it takes some time to figure out how to make it generate the results we were looking for with the boolean search function. However, the BrandMentions team was more than willing to help us set up alerts so that helped a lot.
Digimind stands as a robust platform for social listening and market intelligence. This tool enables you to monitor critical conversations surrounding your brand in real-time across millions of sources, empowering you to enhance your marketing strategy effectively.
Within the Digimind ecosystem, various dedicated solutions cater to specific needs, including Brand Reputation, Competitive Intelligence, Consumer Insights, Influencer Identification, Campaign Analysis, and Trend Tracking and Innovation.
This integrated system provides businesses with comprehensive insights into social media activities. You can track specific keywords and topics, generate insightful reports, and measure ROI for owned media effortlessly.
Pros
- Social listening helps users monitor content performance and benchmark it against other social profiles.
- The platform can analyze the sentiment behind every brand mention.
Michael O.
Digimind Social presented quick and easy to understand data about audiences such as age, gender, and profession. The charts and word clouds allowed for quick overviews that we could use with clients to deliver valuable insights.
Cons
- The UI can seem complicated to users at first.
- Historical data is not always readily available.
Verified User
The UI is not the most friendly so it needs some training to understand the power behind it.
Influencer Marketing Tools: Campaign Management and Analytics Tools
The most important step of influencer marketing is the actual influencer campaign. Most influencer marketing tools have the functionality to manage a campaign. But in this section, we will mention some influencer tools that can not only monitor a campaign but also deduce in-depth analysis of the results.
GRIN is an excellent tool for influencer management, with intricate but easy-to-use workflows all integrated into one space. The platform integrates seamlessly into your e-commerce software like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, along with your email accounts from Gmail and Outlook.
More centered on e-commerce platforms, GRIN pulls registered users’ information to identify potential leads for influencer collaboration. Other than this, the tool also collects creators the old-school way- from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Once the campaign is underway, users can manage it seamlessly through Grin, engaging with influencers from start to finish until content goes live. The platform notifies you as content is posted, with Slack integration available. Build a content gallery for easy access to all photos and videos, perfect for repurposing.
Access to comprehensive data allows for precise evaluation of each influencer’s performance, identifying top converters and ROI champions. With established KPIs, pinpoint influencers worth future collaboration. Grin fosters a cycle of success, each action informing and enhancing subsequent campaigns.
Pros
- The platform can filter out influencers from e-commerce as well as social media platforms.
- Understand actual ROI with real-time sales/referrals.
- Lets you create shoppable codes and links, making for easier influencer metrics reporting.
Lexis F.
We manage all of our influencer collaborations through GRIN. GRIN allows us to seed product to our influencers, find new influencers quickly, track conversions, and pay influencers efficiently. We have used many other services and GRIN is by far the best influencer marketing platform. The growth of our influencer program would be nothing without GRIN. The GRIN team is super quick to respond if I ever have questions and always there to help.
Cons
- The tool might be sometimes slow to pull content in real-time.
- Users have faced problems while downloading content created by influencers.
Gabe F.
One of the speed bumps with GRIN is not having the ability to dive into deep links. We wish our creators can create deep links for specific products through the GRIN creator portal.
Introduced in 2015, Refersion caters to brands seeking to streamline and enhance their affiliate networks. Setting itself apart from competitors, the platform grants brands autonomy in managing their affiliate relationships, unrestricted by network limitations or rigid commission structures.
Refersion offers pre-built apps seamlessly integrating with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Stripe, and Chargebee. Custom integration with Refersion’s API is necessary for other e-commerce platforms.
It facilitates the creation of custom coupon codes, enabling precise tracking of influencer content performance. This data aids in identifying top-performing influencers. While each brand partner enjoys a personalized platform, a dashboard summary provides an overview of all partnerships and campaigns. Refersion can also take care of payments. You can automate payment scheduling and pay directly with Refersion Pay.
Pros
- Makes management of affiliates at scale very easy.
- Custom referral rewards or commission structures can be set up.
Idowu A.
Their user interface is very simple and the tracking and reporting tools provided were so advanced, which enables us to easily track our marketing campaigns performance.
Cons
- Organizing influencers on their basis of their performance is difficult.
- No facilities for on-platform payments.
Verified User
It automatically approves people who sign up and we have had a few issues with people using the codes on coupon sites and making money off of us that they did not actually earn.
NeoReach offers cloud-based software tailored for Fortune 1000 brands and their agencies, streamlining influencer marketing through automation. Employing AI, the platform enhances influencer suggestions with increased usage.
Comprehensive campaign management tools are an integral part of NeoReach, featuring a centralized communications hub. Its reporting functionality delves into audience demographics and calculates ROI, introducing its own performance metric, Influencer Media Value (IMV).
NeoReach’s campaign management suite facilitates organized efforts, providing a centralized hub for communication and built-in management tools for overseeing influencer collaborations. Each influencer’s involvement in a campaign can be tracked meticulously, including message history, contract viewing, and content progress and performance assessment.
The reporting engine offers various insights, limited only by the platform’s data capabilities, ensuring thorough analysis within NeoReach.
Pros
- There are millions of metrics available for facilitating your discovery.
- Their self-invented metric Influencer Media Value (IMV), clearly demonstrates ROI.
Lauren M.
NeoReach gives a lot of great tools for finding influencers that fit perfectly with our client’s brand. We work with smaller businesses so NeoReach gives them access to top tier influencers they may not have otherwise had an in for. The most helpful part about NeoReach is definitely the data analyzing. They really do the work for you and track all kinds of things in easy-to-read ways that make it super easy to send our client’s way.
Cons
- Users have found the presence of micro-influencers to be lacking in their database.
Swadhiti S.
There are possibilities in the space of NeoReach wherein they can introduce some new resources for developing enterprises. The crypto and NFT marketing space in the platform is an emerging vertical but with tons of work to do.
How Do You Select the Right Influencer Marketing Tool
After seeing all these options, it might get confusing as to which tool to pick. However, you must always look at three major factors in a tool to gauge its suitability according to your requirements.
- Price: The budget you have allocated to influencer marketing would be a deciding factor in your choice of tool. This will vary with the size of your business and campaign requirements.
- User-friendliness: A tool, however, loaded with advanced features, is of no use if it is not easy to use. Look for a platform with a shallow learning curve. You can determine whether the tool is user-friendly or not while using it or from authentic user reviews.
- Main USP: You have to understand the role that the influencer marketing tool has to play in your workflow and make sure that feature is the strongest in the option you select. Whether you need a tool to find influencers, automate the outreach process, manage relationships, access audience analytics, or streamline the payment and commission of the creators, the tool should be able to do so.
- Types of influencers: It’s mostly a predetermined factor, as to what type of influencer you require to collaborate with. Go with an influencer search tool which has expertise in scoping out even the nano or micro-influencers from the niche you belong to.
- Fake audience detection: This one is a crucial feature. The best tools to find influencers always provide in-depth follower analytics. However, the tool should be able to dig deep enough to determine which of the influencers have authentic followers and the ones who have used shady means to hike up their followers’ numbers.
Conclusion
The diverse array of influencer marketing tools available today reflects the dynamic requirements of influencer marketing. From platforms specializing in influencer discovery and campaign management to those focusing on audience insights and brand monitoring, businesses have a wealth of options to choose from.
As influencer marketing continues to evolve, leveraging the right combination of tools will be essential for staying ahead in the ever-changing digital ecosystem. By harnessing the power of these tools, brands can forge meaningful connections with their target audience and drive impactful results in the competitive world of influencer marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the tool used for influencer marketing?
There are a lot of efficient tools used for managing influencer marketing campaigns. Versatile tools like Upfluence, HypeAuditor, Audiense, GRIN and NeoReach can provide assistance in every step of collaborative ventures with influencers.
Which platform is used most commonly by influencers?
Instagram is the most popular platform used by influencer for marketing due to the presence of a young demographic. Also the availability of variety of creative tools to generate engaging content to appeal to the audience is a reason for its popularity.
How do influencers do marketing?
Influencers are creators with a considerable following who are considered to be experts in their subjects. Brands and businesses want to leverage this authority of influencers to promote their products. So, both parties enter into a mutually beneficial deal where the brand fulfills its marketing objectives, and the creator gains monetary compensation.
What are some influencer marketing strategies?
Influencer marketing strategies involve a a whole lot of steps to ensure the success of the subsequent campaign. This involves setting up campaign goals, definigna budget and ensuring an indepth research to find the right influencers for your campaign.
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