Influencer marketing takes practice and patience to master. Unlike traditional marketing, businesses must be willing to work hard to build genuine relationships with their influencers. The results are often measured not in dollars and cents, but in new brand loyalists gained. It’s difficult to assess your success without a bank account statement.
While marketing itself takes time and personal attention, managing campaigns and influencer relationships does not have to be. Finding the right people to work with, tracking campaigns, and assessing success (or failure) are all important tasks. But that doesn’t mean they can make unreasonable demands on your time. That’s why we have software. Just as accounting software eliminates the need to count money, influencer marketing software eliminates time-sucking administrative tasks that can keep you from achieving your goals.
Brands can use influencer marketing software to better manage their influencer marketing campaigns. Before influencer marketing software, it could take a long time for brands to identify potential influencers, build relationships with them, and launch campaigns with them. Finding relevant influencers was difficult without prior industry knowledge. Influencer marketing software and specialized influencer search engines made this process much simpler. Brands benefited from additional services such as relationship management, campaign management, third-party analytics, influencer content amplification, and even the use of influencer marketplaces in some cases.
1. AspireIQ (formerly Revfluence)
Unlike the other platforms on this list, AspireIQ is more hands-off. It is a self-service platform that provides access to over 150,000 influencers across major social media platforms. Because of this, it is ideal for marketing agencies and brands who develop their own campaigns.
AspireIQ’s sophisticated machine-learning engine constantly updates its database of influencers’ social media activity. The software collects data on posts, content quality, engagement, and even the sentiment behind the comments. The data is parsed as the software matches them up, which helps agencies and brands find influencers who meet their criteria. AspireIQ’s interface makes it easy to pitch ideas to hundreds of influencers at once, while tracking and managing responses from a single platform.
For the platform to achieve its overall goal of being a one-stop shop, AspireIQ emphasizes content creation. The Creator Collaboration Toolkit streamlines the process of working with influencers. Roles and responsibilities can be assigned to individuals, and built-in tools help create and manage content. You can then track each campaign’s progress, including its reach and subsequent engagement with target audiences.
AspireIQ’s customers are typically SMBs and large corporations. Companies like Quest Nutrition, Birchbox, Dermalogica, and Scopely aren’t household names yet, but Refluence is helping them get there.
2. #paid
While #paid works similarly to other influencer marketplaces, it has two key differences. For starters, it enables Whitelisted Ads. You can use paid Facebook and Instagram ads by whitelisting specific creators and content. #paid works with Facebook Ads Manager to push these ads into timelines and feeds under the creator’s real name. This gives the posts a more genuine feel to the audience. No longer limited to those who follow your influencer’s social media accounts.
#paid gives you a Handraise for the second time. Influencers who are interested can “raise” their hands and wait for brands to contact them. Creators who use a Handraise send a message to the community explaining their campaign strategy and why they think they are a good fit. Each Handraise submitted to #paid is vetted by a team.
Because the creators set their rates in advance, there is no time wasted negotiating rates. Brands plan content for Instagram, such as two posts and two stories, and then execute. This allows them to easily track their funds.
#paid has elevated the fundamentals of a marketplace to a new level of significance. Their target market is large corporations with big marketing budgets.
3. CreatorIQ
CreatorIQ is an end-to-end solution with an elegant and efficient user interface. It has a comprehensive feature set that includes everything you need from an influencer marketing platform. CreatorIQ won the 2019 MarTech Awards for best influencer marketing platform.
It is clearly aimed at large agencies or corporations seeking a fully integrated solution. Despite not disclosing pricing, it is clear from the clients that CreatorIQ’s primary focus is on large corporations rather than small and medium-sized businesses. Disney, Tiffany & Co., Unilever, Dell, and Ralph Lauren are among the clients.
CreatorIQ uses social media APIs directly, but once you’ve chosen your favorite influencers, it has access to much more data than is publicly available. It provides a white-labeled, fully customizable portal for invited influencers to register and onboard before joining your team. By granting CreatorIQ access to their social media posts, influencers create highly detailed profiles on CreatorIQ.
Expanding your network creates your own private marketplace. Influencers visit CreatorIQ to see what your company is up to now, not to find new opportunities.
Create campaign briefs, send them out to your audience, move campaigns forward, approve or deny content, and make payments. It looks, feels, and acts like a private influencer marketplace. Campaign reports are accessed via the portal, which is also the primary method. Because these reports are dynamic, you can filter and sort the data however you want. Widgets allow you to customize your reports and display exactly what you want.
4. Tagger
Tagger began as a music recommendation engine and still is. It wasn’t long before it shifted focus to influencer marketing, leveraging existing software’s best features.
Tagger tracks over 9 billion social conversations linked to over 3.5 million influencer profiles, yielding an overwhelming amount of data. Tagger is a standalone digital marketing research tool.
It has all the features of an influencer marketplace plus more. The platform’s focus on psychographics sets it apart. It uses a social listening feature to analyze what people say to determine their interests and affinities. Brands and agencies can learn exactly what content works best to engage these audiences. Competitor research provides a wealth of data. This information not only gives you insight into their campaign, but also serves as inspiration for your own.
All previous content has been indexed, including sponsored content from 2013. You can sort, filter, and refine the results in many ways. Influencer searches include a variety of filters to help narrow your results. Tagger’s data analysis engines can “understand” an influencer’s followers to the point where they can find “lookalike” audiences.
Tagger has a robust reporting feature. You can review your campaign posts to see how it went.