According to a survey, 34% of daily U.S. Instagram users bought an item because it was recommended by an influencer or blogger.
With the growth of social media, businesses have realized over time that influencers can be a real resource when it comes to their marketing strategy. With their millions of followers, these social media celebrities can help companies reach larger audiences and get more leads.
Here’s where influencer marketing platforms come in. In this guide, we’ll explain what they are, how they’re useful, and give you a few of our top picks for you to try. Happy reading!
What are Influencer Marketing Platforms?
Influencer Marketing Platforms are software solutions that make it easy for businesses to carry out their influencer marketing campaigns.
These platforms provide services like influencer search, relationship and campaign management, and tools such as Analytics to help companies implement, manage, and track the progress of their campaigns.
Why Use an Influencer Marketing Platform?
There are many advantages to using an Influencer Marketing platform. Let’s look at some below:
- They save your time.
The greatest advantage of using an Influencer Marketing Platform is that it automates most of the influencer marketing process for you. A survey states that 22% of brands have a hard time finding appropriate influencers.
With large databases of legit influencers, these platforms allow you to pick the ones that best suit your campaign. You can filter them based on their location, niche, number of followers, and more.
- They help you scale.
Keeping track of all your campaigns manually can be hard, especially if you’re working with hundreds of influencers. These platforms offer campaign management to help you scale easily by tracking all your campaigns in one place.
They provide dashboards for running campaigns and tools to help manage influencer relationships.
- Get real-time analytics
According to statistics, posting at certain times of the day can get you more engagement. Influencer platforms help you track these engagements on a real-time basis, which would be impossible to do manually.
These platforms ease you out by measuring ROI and engagement automatically, so you don’t have to pull out the data and analyze it yourself.
- Guarantee Results
Influencer marketing is still new, and marketers are prone to make mistakes. These platforms counter this by automating your campaigns. They carry out, manage, track, and optimize your campaigns to give you the best results.
Best Influencer Marketing Platforms
Now that we’ve seen why we need these platforms, let’s take a look at some of the best ones being offered today. We’ve compiled a list of our favorites for you below.
Grin offers influencer relationship and campaign management and a reporting suite that tracks sales and analyzes data. It’s estimated that 1,270 live websites are using GRIN. Pricing for the platform starts at $2,125/month.
Unlike GRIN, Upfluence is meant for all kinds of companies, from SMBs to Fortune 500s. It provides influencer search, relationship and campaign management, and third-party analytics. Pricing varies depending on the size of your business and its needs.
Tribe Dynamics allows you to track, manage, and analyze influencer content as well as segment your influencer community, compare campaigns, and analyze your performance. Pricing starts at $1,500/month. Around 8 million users use this platform.
The unique aspect about creator.co is that it utilizes the efforts of micro-influencers rather than marketing on a larger scale. As a result, it focuses on quality rather than quantity.
Despite being pitched to SMBs, the platform offers 500 million influencer profiles in its database and a gigantic amount of data on them, and so promises a lot of reach to those who want it. The platform has two different payment plans: self-serve ($395/month) or community-driven ($795/month).
- Fourstarzz Media
Fourstarzz media is perfect for SMBs, startups, and solopreneurs. It is ideal because it’s less pricey than other solutions, at only $59/month.
The platform offers unlimited access to influencer profiles. It gives an added advantage where you can also invite influencers. It also offers guides, templates, and other resources to ease out the process for you.
AspireIQ has a “Quickmatch” feature that pairs you with an appropriate influencer. You can also upload an image to find influencer content that is similar to yours.
With digital term sheets, product tracking for products you send to influencers, and campaign analytics, AspireIQ covers all your bases. Also, it provides the added feature of saving your best-performing content for future use!
Pricing for AspireIQ is customized and lasts yearly. AspireIQ was rated as the best solution by Forrester in its report on Influencer Marketing Solutions.
Heepsy has a huge database of 11 million influencers and lets you check the authenticity of these influencers. It also allows you to get cost estimations of these collaborations. Pricing starts at $49/month.
Influencity provides campaign management, analytics, and performance metrics. Their pricing starts with the Starter plan at $48/month.
TrendHERO’s analytics tool uses 90+ metrics to analyze influencer profiles.
It has a huge influencer database and advanced machine learning to process data. Pricing starts at $15.99/month.
Geared towards larger businesses, this platform is a step ahead of the rest. It provides you customization at every level— from creating campaigns to searching for influencers. It performs analysis on conversations on social media to find people’s likes and connections so that companies can choose to market what people will talk about.
MightyScout provides a profit calculator to predict ROI and an engagement calculator to analyze influencer engagement rates. It allows you to create content and carry out social listening and analytics. Pricing starts at $99/month.
After companies select their influencer(s) from Influsoft’s database, the platform goes a step further and gets in-depth analytics that aren’t even present on the influencers’ social media profiles. Companies get a detailed insight into how users interact with social media.
Apart from relationship management, campaign management, and social listening, the platform also has a Plan module where you can select all the tasks in your campaign and then use the Measure module to see how they’re progressing.
This influencer marketing platform focuses on how important it is to select the right influencer for the brand. It allows brands to create campaign briefs about their goals and the scope of their content, and influencers “raise” their hand to indicate interest.
Pricing starts at $299/month.
- Ambassador
Not only does it allow you to partner with influencers, but also affiliates and employees. It allows management and analytics via a dashboard and many payment methods. Pricings vary depending on which plan you choose.
CreatorIQ leverages the power of data for follower fraud and fake influencer detection as well as inflated reach metrics. It eases out the marketing process through influencer selection, campaign creation, and monitoring.
Their clients include giant companies like Disney and Unilever.
Post for Rent provides a sleek UI for creating campaigns and a dashboard for managing and tracking them. Their clients include large companies like Nike and H&M, but they also take on smaller clients.
They provide a week-long free trial and their standard plan pricing is $59/month.
This platform features a worldwide influencer database, strong search filters, and workflows that help you scale your marketing campaigns. Pricing is higher, starting at $2000/month.
This platform offers services like influencer search and discovery and campaign management to automate the influencer marketing process. They have annual subscription fees that start at $50,000.
Not only does it provide a 60k-strong influencer database and management tools, but also amplifies influencer content. They offer three pricing plans: Lite, Suite, and Single Buy.
This platform mostly allows brands to discover influencers. To do so, it provides in-depth data about influencers’ popularity, audience, and content. Their prices are available on their website.
This platform brings together the needs of influencers, marketers, and brands into its campaigns. The focus is specifically on selecting influencers that fit best with the brand.
Its clients include big names like Gatorade and Adidas. Subscriptions are priced at $99.99-$1,399.99/month.
The most important aspect of this platform is its influencer search engine with 100k influencers, recognizing 3,000,000 mentions and 5,000,000 keywords. The site gets around 8 million visits globally.
Tidal Labs helps automate the influencer marketing process by providing an AI-based influencer discovery feature, campaign creation, and relationship management. Pricing starts at $750/month.
Klear provides influencer search and analytics. It has a free and advanced pricing plan. It also has a $250/month plan for small businesses. The platform works with giant brands like IMG and Microsoft.
Not only does Julius provide campaign management tools, but has a strong talent database of 120k influencers and searching criteria based on 50 filters. You pay an annual fee to use its services.
Brandbacker invites influencers to join the platform and they receive free samples, paid post opportunities, and discounts. It also provides tons of data for brands.
Content BLVD focuses on pairing brands with YouTubers. Brands can post on their marketplace and YouTubers can request a brand deal from these brands. This platform does not require any payments.
- Exposely
Exposely allows both influencers and brands to sign up—influencers get paid opportunities from brands and brands get to set a budget and select appropriate influencers.
It also provides a dashboard for campaign data. Pricing starts at $100.
It provides tools to manage and track influencer marketing. It is free for Shopify stores but $250/month for agencies.
In 2016, FameBit had more than 300 million subscribers. Brands can post their campaign ideas and influencers can make proposals. Sign-up is free.
Automating the marketing process, Find Your Influence has run 100,000 successful campaigns to date. They have worked with brands like Lenovo and Sony, and offer different pricing options that start from $300.
MARKERLY provides influencer CRM tools and full-service campaign management. It allows you to create content and perform analytics on that content. Their pricing varies and can be found out through their website.
Grapevine lets you search its influencer database using keywords. It allows you to make direct offers and track your analytics and engagement. Its pricing starts at $199/month.
- Blogmint
Blogmint allows anyone who thinks they’re an influencer to sign up with it, and gives them a BlogScore based on the quality of their blog.
Brands can post campaigns on Blogmint and can select influencers based on several factors like their BlogScore.
Trend lets you execute dozens of campaigns per month all while making managing them a breeze. It connects you to influencers who make high-quality content. Each campaign costs $100.
InkyBee provides marketers web-based tools to manage their influencer marketing campaigns. Its algorithms are used to analyze data from around a million blogs to determine the best bloggers that companies can collaborate with.
This is an opt-in platform. It focuses on finding influencers that have more engagement regardless of their follower count. It provides tools for creating campaigns and analyzing them.
This platform is targeted towards both small and large businesses. It helps you create, run, analyze, and improve your marketing campaigns. Pricing options are $149/month or custom pricing depending on which service you want.
Mustr is different because it focuses on PR connections rather than influencer marketing. It is a CRM but for bloggers.
Carro helps you connect with influencers, journalists, and media that already follow you. It also allows you to collaborate with other brands through its Brand Partnerships program. This platform is free to use.
Adly simplifies influencer marketing by using tools like AudienceIQ, which uses Q-score to determine how influential an influencer is. These tools help with campaign creation and data analysis.
With a 700k-strong database, Onalytica provides great influencer relationship management. It also provides analytics to keep track of your marketing progress. Geared towards medium and large businesses, its pricing can be found by contacting the site.
This platform eases out the process of influencer marketing through automating influencer search and campaign management, backed by 8 years’ worth of real-life data. To find out about pricing, contact TapInfluence.
Using Cision, you can search from a database of 1.4 million influencers based on their niche and reach. Get in touch with Cision to know about pricing.
This platform runs on data to create the best influencer marketing campaigns, allowing marketers to choose the right strategies and scale appropriately. They work with trendsetter brands like L’Oreal, Shiseido, and Coach.
Dovetale is a platform that allows you to speed up the influencer marketing process by automating it. It is used mostly by eCommerce brands and big names like Proctor & Gamble. The platform is free for Shopify merchants but costs $250/month for other brands.
SocialBakers’ marketing suite is run on AI. It provides brands refined tools that help them get to the top. Prices start from $200/month.
Webfluential focuses on getting influencers brands rather than the other way around. They work with quality influencers that undergo a vetting process.
They charge brands a monthly fee that depends on how many influencers are in their network. The minimum pricing is $50/month.
Bazaarvoice provides leading tools that brands require to market their businesses. It allows you to connect to customers, gain insights from marketing data, and increase sales. It has a free version, but prices start at $39/month.
Captiv8 has a mind-blowing collection of data based on three categories: accounts, location, and hashtags. Not only can you search influencers by content, but also audience traits—from interests to gender to other factors.
Giant companies like Honda, Dr. Pepper, and Nissan all use this platform. Since its customers are large businesses, their services tend to be expensive.
Takeaway
According to statistics, 89% of marketers say that their ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. 49% of customers use influencer recommendations when purchasing stuff. This means that influencer marketing is imperative for successful business marketing.
Influencer Marketing platforms are useful when it comes to simplifying this process. With the automation helping companies save time and effectively market, track, and scale their campaigns with successful results, it is no wonder that these platforms are projected to grow more than 32% annually from 2020-2025.
For this reason, we encourage you to incorporate an Influencer Marketing Platform into your marketing strategy. Platforms like Upfluence, Grin, or AspireIQ will have you easing out your workflow and tracking your campaigns more effectively. If you have any questions, let us know down below.
AUTHOR : Mandy Schmitz is a freelance consultant and project management expert with 10+ years of experience working internationally for big brands in fintech, consumer goods, and more. Join her on Changeaholic.com to learn how to optimize your business operations and find the latest software reviews.
