Influencer platforms act as support to make life easier for both agencies and brands when managing and working with influencers. An influencer marketing platform is a software solution designed to assist brands with their influencer marketing campaigns. Influencer marketing platforms provide influencer discovery tools for brands and agencies, some also offer massive searchable databases of potential influencers, using clever algorithms.
Others prefer an opt-in method for influencers, where the staff of the influencer marketing platform can vet potential influencers and check that they are genuine and willing to work with brands. More recently influencer platforms have expanded their offerings, to include relationship management, campaign management, influencer marketplaces, third-party analytics, and influencer content amplification.
Top Influencer Marketing Platforms to Boost Your Campaigns:
Key Features to Consider When Choosing an Influencer Platform
As you can see, there are dozens of great influencer marketing tools available. To help you narrow down the choice and find the best influencer platform, here are seven essential features that can make your break your influencer marketing efforts:
- API integration
- Messaging automation
- Payment automation
- Real-time reports
- Post and campaign tracking
- A whitelabel feature
- Key insights
While communication and payment automation are good places to start, also look for a tool that can automate campaign actions. If you can find an influencer discovery platform that can also let you set up automated processes to help you target different audiences and boost your posts, for example, even better.
In addition to these features, it’s also important to find a tool that has a huge influencer network on various social media channels. It’s an example where size matters. Then, to help you streamline influencer matching, it should also let you filter your search using criteria like:
- Location
- Native language
- Main interests
- Age
- Gender
- Audience type
- Frequently used hashtags
Understanding Platform ROI: Cost vs. Value
Here’s the thing about cost when it comes to influencer marketing technology, the price can vary significantly. You’re basically looking at spending anything from $100 per month to more than 20 times that. You would also have noticed that most don’t publicly share any pricing details on their websites, making it more difficult to do a cost analysis.
On average, though, you’re looking at spending between $500 and $800 per month.
A self-service influencer platform generally works out cheaper. For example, Webinfluential’s package works out at only $100 per month, with Influence’s option slightly more expensive at $129 per month, which is still well below the average monthly subscription.
That said, the true value of influencer marketing technology is found in the time that it will save you. So, while you might pay only a hundred bucks for a self-service platform, you’ll lose out on the main benefit.
Timesaving, however, is a difficult concept to quantify.
For a better idea of what your potential ROI can look like, let the case studies guide you.
Let’s take Creator.co as an example. Pricing starts at $460 per month. You’ll also need to spend a one-time onboarding fee of $395.
However, it has helped clients to increase sales between 55% and 70%.
Add that to the time that their clients have saved and the potential return on investment quickly becomes very attractive. For example, with the self-serve subscription, you can save up to six hours per week already.
With a tool like Influencity (which is one of the cheapest options with pricing starting at less than $200 per month), brands have reported cutting the time spent on influencer search in half.
And, if you want to prove the value of your own campaigns, many of these tools can make calculating ROI straightforward too!
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Influencer Marketing Platforms
No solution is perfect and just like with any other digital marketing strategy there are several common mistakes. When it comes to choosing and using your new influencer marketing platform, avoid the following:
- Ignoring a platform because its influencer marketplace has only nano and micro influencers
- Choosing a platform that supports only limited social media platforms
- Setting unclear goals or limiting your influencers’ creative control
- Not using it to track data from your influencer marketing campaign
- Using an increase in sales as your only metric to determine the success of a campaign
- Expecting results overnight or after only one campaign
- Ignoring the relationship that you’ve fostered with your influencers after a campaign has ended
Insights from Industry Leaders: Expert Perspectives and Trends
If you still can’t make up your mind about whether you need to invest in a platform to find influencers, consider what some of the following thought leaders have to say. Here’s more insight into the strengths and weaknesses of a couple of the above-mentioned influencer marketing tools.
Shae Sattler, former Head of Partnerships and Community Marketing at Outer – a D2C outdoor furniture brand, highlighted Aspire’s support and intuitiveness:
“I highly recommend Aspire. Their team is SO available and helpful, and the platform saved me so much time and increased my results by a ton.”
Brandwatch Influence is another tool that’s praised for its level of customer support. Alex Garcia, Head of Partnerships at Insta360, added the following:
“Customer support is very responsive and teaches you when in doubt or helps you report/solve technical problems. At an enterprise level, you get assigned an account manager that helps you keep it more personal and is someone who understands your company needs very well.”
In addition to customer support, he also highlights automatic post collection, live data update, and reporting as strengths.
One area where Brandwatch Influence can improve, though, is the campaign feature that you can use to track the releases and report. For Insta360’s use case, there are two limitations:
It supports only 150 accounts per campaign.
Alex explains, “Sometimes we work with 300+ influencers in one campaign across all regions. This makes us have several campaigns for the same project.”
The second weakness is the 90-day limitation.
“For some one-off campaigns it’s not a problem, like a product launch, but for always-on projects that require tracking during the whole year it’s annoying because it makes us duplicate the campaigns every three months, with the same influencers in it but just another timeframe.”
Limitations aside, Insta360 still manages to generate loads of engagement. They’ve recently won the YouTube Streamy Award for Brand Engagement for their “No Drone? No Problem!” campaign. The campaign’s hashtag #NoDroneNoProblem generated 238.9 million views on TikTok alone.
If you want to combine video content with ease of use, gen.video is a tool that stands out.
Denise Vitola, an award-winning marketing pro and VP of Brand Integration PR, Social and Influencer at Bayer, the multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, has this to say about gen.video:
“I think the biggest strength is the ease of use, being able to view campaigns, influencers and content in one place. Being able to look things up and review metrics for each campaign right on the platform.”
While she also appreciates its sharing functionality, the content editing capabilities are lacking.
“I think the editing content could be better. Instead of a cut-and-paste feature, I would like to track changes.”