The power of influencer marketing remains a dominant force in 2020. The internet has created niche hubs of consumers, centred around recognisable figures who affect their audiences with their opinions, suggestions, and insights. When brands decide to leverage the authority of influencers to represent their products and services, they are tapping into highly personalised and receptive audiences.
But with so many social media personalities to choose from, how can your marketing team select the right brand ambassadors for your business? Thankfully, there's a wide range of influencer marketing tools available that can help you simplify your influencer outreach and campaign management.
Like all software investments, you're going to have to consider the pros and cons of each tool you're reviewing in relation to your marketing goals and budget. If your business is scaling up, it's likely that you're looking for a SaaS solution to make finding and managing influencers a more automated and sustainable process.
Influencer marketing platforms have been created with the aim of collating all the market-specific data you're searching for to ensure that you're finding influencers with the right audiences for your products and reducing the risk of pouring money into campaigns that don't resonate with your buyers.
When choosing a platform, you should highlight the core functions that matter to you and make sure that the software provides those. These features could include:
- Communication tools
- Tracking and analytics
- Targeted social media platforms
- Relationships management facilities
- User experience (UX)
As an inbound marketing agency, we work with various influencer marketing platforms to help our customers grow their fanbases. To help you make the right choice for your business, we've researched some of the best platforms on the market.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a tool that helps you build a database of relevant influencers for your company. The software finds influencers’ websites that you may be interested in building relationships with. You can build up influencer profiles and keep track of the communication you've had with those individuals. It's an excellent tool for creating a data-rich catalogue that makes managing your outreach more straightforward and effective.
According to some reviewers, however, the UX could do with some streamlining, but the software does deliver a premium service at a reasonable price.
G2 rating: 4.0 out of 5
Cost: BuzzStream offers various plans to suit your business size and user requirements. The starter plan begins at $24 per month.
NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach filters through millions of influencer insights to find the individuals who align with your marketing message. As an all-purpose marketing tool, the software comes with a built-in CRM, so you can manage all of your outreach campaigns and comprehensively organise your leads, track conversation histories, email opens, and clicks.
NinjaOutreach focusses on Instagram and YouTube influencers, so if those are your target platforms, this could be the tool for you. There are conflicting reviews about the software's interface, with many singing its praises, while others find the UX a little clunky. It's definitely worth taking advantage of the free trial to make sure you're happy to pay the price.
G2 rating: 4.1 out of 5
Cost: You can enjoy a 7-day free trial; however, monthly memberships start at $299.
BuzzSumo
If you're looking for the most popular content around specific topics, BuzzSumo is the tool for you. You can view competitors top-performing content and use that to generate ideas for your own content plan. There's also a fantastic Twitter influencer research tool that helps you find the most relevant influencers on the platform. It's got handy features around monitoring, providing alerts for the topics, brands and keywords that matter for your business. You can also keep an eye on SEO boosting backlinks and leverage those to build relationships and grow your business.
The common theme amongst users of BuzzSumo is that the price is on the higher side; however, with the features and analytics that the software pulls up, it's well worth the investment for this mutli-purpose marketing tool.
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5
Cost: Limited searches are free, but for the more exclusive packages, you'll start paying $99 per month.
Influsoft
This platform is all about streamlining your influencer marketing campaigns across all platforms. Influsoft includes key features such as brand analysis and social listening, along with AI-powered authenticity to help you determine whether your target influencer is the real deal.
For granular insight into all the metrics that matter to a social media marketing campaign, Influsoft is the tool to use. With licensed API integrations with most social media platforms, including TikTok, you'll be hard-pressed to find a smoother tool.
G2 rating: N/A
Cost: While there's no pricing available on Influsoft's website, the features certainly warrant an exploration of their free demo.
Upfluence
Upfluence wants you to "turn your customers into authentic content creators for your brand." The software provides access to over 4 million influencer profiles and gives you advanced search options to narrow down the influencers that meet your criteria. It's the only influencer platform that lets you identify organic influencers, meaning regular folks within your customer base, enabling you to add them to your affiliate campaigns. This seems like a very natural and authentic approach to building authority and leveraging the evangelists in your sales funnel actively.
As with Influsoft, you'll have AI-powered technology to help you gain insights into your influencer's performance and check on engagement rates and posting habits. You can calculate the ROI of your campaigns within the platform and keep track of the earned media value you're gaining through your influencers, so you're always keeping on top of the figures.
If you're looking for Tik Tok influencers, however, this is not the tool for you. Detailed data is limited to Instagram, but you can also use these results to discover TikTok influencers who may have cross-platform audiences.
G2 rating: 4.1 out of 5
Cost: While there aren't listed prices on the company's website, Upfluence offers five levels of service, each sold on a subscription basis.
If you'd like some more advice on choosing the right influencer marketing tools for your business, give our team a call today. In the meantime, take advantage of our guide to building your presence on Instagram.
