Modern-day consumers are tech-savvy and have access to social communities of opinion leaders, influencers, and reviewers to help with their buying decisions. They don’t take brand promises at face value and seek credible information from trustworthy sources. It is no surprise that influencer marketing has become an important inclusion in the brand strategy of all marketers.
Influencer marketing can help brands reach their target audience more effectively, build trust, and promote products with content that adds value. At the same time, the total cost of influencer marketing is much less than the traditional marketing channels, and returns can be much higher. However, as the influencer community employed by a brand grows, it becomes difficult to manage everything manually.
To identify relevant influencers, brands need to stay on top of social trends, roll out high-impact influencer campaigns, reward performers, expand the community sustainably, digitise and automate the process. Fortunately, many influencer marketing platforms and influencer marketing tools can help influencer marketers achieve maximum brand potential.
Influencer marketing tools help brands measure their brand reach, find relevant influencers, connect with them, monitor their impact on campaigns, and improve conversion.
Here are 10 essential tools for influencer marketing that every influencer marketer should use.
Designed for seamless social listening, Awario is one of the most important influencer marketing tools that help influencer marketers tap into the market’s pulse. This tool allows brands to measure their reach by tracking the most influential creators on the web and social media who talk about their brand or relevant topics.
With Awario, brands can identify the most impactful influencers in every domain and cultivate strategic relationships with those who can add the most value to their business. The platform also offers guest blogging opportunities, which could be a great starting point for any influencer marketing campaign.
Awario offers monthly and annual subscription plans, with the yearly plan being more cost-effective.
BuzzSumo is essentially a content research platform that also serves to find relevant influencers for brands. Brands can look for Influencers in terms of location, niche, social media platform, and many other filters. As brands can find influencers based on the content they post, brand relevance can be determined more accurately before initiating a relationship.
Furthermore, influencers can be sorted based on their reach, authority, and audience engagement. BuzzSumo offers a free plan and a free trial for its paid plans. Marketers can try the platform before committing to a monthly or annual subscription plan.
PitchBox is a powerful content marketing platform that enables brands to establish a robust blogger outreach and network. With the help of intuitive profiles and keyword search, brands can identify relevant and high-authority content creators as influencers.
Custom-built outreach programs can then be launched on the platform to collaborate with selected influencers. PitchBox also offers data-driven insights and analytics to improve the performance of brand outreach programs.
Dovetale is an influencer marketing platform designed to discover influencers and monitor their impact on every campaign. Its ‘Monitor’ feature offers real-time data analytics, allowing for competitor analysis during influencer selection. Influencer lists can be seamlessly created for running campaigns through the platform.
The Dovetale interface also supports payments to influencers for paid influencer marketing campaigns. This sets it apart from the other tools in this list and makes it a must-have for influencer marketers seeking end-to-end solutions.
UsePlaza is an influencer community that gives brands access to high-impact, video-based content especially relevant for eCommerce companies. Brands can co-create virtual shopping experiences with their influencer teams and maximise conversions for every campaign.
The platform supports Shopify integration and facilitates content management for multiple campaigns. Target audiences can experience live commerce with their preferred influencers and complete product purchase during the interactions themselves. Furthermore, campaign scheduling, reporting, and analytics make it an essential tool for influencer marketing.
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform that offers automation of email marketing, CRM, marketing, sales, and support services. Brands can’t afford to forget about their customers once they have made the purchase successfully through an influencer channel. Continual customer engagement ensures that satisfied customers come back with more business. ActiveCampaign helps influencer marketers achieve this through automation.
New campaign launches can be automated, with inbuilt offers and promotional support to increase the influencer reach. The platform also supports the design of lead magnets, subscriptions, or sign-up forms for influencer campaigns. ActiveCampaign offers a free trial with four pricing options for a paid account.
The whole point of influencer marketing is to create a community of your own that you can engage and work with. Tribe helps brands do that. Tribe is a social community platform that can be used to build customisable campaigns to engage customers. The platform helps brands create their independent communities of empowered customers.
The voice of the customer can be collected with sustainable feedback loops created on the platform. Actionable insights can be generated from these, and responsive product updates can be rolled out. The Tribe can be integrated with apps like Google Analytics, Zapier, and Amplitude for community optimization.
Tribe has customizable spaces to host content and community members as per specific themes. Community success can be tracked with in-depth analytics, and community activities can be moderated on the platform through specialised tools and automation. Tribe is free for up to 100 members and monthly and annual pricing plans for businesses with larger communities.
With a database of more than 10 million creators on Instagram and Youtube, HypeAuditor is a great tool for building influencer marketing campaigns with video-based content. Influencers can be searched based on their location, language, and demographic indicators such as age, gender, etc.
But what makes this influencer marketing tool even better is search filters that allow for selecting influencers based on their target audience, engagement levels, audience quality, brands collaborated with, average content views, and growth rate. Keywords and brand mentions can also be used to refine the search and discover the most relevant influencers.
This makes it easier for influencer marketers to choose influencers aligned with their brand needs and ensure better campaign effectiveness. HypeAuditor offers both a free plan and a paid plan with premium features, making it a good tool to start with for those on a tight budget with a scope of later expansion.
Influencer marketing can continue to be successful only when brands collaborate and co-create with their influencer communities. ClickUp is an all-in-one tool that helps brands ideate, collaborate, and co-creating with their influencer partners. The platform allows for setting campaign-specific strategic goals, building a knowledge base for the influencer community, and managing tasks with customizable dashboards.
ClickUp also has a unique real-time chat feature for tagging internal stakeholders, individual influencers, and groups for assigned action items. Actions can also be linked to a particular campaign for driving optimal results. ClickUp has a free plan for personal use and flexible pricing models for business and enterprise partners.
Influencer marketers have to regularly monitor each campaign's performance and modify aspects of the campaign and the influencer network to drive the best results. Therefore, a tool like Google Analytics is an essential addition to the arsenal of influencer marketers. You can monitor brand activity on social media and track influencer impact on conversions and other brand objectives using Google Analytics.
The ‘Conversion Report’ feature of Google Analytics provides details about the number of conversions and monetary value of conversions generated through Referral Traffic. These can be further drilled down to individual influencer levels and determine influencer marketing ROI for the brand. With unique marketing source codes, affiliate and influencer activity can be seamlessly tracked.
Finally, with these ten essential tools for influencer marketing, any brand can develop a holistic influencer marketing program. Even though other similar tools and platforms are available in the market, these 10 are great to start with and steadily grow the influencer marketing channel for any brand.
The right combination of these tools can help influencer marketers track social trends, design influencer marketing campaigns for maximum impact, and build an influencer network that can optimise their brand reach.
