With the rise of social media platforms, individuals have been able to amass a large following owing to their skills and expertise.
The Kardashian sisters promoting any known brand, themselves, or any campaign that you may see on your Instagram feed is the most popular example of influencer marketing today. The fact is, influencer marketing has caught on in a big way. You no longer require millions of followers to be known as an influencer. You can have a handful of loyal-engaged followers in your area of expertise and may still be known as one of the most influential personalities.
Influencer marketing is a useful bridge to connect brands with potential customers by way of product mentions or endorsements. As more brands started using influencer marketing as a tool for promotion, there has been a rise in the number of influencer marketing software offerings available in the market. While the influencer marketing genre is being led by Instagram, there are other popular names like YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat that have been able to create an army of influencers with their own set of loyal followers.
Read on to know more about influencer marketing platforms and check out the comparative guide for the best influencer marketing software available in the market.
Influencer marketing platforms are software solutions that are built to help brands and agencies in their influencer marketing campaigns. These platforms offer a plethora of options, such as influencer discovery tools and other features, that make it easy for brands to run influencer marketing campaigns.
Some influencer marketing software work as a marketplace, while others work on an opt-in mechanism where the influencer needs to confirm if they are open to working with a particular brand. There are several other features like campaign management, relationship management, analytics, marketplaces, etc. that are available on influencer marketing platforms.
There are several benefits of using an influencer marketing platform for any of your campaigns. Some key benefits are as follows:
Most influencer marketing platforms do the hard work for you and identify the real influencers that can drive reach and engagement for your brand. By identifying the fake influencers, the influencer qualification mechanism in most influencer marketing software is robust.
This is the most significant difference between an agency and a platform. While an agency would find it difficult to handle issues in the area of influencer qualification, the influencer marketing software can do the task with ease. By getting the right set of influencers on your side, you can expect a strong return on investment for your influencer marketing campaigns.
As these influencer marketing software are built on technology, brands can derive data-driven insights to reach the right influencer for their requirements. As the decisions that the brands take in selecting the influencers are based on data, you can expect good results and a strong return on investment.
Rather than relying on your gut, make use of the vast data that is available with a few clicks to make decisions that will decide the fate of your marketing strategy.
You can use these influencer marketing platforms for managing a campaign with multiple influencers to increase reach and engagement for your brand. You would otherwise require a large team to manage your influencer marketing campaigns. With the presence of such influencer marketing software, you can easily manage your campaign using the platform's dashboard.
This is crucial, especially if you are planning to use influencer marketing in a big way as part of your marketing strategy. Rather than wasting productive hours identifying and managing the influencers that you intend to rope into the campaign, it is better to rely on any influencer marketing software to identify and manage the influencers.
The influencer marketing platforms help brands identify the sweet spot for influencer payments. Before you get scared by the amount being charged by celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo or Kylie Jenner, check the millions of influencers available on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. They are willing to undertake the project at a price that does not burn a hole in your pocket.
Partnering with an influencer marketing platform helps you in achieving a better return on investment for your efforts. The nature of the influencer marketing industry is such that without the platforms, it is difficult to ascertain the amount to be paid for the services of an influencer. Rather than being in doubt about the overpayment, it is better to rely on the past payments made to the influencers by other brands and follow the rate suggested by the software.
There are several platforms available to handle your influencer marketing campaigns in the market today. Each platform caters to a certain set of consumers. It is critical to research to find the best influencer marketing software per your requirement. Instead of wondering which platform is best for influencer marketing, outline your objectives and know what kind of platform suits your needs. This would help you identify the right influencer marketing software.
To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of the top five influencer marketing software available in the market. These are the best solutions to handle your influencer marketing requirements with ease.
It is one of the most popular influencer marketing software solutions available in the market today. The basic foundation of Grin is that you need to market to the influencer. If you can build a lasting relationship with the influencer, the rest of the puzzle pieces would automatically fall into place. Grin aims to connect influencers with a large following and micro-influencers with large brands for their influencer marketing requirements without the challenges of a usual influencer marketing campaign.
Grin is focused on the ecommerce business and offers integrations across all major ecommerce platforms. The platform developed by Grin for brands and influencers is intuitive and easy to use. It breaks down the process into small activities and workflows that are easy to understand and manage for influencers and brands.
For instance, you can take the email list of your existing customers and use Grin to figure out their social profiles. It also offers you the list of potential influencers along with relevant numbers like the follower count, reach, and other statistics.
You can find relevant influencers from a database of over 100 million influencers. Out of the total 100 million, close to 37 million profiles have real email addresses to get you started with your campaign. Grin also offers a lookalike function that can suggest more influencers that you can partner with based on your selection.
The platform counts major brands like Macy's, L'Oréal, Legendary Foods, and Tonal as its key customers. In terms of pricing, unlike other platforms, Grin does not offer upfront pricing for its consumers. You would need to book a demo with its team to get pricing and other relevant details.
Plaza is a creator commerce platform that can be used for your influencer marketing campaigns. Plaza provides a suite of tools for creators, product experts and live streamers to record and stream videos across their accounts. While also providing brands a way to access curated list of creators who are experts in their specific niche with access to highly engaged audience.
Unlike most platforms, our USP lies in the expertise of our creators(mostly micro-influencers) who are trusted by a small yet highly engaged audience.
Klear works with many renowned brands like IMG, Microsoft, Adidas, and Huawei. Klear was started by three brothers – Guy, Eytan, and Noam Avigdor – around four years ago with a vision to create a platform that offers smart web insights to generate effective influencer marketing campaigns.
With a database of over 900 million influencers, Klear is a strong platform that helps you with influencer discovery. It also has strong analytics and relationship management tools that offer features like payments and contracts to manage your campaigns.
Klear has created a one-stop-shop for your influencer marketing campaigns that help you manage them in a single window. Also, the pricing offered by the platform is transparent and affordable.
You can get started with a free plan that offers you limited influencer search and social profiles. Once you are comfortable with the results, you can opt for an advanced plan that offers features like relationship management, influencer research, campaign monitoring, social monitoring, and one-to-one consultations.
Klear also has an ideal plan for small businesses at $250/month. This is known as a Startup Plan that helps small businesses participate in influencer marketing activities. However, there are limits on the number of search results, number of profiles that can be viewed in a month, keywords, and brands that they can work with.
Klear supports major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Blogs with its wide range of offerings. You would miss out on other platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, etc., as Klear is not as versatile when it comes to reaching on various platforms.
CreatorIQ is one of the best solutions available in the market to handle the most commonly faced problems in the influencer marketing industry. Issues, such as fake followers, inflated reach numbers, and inauthentic influencers can be handled by the CreatorIQ platform with ease. If you are looking for an enterprise-level solution for your influencer marketing requirements, CreatorIQ is your go-to platform.
With names like Disney, Tiffany & Co., Dell, Unilever, Ralph Lauren, and many other similar large-scale companies, CreatorIQ has a roster of many popular brands. Even the small businesses boast revenue of over $100 million.
The cloud-based solution from CreatorIQ comes in handy for clients that need a lot of influencer marketing support during their campaigns. The detailed analytics provided by CreatorIQ help them make the right decisions at the right stage of the campaign. There are a variety of CRM and API integrations available that can help you create a seamless campaign for your business.
CreatorIQ focuses on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Blogs, Twitch, and Twitter. For the influencers, the platform focuses on creating quality content that engages users to buy from the brand. There are various features like payment management, joining hubs, and collaborating with influencers on the platform.
The AI-powered platform has a unique feature called Integrity Quotient that assigns a score to each influencer indicating their level of authenticity. With over 15 million influencers enrolled on its platform, CreatorIQ has an exhaustive set of solutions available for its clients.
You would need to set up a call with the team to know more about its pricing. This call would help you explain your requirements and objectives.
Aspire, formerly known as AspireIQ, is a self-service platform that helps influencers view the ongoing brands and campaigns on its platform. Over 150,000 influencers have signed up on Aspire to engage with a variety of campaigns and brands.
For organizations, Aspire is an all-rounder. It counts Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and blogs as its focus areas and provides a variety of tools to help in every stage of campaign management.
The influencers signing up on Aspire need to meet the minimum eligibility criteria of 500 Instagram likes or 2,500 YouTube views. There is also a manual process involved in approving the influencers on its platform.
Aspire offers a simple search-and-match mechanism that works seamlessly to match the brands with the prospective influencers based on its data. Brands can also create a community on Aspire and do much more than just influencer marketing management.
With clients, including Modern Fertility, Empress 1908, Smartypants Vitamins, and Future, Aspire focuses on helping ecommerce brands succeed in a competitive marketplace. You need to request a demo for more details about its pricing and other features.
Izea has played an active role in shaping the global influencer marketing industry. Being one of the early starters, Izea is still equally popular in the industry as the go-to platform for influencer marketing campaigns. The company has been in business for over 15 years now and a team of 100+ members has over 975,000 registered members on its platform.
Izea has handled over 3.9 million marketplace transactions on its platform. It's gross billing in 2020 alone stood at over $24 million. The company counts major brands like Marriott, Wendy’s, NBC, The Home Depot and Kraft as its major customers.
You need to contact the support team at Izea to know more about their pricing and product features.
These are the top five influencer marketing software that you can use for your influencer marketing needs. As you must have realized, all these cater to a certain type of business. You should do your research based on the current size and plans of your business before finalizing one.
The most crucial aspect of an influencer marketing platform is the ability to manage the end-to-end process of influencer marketing from discovery to payment. You can get started from here and zero down on any influencer marketing software that suits your needs.
