If you’re considering an influencer marketing campaign, you might wonder how exactly you’ll manage it. It’s not a secret that an influencer campaign can rapidly become larger than you ever expected – especially if you’re not prepared. Thankfully, there are a ton of influencer marketing tools to help you run a successful and streamlined campaign.
Amid the many tools available, you’ll find platforms, sites, and software apps. Each tool often has a large database of influencers to draw from. Features such as search engines and artificial intelligence can help you discover the influencers best for your campaign and how to access their followers regardless of a social platform. Influencer marketing tools can also help you create, update, and amplify your content.
Key Features
These tools might seem a bit intimidating at first glance. These are the key features you should be looking for:
- Discovers influencers and help begin outreach
- Active social listening
- Manages all forms of content
Discovery
Discovering relevant influencers is the number one aspect of an influencer marketing campaign. Certain tools, such as Klear, BuzzSumo, and Buzzstream can help. For instance:
- Klear allows you to filter influencers according to the category, check demographics, see usual posting platforms, number of followers on each platform, and choose your influencers based on levels – want to choose a celebrity influencer?
- BuzzSumo takes it a step further and allows insight into influencers who are already influencing – for your competition.
- Buzzstream can link you with awesome bloggers and social media personalities.
Social listening
Instead of casting a wide net, maybe you’d rather seek out influencers who’re already mentioning your brand. There are a lot of social listening apps, such as TweetDeck and Mention, that can tell you who these influencers are, and show you exactly what they’re saying about you and where they’re saying it. No matter what social media platform is in use, tools for social listening have their ear to the ground for the conversations that matter most to you. These tools also assist in content creation via consumer insights and can post your content on your social platforms for you.
Managing content
And speaking of your content, you might have all types of content on your calendar at any given time. Influencer marketing tools such as Hootsuite can help your busy content development department with all aspects of managing, creating, and coordinating your content. These types of tools have interactive dashboards that make analyzing the success of your content even easier – so you can boost those posts that are showing the greatest interaction.
Influencer Marketing Tool Benefits
Think back to the offices of yesteryear…
There were file cabinets lined up against the walls that held all of your customer information. On paper. If you had a good filing system, you could probably find things relatively easily, but the odds are pretty high that those file cabinets didn’t hold every single interaction your company ever had with a customer, much less every interaction your customer had with your brand outside of directly speaking to you.
Now consider attempting influencer marketing with this same set of file cabinets.
Fast forward to today – what if you could have an entire database of influencers at your fingertips? A database that you can easily search with just a few mouse clicks based on the info you’re looking for?
But there are even more benefits associated with influencer marketing tools:
- Efficiency
- Cost savings
- Reach your target market
- Find new target markets
- Develop the perfect campaign
- Measure campaign results
- Boost conversions
- Boost ROI
Just imagine seeing every aspect of your campaign as a metric and being able to refine the campaign as you go!
The Top Influencer Marketing Tools You Should Start Using Now
Harnessing the real possibilities of influencer marketing comes down to choosing the right tools. But there are so many to choose from, how do you know which ones are right for you?
These seven tools can complement your marketing strategies:
1. Klear
As mentioned above, this is one of the best tools available for influencer marketing. Brands have used this software in the identification of influencers, to gauge their interaction, and measure their sway over the market as a whole. The program is quite user-friendly, offers insightful data, and comes with incredible customer service.
2. BuzzSumo
Nearly 70% of marketers say their biggest challenge is finding relevant influencers and learning how to engage with them. While BuzzSumo has gained popularity as a research platform for content, it’s also one of the best places to discover relevant influencers. It also includes an influencer search element allowing you to look for the best influencers across niches, social platforms, and locations. And there are two different ways you can do so:
- Through the influencers’ bios
- Through the influencers’ shared content
You also can filter the results by type of influencers, such as:
- Blogger
- Influencer
- Company
- Journalist
- Everyday people
3. Upfluence
Some of today’s influencer marketing tools have to be coupled with other tools and strategies to make the most of what they provide. This isn’t so with Upfluence. Upfluence does everything:
- Discover and choose the most relevant influencers
- Manage your campaigns
- Monitor campaign performance
This tool has one of the biggest databases of influencers – more than a million. Based on the criteria you feed the program, it can return results based on influencer aspects, such as:
- Location
- Social media metrics
- Languages spoken
You’ll even be able to access their post stats in real-time, as well as their engagement rates and the number of monthly visitors. After you’ve chosen the influencers most aligned with your brand, you can use Upfluence to contact them.
4. BuzzStream
This tool also lets you seek out relevant influencers and operate effective campaigns. With BuzzStream, first, you search for simple keywords that are relevant to your market. Your searches return influencers that are relevant to your brand. You can also use filters to find influencers based upon the language spoken, country of residence, or types of content they produce. You can further prioritize your results using standard metrics such as page rank, the number of inbound links, or the number of followers. You can also research metrics such as MozRank and Domain Authority. BuzzStream gives you a well-rounded insight into an influencer’s total presence online.
5. FameBit
Do you make a lot of videos? Even if you don’t, FameBit can connect your brand with the best YouTube creators to get your message out. The content creators you’ll find with FameBit can help you connect with people who will not only remember your brand but trust it as well. This influencer marketing tool puts you in touch with writers and producers whose large audiences trust them. And, among millennials, it’s thought that YouTube creators understand their audience better than the viewers’ friends do.
6. Pitchbox
This influencer marketing tool helps brands with outreach efforts and content marketing strategies. Pitchbox lets you find niche influencers in just seconds by utilizing multiple prospecting methods. It also has a keyword search tool that’s quite intuitive. Pitchbox is one of the most popular influencer marketing tools that allow users to reach the most authoritative of influencers.
7. NinjaOutreach
Like its name, this outreach tool is like a ninja. It’s powerful, and it’s an all-in-one tool that’s used all over the world. With NinjaOutreach, you get instantaneous access to more than 25 million influencers around the globe. Simply enter your relevant keywords and this tool will return hundreds of results. You can filter results by tags, such as:
- Blogger
- Influencer
- Company
NinjaOutreach is the perfect way to reach out to influencers and be able to manage your conversations.
Over the past decade or so, influencer marketing has swiftly become a marketer’s preferred method – mostly because of the incredible potential for incredible returns. But, if you’re attempting to keep up with your efforts manually, it takes a lot of time and effort to leverage the power of an influencer. These seven influencer marketing tools can save you by eliminating the long search time to find a relevant influencer and reaching out to them.
There is a wealth of marketing tools at your disposal. These tools can simplify your campaigns, make them faster, and more successful. But, as with anything, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to influencer marketing tools. You must put the time in to decide which tool, or combination of tools, is right for your brand.
