This is 2022 and Influencer Marketing is bigger than it ever was. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the industry is expected to reach $16.4 billion this year, as more and more marketers are beginning to consider influencers as a major part of their marketing plans.
But selecting influencers and managing an influencer campaign can be very time-consuming, especially if you need to manage several creators at a time. This is where influencer marketing tools came in handy.
In this post, we’ve rounded up 7 of our favorite influencer marketing tools that can help you get more out of your influencer campaigns, with less effort on your part.
Why You Should be Using an Influencer Marketing Tool
Influencer campaigns, when done right, can have great results and do a lot for your brand.
But let’s face it, they are hard work! Between selecting influencers, negotiating with them, dealing with legal, briefing each creator on the campaign, and managing their content and results, it’s a long process.
Luckily you no longer have to do all of this yourself. You can use an Influencer Marketing platform. It truly couldn’t be any easier to use these platforms, and we speak from experience.
Influencer Marketing platforms put at your disposal a wide range of creators to choose from. They help you ensure there’s always someone who is a good fit for your brand and is ready and willing to partner with you. No more scrapping Instagram and Tik Tok for influencers!
Also, some of these platforms work closely with their creators to train them in the art of video ad making, ensuring you get the highest quality content you possibly can, every time.
How do Influencer Marketing Tools Work?
Luckily, all Influencer Marketing platforms work similarly:
- Campaign Creation: You start by creating your campaign on the platform. Each platform might differ in the way to do this but it’s usually the first step whichever tool you choose.
- Influencer Discovery: Now, depending on the platform you choose, you can either search for influencers to invite to work on your campaign or you can let creators come to you directly and apply to work with you.
- Influencer Selection: Once you choose your creator/s, most of these platforms will help you easily close the deal with them and ship them the necessary products so they can get started on their content. This is done through integrations with your Shopify or Woocommerce stores.
- Content Approval: Your chosen influencers will send their content for your approval.
- Payment: You can easily pay each creator right from within the platforms.
- Data & Analytics: You can manage your campaigns and analyze their results as well as each influencer’s performance. Based on this data you can decide on future partnerships.
But let’s get into each one of the platforms and hopefully, help you decide which tool is the right one for you.
Best Influencer Marketing Tools
| Features | Influencer Discovery & Management, Creator Marketplace, Analytics & Reports, Strategic Services, Social Listening Tool, Pricing Recommendations, Influencer Whitelisting, Reverse Image Search, Campaign Management |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Blogs, Tik Tok |
| Main Integrations | Shopify, Woocommerce, Paypal |
| Pricing | On request |
Aspire is a great platform overall! It offers pretty much all of the features you would expect from an Influencer platform and some more.
Our favorite feature in Aspire that we haven’t found in competing platforms yet, is the option to Reverse Image Search.
This is a great tool if you have previously run influencer campaigns and have a good insight into what content works best for your brand. By using the Reverse Image Search tool you can grab your top-performing content and reverse search it to look for influencers with similar aesthetics and content to yours.
| Features | Influencer Discovery & Analysis, Influencer Management, Product Seeding, Campaign Management, Influencer Payment |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitch |
| Main Integrations | Gmail, Outlook, Klaviyo, Shopify, Woocomerce, Zapier |
| Pricing | On request |
Upfluence is an all-rounded solution that allows you to completely manage your influencer campaigns from one place.
Our favorite feature from this platform is the Influencer Payment feature.
This tool analyzes each influencer and their engagement rates, posting habits, and performance and provides you with fair pricing for that influencer. This eliminates the negotiation aspect of managing your influencers by yourself because it gives you a clear and fair price and data to back up that price.
| Features | Influencer Discovery & Recruitment, Influencer Relationship Management, Product Seeding, Creator Payment, Content Management, Reporting & Analytics, Campaign Management |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch |
| Main Integrations | Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, Salesforce, Instagram |
| Pricing | On request |
Grin is very similar to Upfluence and offers many of the same features.
What we love about this platform is its Content Management feature. Content is gold! And your takeaways from an influencer campaign should never just be the revenue you make from the partnership, it should be the content, first and foremost.
Grin offers a content library that stores all your influencer and UGC content in one place so you can easily pull from it and repurpose it for other channels, giving you the option to generate even more revenue from your content.
| Features | Influencer Discovery, Campaign Management, Intellifluence Payments, |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Tik Tok, Linkedin, Pinterest, Blogs |
| Main Integrations | LinkResearchTools, Amazon, Facebook, GrowthGenius, Youtube, Twitter |
| Pricing | Free to $599/month |
This platform offers the standard features that every other platform does.
Where it differs from competing platforms is that it offers the option to run Blog Campaigns as well. Meaning, it allows you to search for expert bloggers or influencers that shine on the blogosphere and partner with them for review or testimonial blog posts.
If you’re looking for these types of influencers, you can use Intellifluence’s Influencer search tool and filter by blog, Moz authority score, citation flows, and other important SEO metrics, to find the perfect blog or influencer to partner with.
| Features | Influencer Discovery & Analysis, Influencer Organization & Management, Campaign Management, Analytics, Results Forecasting, Fake Follower Detection, Influencer Doppelgangers |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube |
| Main Integrations | Shopify, Zapier |
| Pricing | Starting at $148 for monthly plans |
While Influencity falls short of competing platforms with regard to the social media channels (Instagram, Tik Tok, and Youtube), it does offer other interesting features like the Fake Follower Detection and Influencer Doppelgangers.
The Fake Follower Detection tool is very beneficial, especially for smaller brands that don’t have large budgets to hire experienced influencers with proven track records. Influencity’s proprietary tool allows you to distinguish between real and fake followers and determine an influencer’s authenticity.
Also coming in to help small businesses is the Influencer Doppelganger tool. This tool is extremely helpful if you can’t afford the influencers you’ve been hoping to work with because it allows you to search for smaller and similar influencers to those.
| Features | Influencer Management, In-Platform Payments, Analytics & Reports, Influencer AI Matching Tool, Paid Ads, Content Library, In-Platform Chat, Campaign Management |
| Social Media Platforms | Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube |
| Main Integrations | Apple, Google Play, eCommerce Tools |
| Pricing | On request |
Vamp works a little differently than the remaining platforms, and this could either be a good or a bad thing depending on how you prefer to work.
When you create a campaign in Vamp, instead of searching for influencers to invite to your campaign, Vamp puts the campaign out there and allows its long list of vetted influencers to apply to work with you.
If you find searching for influencers too time-consuming, this is great because by using Vamp, you’re asking the influencers to come to you. However, if time isn’t an issue for you and you want to make sure you find the perfect influencer for your brand, maybe Vamp isn’t the platform for you and you’ll be better off with one of the other platforms on this list.
| Features | Influencer Discovery & Vetting, Campaign Management, Social Commerce, Budget Optimization, Program Management, Relationship Management, Influencer Market Benchmarking |
| Social Media Platforms | Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogs, Tik Tok |
| Main Integrations | – |
| Pricing | On request |
Where the Traackr platform shines is in its data & analytics capabilities and, especially, in its Influencer Market Benchmarking tool.
This tool can gather influencer data, albeit on a high level, from hundreds of brands so you can compare your data to your competitors’ data and see where you stand in your industry. It can show data like the number of influencers activated, number of posts, and engagement so you can get an idea of your competitors’ influencer marketing efforts and their overall results.
Conclusion
Influencer Marketing isn’t for every brand. But if you want to give it a try there are definitely easier ways to do it than manually.
Whether you want to save yourself some time, have a network of vetted influencers at your disposal, or simply centralize all your influencer marketing efforts in one place, an influencer marketing tool is the way to go.
Now, you just have to get your priorities clear and choose the platform that will best help you scale your influencer marketing and take your brand to new levels.
You have all the influencer potential at your fingertips. What are you waiting for?
