July 31, 2017. Influencer marketing has grown at a staggering rate over the past few years and looks primed to become the primary marketing strategy for businesses, both large and small, as more and more companies look to build their brand reputation and stay competitive in the social media age.
Nowadays, celebrities, Instagram stars, and internet personalities command large swaths of loyal audiences who listen to what they say, dress how they dress, and buy the things they buy. For this reason, brands are starting to recognize the power of leveraging these influencers and their audiences to sell their products and increase their brand awareness.
And the rise and successes of influencer marketing are well documented. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub 2017 Study, influencer marketing is the fastest growing customer acquisition method and also has a $7.65 average earned media value per $1 spent.
Needless to say, tools that help brands capitalize on influencer marketing’s ability to build brand reputation and reach new audiences are invaluable.
Here are the top 10 new tools to improve your influencer marketing campaign:
1. Mention Influencers Dashboard
Mention is a powerful tool to take your influencer marketing up a notch — think of it as your brand’s Influencer marketing command center. Mention’s software excels at helping businesses identify and reach out to influencers who mention their products on the web and social media directly through an intuitive dashboard. It also monitors who competitors are using as their go-to influencers.
2. Publicfast 2.0
Somewhat similar to Mention, Publicfast 2.0 is an influencer marketing platform that brings brands and influencers together to build successful influencer marketing campaigns. Once a brand creates an advertising campaign for their product, they can use Publicfast 2.0’s heavily filterable list of social media influencers to find and connect with an influencer that matches their campaign’s need. The site also has a social media analytics page that lets brands monitor the ROI for their campaigns.
3. Insense
Insense is for companies who want a more targeted approach to influencer marketing. Rather than spending millions on a campaign and possibly failing to reach their audience in a targeted and cost-efficient way, Insense lets advertisers analyze influencer’s audiences by location, age, gender, and interests. This, in turn, allows the brand to make an educated decision on how targeted the campaign will be to an influencer’s specific audience.
4. Reelio
Used by brands, agencies and publishers, Reelio is an influencer marketing platform that helps brands find the right influencers (at the right price), track ROI and scale their influencer marketing efforts. Uniquely, Reelio has a featured creator tool that helps marketers find creators who produce quality brand partnership work, based on their previous performance with Reelio. Their workflow management system also helps simplify the complex process of influencer marketing.
5. Dovetale
Dovetale, like many of the tools above, offers an all-in-one platform to manage influencer relationships and see detailed analytics like demographics, engagement, and location of an audience. But that’s not all. Dovetale stands out from the others with an innovative image algorithm that lets brands find influencers by entering a desired image description and follower count as well as an image they like the look and feel of. The algorithm then gives the brand a list of influencers who post pictures that fit its influencer marketing campaign.
6. Assembly
Assembly, an advanced analytics software, focuses on giving brands in-depth data on campaigns and streamlined influencer management systems in order to make the influencer marketing process as seamless as possible. The platform also has intuitive ROI tracking to make sure your marketing money is being optimized.
7. Influential
Influential utilizes IBM’s powerful AI technology to become the only AI powered influencer platform. The technology matches brands with influencers based on “demographics, psychographics, contextual relevance.” Influentials invite-only influencer network is made up of only the top 1 percent of influencers on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Youtube.
8. Julius
Julius is a heavily data-driven platform that helps match brands with the right influencer. Unlike most of the other platforms mentioned, Julius relies on real people to do research on over 70,000 of the top influencers on social media, resulting in a much more curated experience. The researchers examine an influencer’s content, past brand affiliation, audience, and much more to determine a fit.
9. Pitchbox
Pitchbox’s innovative keyword search tool makes it a breeze for brands to find prospective influencers to suit their influencer marketing projects. The software also gives companies customizable and personalized email outreach and an organized management client, which turns building a marketing strategy and coordinating with team members an efficient process.
10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo’s comprehensive platform lets companies easily discover and understand influencers for their preferred niche. The strength of BuzzSumo’s powerful influencer search engine lies in its unique ability to filter by topic, location, reach, activity, influence, as well as many other parameters. The platform also allows brands to see detailed descriptions on an influencer’s sharing habits — such as which topics, links, and domains do they share most.
