The influencer marketing landscape is in constant change. Social media platforms go out of their way to attract more users. Regular users can become rising stars if their content goes viral. Businesses need to make every effort to maintain the interest of their audience. That is why brands turn to influencer marketing tools for help.
With so many solutions out there manoeuvring these platforms seems a challenging task. It is undeniable that influencer marketing is a great way to reach new audiences and increase brand visibility. Businesses can choose from a wide range of influencer marketing tools that enable them to plan and carry out successful marketing campaigns. But how do you know which one is the right for your business?
In this article, we guide you through various tools and help you understand how to use them best.
Why Influencer Marketing Gained Ground
What used to be an additional means of marketing for big companies with a huge budget turned out to be a must-to-have solution for businesses in numerous industries. Influencer marketing is still on an upward trajectory due to the variety of social media platforms, their expanding features, and the growing number of prospective creators. Not to mention the emergence of a new audience aged 16-26 that is more responsive to their peers' opinions.
A new audience requires a new approach
Generation Z consumers talk with fellow users about brands instead of listening to businesses telling them what product to buy. Traditional marketing methods still work but companies can't deny the fact that they have to approach young people in a new way. According to the Forbes article, Gen Z customers make up 40% of consumers and they spend more than 3 hours on social media platforms. Brands had no choice but to align their marketing strategies to the internet habits of this generation. Namely, target young users with unique content on social media outlets.
The opinion of influencers matter
Since marketing exists, word-of-mouth marketing was one of the best methods to raise the interest of possible customers and increase brand awareness. If you choose the right creators, influencer marketing can leverage the potential of word-of-mouth to its maximum.
Influencer marketing moved users to social media channels and opened up opportunities for regular users to become influencers. These creators, called nano- and micro-influencers, have relatively few followers. However, they build and nurture a close relationship with their audience. They specialize and create content on a distinctive topic in which they are experts. Their audience, in exchange, trusts their opinions and is more likely to follow their ideas.
How Marketing Tools and Platforms Have Evolved
As influencers grew more popular more companies decided to invest in this form of marketing. Due to popular demand influencer marketing technology evolved a lot in the last couple of years likewise. In the beginning, they were practical tools for detecting fake accounts. Now you can find even AI-driven mega-platforms that cover every step of building and managing marketing campaigns.
The focus of influencer marketing is shifting from the number of followers to the quality of audience and engagement. These are key metrics if you want to drive awareness and action. Online creators and their audiences create a vast amount of data that you may use to your company's advantage. Influencer marketing tools provide you with many features to examine this data. You identify influencers that can endorse your brand and learn about user behavior, likes, negative sentiments, and interests.
Available Influencer Marketing Tools
Each business has its requirements, thus each marketing scenario needs its special solution. As a first step identify your goals, research your industry and competitors and gain information about your target audience. If you are aware of these data then you understand which marketing tool to choose.
Tools for discovery, profile analysis, and outreach
Finding influencers who publish content in your niche and can easily target your audience is a time-consuming task. Influencer discovery tools are designed so that you can either search for influencers by their names or other categories. To acquire the best results, fine-tune your search by filtering basic demographic data. You can improve your search even more if you apply filters for the creator's audience and add keywords.
Create a list of prospective influencers and set the performance requirements. Analyze the profiles on your list focusing on several key metrics. Influencers might have a massive number of followers but if their audience quality and engagement rates are poor you are wasting your time and money with them.
Influencer analysis tools use a ton of data influencers and users create on social media channels. All this data facilitates your work process by giving you ideas on what content to create and which influencer to team up with.
With outreach tools, you can contact influencers. You may create template emails for a campaign and follow up on your conversation with prospects.
Influencer marketing marketplaces
A place of networking for both businesses and influencers. Influencer marketplaces are platforms where brands and creators can sign up and look for an opportunity for collaboration. Both parties can search the database in their niche by applying relevant filters and building a business partnership. These systems usually have an outreach feature to speed up the process.
Marketing agencies specializing in influencer marketing
Of course, as influencer marketing became popular, many marketing agencies turned their attention to this new marketing trend. Agencies comprise experts who have worked together with many creators across different industries. They scrutinize your business objectives and your target audience, and they know your industry. They make efficient preparations to conduct successful marketing campaigns.
Social Media Listening and Analytics Tools
How impressive would it be, if you knew what people are talking about your products or services? Social media listening tools do exactly this. They collect and analyze brand mentions in posts. You can leverage all this data and turn them to your business' advantage.
Platforms for creating branded influencer content
Again, these platforms have a huge database of creators where brands can find their future collaborators. Creators can pitch their content ideas to businesses which they later use on their social media channels as paid advertisements. Branded content platforms are ideal places if you are looking for an influencer with uniqueness.
Influencer affiliate marketing programs
If you are into affiliate marketing, then working together with an influencer will drive more sales and enhance your brand visibility. On influencer affiliate marketing platforms you can connect with creators who produce content in your niche. They will publish engaging content to their followers and have an impact on their purchase decisions.
Data collector systems
Just like social media listening tools, data collectors garner a huge amount of data produced on social media outlets and blog-olds. Understanding and analyzing data is vital before you start a marketing campaign. You can uncover what users think about your brand, and exploit this information to improve and develop or simply maintain quality.
Customers and employee advocacy tools
Turn your most dedicated customers and employees to brand advocates with these tools. Enthusiastic consumers can become influencers by endorsing your brand. Your employees know a lot about your company's internal operations. Treasure their knowledge because it is a key weapon in improving your brand image and customer service.
End-to-end influencer marketing platforms
These platforms are the alpha and omega of influencer marketing. They use Machine Learning and AI to process an enormous amount of data and include all the above features. You can identify your future creators based on your requirements, build and track your campaign and keep an eye on your budget.
All-in-one marketing platforms are loaded with the profiles of millions of influencers. They provide you with ample filters, and metrics to choose relevant influencers. Their algorithms estimate your campaigns' budget, your Earned Media Value (EMV), and ROI. A comprehensive marketing platform is a powerful instrument for marketing agencies and brands with in-house marketing teams.
Conclusion
We hope that we managed to give you a clear picture of what individual influencer marketing tools are used for. Remember to plan, set your goals and study your audience before you kick off your influencer marketing campaign.
Would you like to learn more about each tool? Do you want to know what metrics you should check before you team up with an influencer? Then we invite you to download our Influencer Marketing Landscape guide.