THE TOOLS OF THE INFLUENCER MARKETING TRADE
Social media is in a state of constant change. Everything moves so quickly that even talking about social media tools is a challenge. In my books, articles, and presentations, I’ve always attempted to discuss concepts regarding tools rather than specific technical details. Technology and the details, along with the companies that offer the tools, will always change. I can name as many tools and companies that have over disappeared the last decade as those who have survived. The fundamental concepts behind the tools, however, do not change.
The aim here is to focus on the concepts of the tools since the functionality can be inefficient or confusing. The tools listed below cover the main groups of influencer marketing tools: tools for analysis, marketplace tools, agencies, and search engines. The amount of data and tools themselves can be overwhelming. These tools and this guide can help navigate them and provide you with a starting point.
THE ROLE OF TOOLS
The process of influencer identification can be very data intensive. There’s so much data to gather, and just as many ways to interpret the data, that it’s nearly impossible to do manually in any thorough way. That’s where tools help. Marketers love tools. They are part of the scaling approach of any business program:
People => Process => Tools
I’m such an evangelist of social media-related tools that I co-founded a now defunct event called the Social Tools Summit to discuss the ways technology can help all facets of social media marketing. The summit addressed the best practices in applying the technology to social media marketing-related topics. I’m an even stronger believer that tools don’t, and can’t, replace processes. You start with a strong process, then find the tool to help you become more efficient and accurate at implementing that process.
The influencer marketing industry has matured to the point where there is a tool available for almost any challenge with influencers that you might have. While most recent marketer surveys indicate that measuring the ROI of influencer marketing is the most challenging subject today, identifying the right influencers to work with is usually not far behind in the results. In fact, Mediakix’s recent Influencer Marketing Industry Benchmarks report indicated that 61 percent of marketers agree that it is still challenging to find the best influencers for a campaign. Beyond the question of ROI and finding or identifying influencers, tools also cover elements of pitching to and maintaining communications with influencers, paying influencers, and tracking performance on key indicators.
If a tool or platform is performing all of the above functions, including compensating influencers on your behalf, then the logical assumption is that influencers opted into this service. All of the tools have a different database of influencers. They collate their pools differently. Some tools act as marketplaces and are opt-in only. This is convenient, but it is also an indication that you’re only accessing a limited subset of influencers compared to what is out there, and what will show up with other search engines. Some tools don’t let you pay or manage influencer relations through their dashboard, but they allow you to communicate or track spending or ROI. This is where you decide what is convenient and what you will do in a more manual approach.
Marketplaces are another field of tools that help manage influencer identification and relationships. Many of these are opt-in for the influencer, meaning that, once again, you’re exposed only to a subset of influencers. That being said, many brands and agencies do appreciate the convenience that these marketplaces have to quickly and easily source and launch a campaign with influencers.
JCLUB
AS A STARTUP, GAINING ATTENTION FOR YOUR brand in the sea of internet companies is a huge hurdle. Standing out and building a reputation when you’re fresh and new is not easy. Is it possible to build a strong reputation quickly? How can working with influencers bring visibility to your brand?
When jClub, an online shopping portal, looked at spreading the word about their new store, they turned to influencer marketing. The goal was to engage with around thirty bloggers to increase brand awareness and drive sales. By engaging with bloggers in this way the brand would also generate a wealth of online material that would point customers to the store in the future. In this case, jClub was quite set in the way they wanted the bloggers to describe and promote the brand.
With the help of the marketplace tool dealspotr, jClub worked with thirty-three influencers who produced a total of ninety-nine pieces of content including thirty-one dedicated blog posts, twenty-six Facebook posts, thirty-one Tweets, and two YouTube videos.1 The influencers were given affiliate codes to pass onto their audience, further incentivizing the bloggers’ engagement.
The return was impressive. For a total spend of $2,923 over 33 influencers, and an investment of 7.5 hours in campaign management, jClub took in $16,255 over 378 sales. That’s a staggering 550 percent return on marketing spend.
A search engine is the final category of tool, and it is truly open. A search engine requires more involvement from your end, including more filtering and searching by hand. Again, you have to understand what each search engine offers. There are different scopes for talent agencies, marketing agencies, and marketplaces. Some agencies or search engines flag accounts as influencers when they have 10,000 followers, but there might be a micro-influencer with 5,000 followers who is more influential and better targeted for your brand’s needs. Every database has a different scope, and you have to understand what you’re dealing with and raise questions to understand what you’re looking for.
Some agencies or marketplaces have filters, but it’s when you get to the search engines and the broader tools without the opt-in methods that you get the most filters. These tools all have different filters and serve different functions. Understanding the possibilities and seeing what’s feasible are the first steps.
Here’s a sample of some of the filters that most influencer search engines provide:
Audience size—an obvious filter and possibly the first one people look at when considering influencers
Engagement rate—a more important metric to see how much of the audience is actually listening and engaged
Reach—expanding on audience and showing how many potential impressions the influencer gets, rather than just audience size
Amplification—measuring how often the influencer’s content is shared and amplified through the networks
Social network—which networks the influencer operates across
Relevance—measured with different filters for different tools regarding topic or other things we know about the influencer
Beyond these common filters, I find the further metrics below to be essential in the refining process of identification.
Audience demographics—Just who is their audience made up of? The usual demographic statistical categories of countries, cities, languages, ages, authenticity, education, income level, etc. are all worth sorting through. The level and detail of information can be scary when you see how much data can be filtered. Further details such as interests, hashtags, categories, and mentions are valuable filters.
Lookalikes—A powerful device to find and match influencers. There are tools that find the influencers you’re looking at and then say: If you’re interested in these influencers then perhaps you’ll be interested in these, too, since the audiences are similar. Engaging with lookalike influencers can be a powerful step to expand your program and might expose you to relevant influencers you would not have discovered on your own.
Hypr (https://hyprbrands.com/) is one influencer search engine that takes information about a social media account and creates an anonymous profile, linking similar accounts. The tool tracks social interactions of the more than one billion accounts in their database, monitoring over 100 billion interactions each month. The data identifies accounts that inspire a large amount of interaction and reactions, measuring the relevant context as well. The example Hypr gives is that Justin Bieber is able to inspire a large amount of reaction, much more than Gary Kasparov, but not in the context of chess. Obviously, Kasparov inspires more in that context and so is more relevant for that audience or topic.
Tools for reporting and keeping track of the return on investment cover content tracking and KPI reporting; spend per like, per comment, or per view; the measurement on redirect or short links; hashtag tracking by date; along with many other metrics. There are different ways the tools gather data for you, just as there are different ways to measure if the campaign was a success.
This is an overview to the landscape to give you an idea where to start in searching for tools that can help you find, engage with, and manage relationships with influencers. It’s not a comprehensive list. There are many changes over time as names change, and startups fizzle out or change focus. An updated list of changing names and tools can be found at https://nealschaffer.com/influencer-marketing-tools.
It should be noted that I have done my best with the various clarification of tools, but in reality there are many overlaps. Just as Hootsuite started out as an agency and developed their own social media dashboard, which became their main business after providing their technology to other companies, some influencer marketing agencies have developed their own tools that they now provide to non-agency clients. Similarly, some influencer discovery tools or marketplaces also offer agency services. I have tried to focus on what I believe is the main benefit that each company brings to the table, but keep in mind that these overlaps exist in almost every category.
SOCIAL LISTENING TOOLS
These types of tools are designed to know who is talking about you or your competitors and can cover subjects, hashtags, and drill down to who is actually posting. They’re about monitoring brand reputation. The ten listed here are industry leaders backed with a solid reputation, all with different specializations.
| Awario | awario.com |
| Brand24 | brand24.com |
| Brandwatch | brandwatch.com |
| Digimind | digimind.com |
| Keyhole | keyhole.co |
| Meltwater | meltwater.com |
| Mention | mention.com |
| Netbase | netbase.com |
| Sprinklr | sprinklr.com |
| Talkwalker | talkwalker.com |
BLOGGER OUTREACH TOOLS
Before social media matured, blogging was the original source of online influence. The power of bloggers is still strong. If you’re focused on bloggers, regardless of social media, this subset requires its own dedicated tools. These tools are a superior focus on blogger outreach.
| BuzzStream | buzzstream.com |
| GroupHigh | grouphigh.com |
| Ninja Outreach | ninjaoutreach.com |
| Ontolo | ontolo.com |
| PitchBox | pitchbox.com |
TRADITIONAL INFLUENCER DISCOVERY TOOLS
After blogging, the evolution of social media influence moved toward social networks. These three tools have been around since before social media became predominantly visual. They are backed by a long history with respect to social media and experience. They boast rich functionality and are extremely well-educated in the space. Each of the tools are a bit different and work off different algorithms because of where they started. They are perhaps better known for B2B engagement but are certainly not limited to that field.
| Klear | klear.com |
| Onalytica | onalytica.com |
| Traackr | traackr.com |
INFLUENCER DISCOVERY TOOLS
These tools recognize that a large portion of social media budgets are going to visual media and focus on that, but each with their own angle. For that reason, they are primarily Instagram-centric platforms but have functionality beneficial outside of that one platform. They differ from the influencer marketplace list to follow in that they are not based on individual influencers opting in to their platform. These tools, instead, focus on developing technology to allow you to easily filter through millions of user profiles to find the perfect influencer.
| AspireIQ | aspireiq.com |
| Grapevine | grapevinelogic.com |
| Grin | grin.co |
| Hypr | hyprbrands.com |
| Mavrck | mavrck.co |
| Neoreach | neoreach.com |
| Open Influence | openinfluence.com |
| Scrunch | scrunch.com |
| Trendkite | trendkite.com |
| Upfluence | upfluence.com |
INFLUENCER MARKETPLACES
As mentioned before, influencer marketplaces often involve a subset of influencers who have opted into these platforms. The pool you identify and draw from might be smaller, but the marketplace gives you convenience as well as potential vetting by the marketplace before allowing them to be registered. These marketplaces help you source, pitch, and often handle payment through the platform. Again, they all have their different focuses with different possibilities for connecting with influencers. Shoutcart focuses entirely on Instagram shout outs. ExpertVoice is another interesting platform. The influencers listed are experts in a niche. They’ve often worked heavily in a type of retail and have the expertise to suggest which skiing equipment, camping gear, or painting supplies people should use for their situation. These influencers are often backed with blogs. Famebit started as a YouTube-based platform and is now currently owned by Google.
| ExpertVoice | expertvoice.com |
| Famebit | famebit.com |
| Influence.co | influence.co |
| Intellifluence | intellifluence.com |
| IZEA | izea.com |
| Linqia | linqia.com |
| Shoutcart | shoutcart.com |
| SocialPubli | socialpubli.com |
| TapInfluence | tapinfluence.com |
| Tomoson | tomoson.com |
HEALTH-ADE
AS COMPANIES LOOK MORE TO INFLUENCERS for engagement, and influencers increasingly make themselves available, how can a brand know what to look for in an influencer? How can a brand recognize what the influencer can bring to the table and if their followers are the real deal instead of bots artificially boosting the numbers?
Once you identify which influencers you want to work with there remain the time-consuming issues of working on terms of payment and terms of engagement. Engaging and managing relationships with influencers, particularly when the communication is almost always all online, can be difficult.
Increasingly, there are tools to solve this problem. These tools—both apps and companies—work as a platform and go-between to handle the mundane details for the brand when working with influencers. Health-Ade Kombucha faced these issues when looking at engaging influencers with their product. Rather than approaching each influencer individually, Health Ade utilized the tool Trend to engage with influencers.
Trend (https://trend.io) is a marketplace that lays the groundwork for brands and influencers to work together. Before listing the influencer, Trend ensures the influencers’ credentials and followers are legit. Brands can post expectations of the interactions with customized requirements along with new products. When a brand and influencers take a liking to each other, they can communicate directly through the app. It’s Tinder for brands and influencers.
In the case of Health-Ade, they decided how they wanted to interact with brands and used Trend to connect with influencers across the United States, without having to worry about the filtering process. The influencers received their sample product and engaged with Health-Ade Kombucha in their own way—some cooked with the product, others turned it into a cocktail or showed how they blended it into their workout regime. The results were over 135 high-quality images taken from the unique perspective of the influencer, resulting in 15,000 engagements on Instagram. The campaign pushed Health-Ade Kombucha’s popularity and visibility to become one of the nation’s leading kombucha brands.
By using Trend, the brand retains control over the influencer posts by approving what is posted. They are also able to still pinpoint the influencers who they feel best represent the brand ethos, image, and target demographic. The brands are also able to download the collected content influencers create to be able to use in further marketing material. These extra benefits of the interactions with influencers make the whole engagement fluid.
INFLUENCER MARKETING AGENCIES
While an agency is not a tool per se, it can provide tremendous assistance at every step of your influencer marketing activities. Some of the above-mentioned tools also have consulting or agency branches that can assist you. The ten listed below are agency leaders I’ve found through my own work and research. Many of these do produce a lot of content themselves, including blog posts and so on that give insights into the influencer marketing landscape to prove their expertise in the space.
| 360i | 360i.com |
| Acorn | acorninfluence.com |
| Clever | realclever.com |
| Collectively | collectivelyinc.com |
| Influence Central | influence-central.com |
| Mediakix | mediakix.com |
| The Cirqle | thecirqle.com |
| Obviously | obvious.ly |
| VaynerMedia | vaynermedia.com |
| Viral Nation | viralnation.com |
OTHER TOOLS
These other tools don’t fit neatly into a category but are useful. Collectively, they look at details across the board, from analyzing fake influence to finding influence in content creation to helping you curate user-generated content from influencers.
| BuzzSumo | buzzsumo.com |
| Curalate | curalate.com |
| FollowerWonk | followerwonk.com |
| HypeAuditor | hypeauditor.com |
| Launchmetrics | launchmetrics.com |
| Nimble | nimble.com |
| Perlu | perlu.com |
| Pixlee | pixlee.com |
| Right Relevance | rightrelevance.com |
| Socialix | socialix.com |
In addition to my own recommendations, if you are looking for a simple list of enterprise-grade influencer marketing tools to begin researching, Forrester has published their own report on the leading influencer marketing solutions, which from their perspective comprise Ahalogy, AspireIQ, Collective Bias, Influential, IZEA, Klear, Launchmetrics, Linqia, Mavrck, Octoly, and Traackr.2
Using these tools is about understanding technology and processes. I cannot stress enough how important it is to not start initially with the tools. Tools are designed to help do what you’re already doing, and to maximize the processes that you’re already undertaking. Tools are there to assist. If you start your program with tools, then you’ll get lost. You’ll be presented with data points that you haven’t decided how to use or how to manipulate and understand to refine your processes. When you start with process and human analysis, then you know which data you need to refine your processes. You’ll understand which tools to engage. The tools are powerful and present a lot of data. It’s up to you to understand which data you need and how to act on it. If you’re overwhelmed with data or design your influencer program without considering what you want to achieve first, then you’ll be lost. Tools are there to support the work you do, not be the work you do.