Influencer marketing is becoming one of the most profitable channels in many marketers’ mixes. Successful influencer marketing needs special tools to connect social media data with marketers’ needs for the greatest impact.
Through this article, we will cover why influencer marketing tools are important to crafting successful campaigns. Look at which types of tools are available to marketers, and when each has its use.
Before dwelling on the specific tools is important to know why marketers need these tools. How do they integrate and enhance social media metrics and then look at when they are most useful.
Understanding Influencer Marketing Tools
Influencers have their impact, mostly, on social media platforms. These platforms collect and hold an enormous amount of data about influencer’s performances, their content, and their audience.
Social media share these data with the influencers. But marketers cannot access them, without direct contact with the influencers themselves. To cover this gap third-party services have appeared and provide tools to effectively discover, evaluate, and track influencers.
Not all influencer campaigns are the same and their goals and execution can be wildly different from one another.
This article will cover these tools in the same order of use when running a campaign, Influencer discovery is the first up.
Influencer Discovery Tools
What Are Influencer Discovery Tools?
Influencer discovery tools upgrade social media native search functions. At times also called influencer search tools these services create an organized database of influencers and their performances.
Through these tools, marketers can rapidly go through thousands of profiles filtering for specific metrics or characteristics.
This kind of service is extremely important and may even be the most necessary tool in a marketer’s arsenal.
Benefits of Using Influencer Discovery Tools
Discovery tools bridge the gap between native social media search and the needs of marketers. Performance metrics and the unique characteristics of each creator are going to be at the base of each search. Using influencer search tools is going to save any marketer an enormous amount of hours of boring, repetitive work.
A crucial advantage of using discovery tools detached from social media platforms is the escape from their content bubble. Social media algorithms govern what platforms show and heavily weigh previous use to suggest new content and profiles. Algorithms can be limiting for a marketer who is doing all his research directly on the platform.
Search tools are a must for finding smaller influencers in specific niches. With hundreds of millions of profiles manually searching is a herculean effort. Adding the necessity to analyze and evaluate the performances would be a complete no-go without these tools. And marketers would pass on some of the most effective channels.
However, finding influencers is only the first step. Once you have a good number of possible profiles who passed the first screening you need to evaluate them.
Influencer Analysis Tools
What Are Influencer Analysis Tools?
Finding profiles thematically connected with your product is the first step in shortlisting influencers for your campaign. The second step is to check these profiles and analyze their previous results. With these process, you can understand what to expect from them and which fit your goals best.
Many of the influencer search tools will also include an analytical component further streamlining your process.
Is essential to keep in consideration the data that each tool offers. Basic ones provide engagement rate and subscriber count. More complete tools include growth metrics, audience demographics, detailed content performances, results estimations, and more.
Most tools will provide three to six months of data but some platforms can hold data as far as a year back. Longer timeframes let better contextualize the creator’s performances and their current results.
Key Metrics to Track with Influencer Analysis Tools
Each campaign will need specific metrics to be tracked and evaluated based on the goals and the scope of the campaign itself. But as a good measure engagement rate and growth metrics are the most important when evaluating a content creator.
Previous content performances are also an important piece of the puzzle. Metrics like comments, likes, and views over time are the best indicators of a genuine account.
Predictive analysis deserves a special mention. Integrating data analysis techniques and AI models, some platforms can use their databases to create estimates of future performance. While these analyses are not 100% accurate they help marketers to understand what is to come.
In some cases is important to have updated metrics. That is where the next category comes in handy.
Influencer Monitoring Tools
The Role of Influencer Monitoring Tools
Influencer monitoring tools are a subset of influencer analysis tools. Their main difference is in the data update frequency. Most analysis tools update influencer profiles once a week or once a month. Meanwhile, monitoring tools have their data updated daily, or almost.
Daily updated metrics let marketers always be on top of the situation.
More frequent updates guarantee a better look at how a creator performs. And shows how their content grows over time. This is especially important for those campaigns that are time-sensitive.
Like in the case of a Black Friday sale promotion. When creators with a high percentage of views on day one are better suited than creators with more views but spread over weeks.
Benefits of Ongoing Monitoring
Monitoring tools offer a unique opportunity for crisis management. Social media is a fast-paced environment. The opinion about an influencer can change in hours because of scandals, poorly thought content, and more unforeseen contingencies.
Being able to catch the insurgence of these issues when they emerge and have a proactive approach to them can save your brand image.
Influencer Ranking Tools
Understanding Influencer Ranking Tools
Is important to understand how their performances compare to other influencers. Benchmarking results with industry standards is the first step to understanding the impact of a campaign.
Ranking tools aggregate the data and make it possible to understand how each creator stacks against the average influencer.
How to Use Influencer Ranking for Better Campaigns
Metrics like engagement rate, followers, and likes can be tricky to understand the impact of each influencer. Content vertical, country, and language greatly affect the possible results.
Being able to account for the specifics of the niche you are targeting lets set achievable and realistic goals.
In true DIY spirit, many marketers use averages and statistics they can find online to benchmark their picks. These data often don’t account for different content categories or countries. Ranking tools allow you to see how each creator stacks against the categories they are part of.
As your parents remind you at every chance they get, the internet all scams and you should never trust anything you see online. But since you are a marketer looking at an article about influencer marketing you know better. Still, there are some frauds online and influencers are not immune to it. That is where auditing tools come in handy:
Influencer Audit Tools
What Are Influencer Audit Tools?
Audit tools use a variety of approaches to look at influencers’ digital footprint and establish how genuine it is. The most common way is by analyzing the followers and evaluating the likelihood of them being bots.
Another way to test an influencer’s authenticity is to look at the patterns around the audience’s interactions. Excluded cases of viral posts most content receives a stable influx of views, likes, and comments. Monitoring tools and specialized tools can highlight abnormal spikes in engagement. When repeated, these spikes can be a sign of paid engagement.
Benefits of Conducting Influencer Audits
Influencers’ unique aspect is the connection they have with their audience and the trust the audience has in them. While there are a lot of good and genuine influencers some try to mimic the look of a successful content creator to get sponsorships. Easily understanding which profiles raise red flags will help you use your budget on worthy creators.
Influencer AI Tools
The Rise of AI in Influencer Marketing
With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 AI has become the hottest topic in tech and beyond. Influencer marketing shows a solid case for the implementation of AI tools.
As we have seen, influencer marketing tools rely on collecting large databases with info about content creators. These databases are excellent sources for training AI models to understand and predict online trends, content categorization, and contextualization.
Optimizing the use and scope of these databases is the main challenge in influencer MarTech in the immediate future.
Enhancing Campaigns with AI Tools
AI impacts influencer campaigns mainly on three aspects: content and creator categorization, predictive analytics, and influencer discovery.
AI models can much faster and more accurately than humans apply tags to content and test it to know which boxes it would fit. This is going to reduce pressure on marketers to find influencers who exactly fit their needs.
The data contained in these databases is used to understand patterns between creators, their postings, and performances. Ultimately to know the content that resonates with which audience and the trajectory the creator is on.
Influencer discovery will benefit from AI integration with tools to identify look-a-like creators on. Marketers will need to find a few relevant influencers and the AI will gather other profiles with similar characteristics.
Influencer Management Tools
Overview of Influencer Management Tools
Influencer marketing does not stop at identifying the right influencers for a campaign. Most of the work is a long back-and-forth between the two parties. Getting in contact with the influencers, negotiating their participation in the campaign, and tracking their posting and timelines.
This is often made through emails and custom-made spreadsheets. However, there are tools to allow marketers to connect directly with influencers.
These kinds of platforms are a sort of CRM for marketers but instead of tracking clients, it tracks suppliers.
Streamlining Campaigns with Management Tools
Influencer management tools, while not essential, make one’s life much easier. Instead of keeping tracking manually of conversations, negotiations, timelines, payments, and publishing management tools do it for you.
In some specialized cases, these softwares can even help with shipping goods and tracking the effectiveness of sponsored posts.
Marketers who create large or frequent influencer campaigns should consider influencer management tools for their stack.
Conclusion
Influence marketing can become much easier, and more effective, for marketers if they use the right tools in the right way. Using discovery and analysis tools will make for a shorter selection phase.
This stack would make it easier to kickstart any campaign and decrease the chance of picking underperforming creators. Management and monitoring tools can track the results while running a campaign.
With the current race to AI, many platforms are implementing AI solutions to go along with their previous offering. These tools further streamline the process of evaluation and will introduce predictive analytics as a normal practice.
While these tools all have their place in a marketer toolset they are not, by any means, all needed at any time. Certain campaigns need a major focus on analyzing previous results and trends while others benefit more from management tools.
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