Influencer marketing has been huge in 2017, with more social influencers popping up seemingly every day, and more brands using them to build successful marketing campaigns. And that doesn’t look to be stopping anytime soon – if you haven’t tried influencer marketing yet, now definitely is the time to start.
In this post, I’m going to share five top tools that’ll help you build a better influencer marketing campaign.
A few interesting influencer marketing stats to get the blood pumping…
- Influencers are as influential as friends – in fact, around 40% of Twitter users claim to rely on recommendations from their favorite influencers when making the decision to buy something new
- Influencer marketing content can generate 11 times the ROI of other traditional forms of digital marketing
Here are five top tools to help you build a better influencer marketing campaign, including tools to help you find relevant influencers as well as influencer outreach.
1. Upfluence
Upfluence is a great option if you’re looking for a tool that handles all the aspects of an influencer marketing campaign – finding and researching influencers, managing your campaigns and influencer lists, and monitoring/ analyzing your campaign.
One of the things that makes this tool stand out to me is that you can actually search for influencers the other way around: by their audience.
This makes it a lot easier to find truly relevant influencers – after all, the idea is to reach your target audience in order to convert at a higher rate, whatever your goal might be.
You can also search for influencers the ‘regular’ way, by adding as many keywords as you want and using filters, like whether they have an email address available or a blog or their exact location.
Once you’ve narrowed down your results, you can then go through and add influencers to your lists. Then, start your influencer outreach campaign by creating an email template and sending it out to your chosen users.
Finally, you can check the status of your campaign for each influencer – see who’s opened the email, who’s engaged with you, and so on.
2. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is perhaps better known for its content research features, but it’s also a great option for finding and researching influencers.
There are two main ways to search and find social influencers – by their author bios or by their content shared. You can also filter your results by city or country, as well as by their type (bloggers, influencers, companies, journalists, regular people).
Once you’ve started a search, you’re also able to quickly check important information about each influencer generated, such as their website’s domain authority, their number of Twitter followers, their average retweet and reply ratios, a list of their recently shared content (to give you an idea of what subjects they usually cover), and so on.
If you find any influencers that might work well on your campaigns, just add them to your list.
3. Buzzstream
Buzzstream is an influencer marketing app which includes research and outreach features.
Of course, it all starts with the research – enter your keywords and select any filters you want (date, language, country, and type of content) to find relevant websites to add to your campaign:
The results can then be ordered by their number of shares (overall shares or shares for each individual social network).
Basically, Buzzstream finds relevant influencers based on their content, which can come in particularly handy when you’re researching a specific niche.
You can also upload your own list of websites to start an outreach campaign in a more efficient way.
Once your list is built, you can easily prioritize the influencers to reach out to by ordering them by their number of Twitter followers, for example, or by their website’s domain authority, among other options.
You can also clearly see who’s worked with you in the past, whether they responded to your emails, and so on.
As for the outreach, it’s easy and quick to do, as you can create email templates to send to your list of influencers, as well as set up automated follow-ups. Or, if you prefer being more hands-on, you can choose to get follow-up reminders.
4. GroupHigh
Like most of the tools in this list, GroupHigh offers both influencer research features and influencer outreach tools.
The way it works is, GroupHigh has a huge database of over 15 million bloggers which you can search through using all kinds of filters (such as their location, social networks, and even preferred modes of communication).
Also, if you have any existing relationships with influencers and you want to manage all of these connections using one tool, you can easily add import them to GroupHigh with a .csv spreadsheet.
One of the standout features is that you can filter influencer results based on each campaigns’ needs – for example, based on their total reach, their number of followers on Twitter, their usual promotional tactics (giveaways, sponsored posts, etc.), their traffic, and many more options.
Once you’ve got your list all set up, you can create email templates to send to the influencers as quickly as possible.
And finally, you can keep an eye on your list and monitor your results – who’s been contacted already, when you last spoke with them, and so on.
5. Famebit
Famebit is a bit different to the other tools in this list – it’s not so much about researching, finding, and reaching out to relevant influencers, but rather more about connecting brands with the right content creators.
The way it works is, you start by setting up your campaign and establishing your guidelines – i.e. what social media channels you want to target, the sponsorship type, and of course, your overall budget for this project.
Content creators will then be able to see your requirements and guidelines, and can reach out to you with their pitches to show you how exactly they can help promote your brand, what kind of content they’re thinking of creating, as well as their fee.
You can then browse through the proposals from influencers and choose the right one for you – you can even filter the results based on each influencers’ audiences’ age and location (to help you find truly relevant influencers).
It’s a very simple and quick process if you’re looking to get a product review, sponsored post, and so on, from an influencer.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing tools are essential when setting up campaigns – otherwise, you’re going to spend a lot of time looking for relevant influencers, not to mention actually reaching out to them, especially if you need to work with dozens of influencers on every campaign. But most importantly, influencer marketing tools enable you to find truly relevant influencers – the ones who share the same target audience with you.