Influencer marketing has taken the world by storm. While celebrity and mega influencers boast their vast following, nano- and micro-influencers bring higher engagements despite their smaller reach.
For this reason, small business owners like you can take advantage of influencer marketing without worrying about enormous expenditures. Hiring nano- and micro-influencers is cheaper than collaborating with celebrities, and they can create customized campaigns that resonate with their followers.
However, scouting for influencers isn’t simple. Enter influencer platforms. What is their purpose, and how can using one scale and augment your digital marketing tactics?
Understanding Influencer Platforms
Influencer platforms are software solutions that facilitate influencer marketing campaigns. They provide databases and discovery tools to help you find and connect with relevant influencers.
These solutions also offer full-service features that manage communication, generate promo codes and affiliate links, and measure performance.
Today, most influencer platforms have expanded their services. These services include influencer marketplaces, content augmentation, e-commerce integrations, and third-party analytics.
Some have begun integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure suitable partnerships, strengthen fraud detection, and create compelling visuals and content.
How Can an Influencer Platform Enrich Your Digital Marketing Strategies?
During the early years of influencer marketing, we saw how the beauty, fashion, and travel industries thrive through influencers. As influencer markets evolved, so did the opportunities for other sectors.
Influencers have become a significant factor in purchasing decisions, particularly for young adults. Gone are the days when these social media stars were limited to fashion and beauty. You can now see more brand-specific influencers—like real estate influencers talking about getting a mortgage loan from a bank.
If complex businesses like real estate companies can make their brands stand out through influencers, your small business can, too. With the help of an influencer platform, you can elevate your influencer relationships and campaigns.
Here’s how an influencer platform can enrich your digital marketing tactics:
Find influencer contacts quickly and efficiently
Scouting relevant influencers involves time-consuming research. This manual search is most likely what you’re currently doing.
An influencer platform can ease this process by providing a comprehensive database that generates relevant influencers based on demographics, aesthetics, location, industry, niche, engagement, and follower counts. You can browse a scaled-down influencer list that matches your brand and goals with just a few searches and clicks.
Moreover, discovery tools like influencer marketplaces and e-commerce integrations can help you find and reach influencers already mentioning your brand. From there, you can quickly conduct outreach strategies and build relationships.
Provides a comprehensive influencer relationship management database
Fostering influencer relationships is essential in influencer marketing. You should maintain them to keep your campaigns thriving. Concurrently, even if you finish the campaigns, the influencers you collaborated with will still be willing to work with you again. That is why influencer platforms are built with an influencer relationship management database.
The influencer relationship management database mirrors the features of customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, which include an influencer contacts dashboard, direct messaging capabilities, and feedback integrations.
These features foster strategic relationships to ensure trust, high-quality content creation, and higher social media engagement.
Enables content organization
Influencer marketing isn’t just about influencers. Like other marketing tactics, it involves content marketing that plays a significant role in enticing and attracting followers and target audiences.
While influencers can transform consumers’ purchasing decisions with just their presence, their content must still be impactful to keep their followers hooked. Content is the lifeblood of digital marketing. Without it, influencers may not acquire impressions and engagements.
For these reasons, influencer platforms possess content creation, management, and organization tools to help you augment your content strategies.
They let you review and organize content based on usage rights. Additionally, they help you establish diversification so your campaigns reach many target audiences.
Automates processes to streamline your workflows
Business operations, including marketing workflows, generally involve monotonous and manual tasks. An influencer platform enables you to automate these processes to streamline your workflows.
For instance, you can automate transactions like sending emails and direct messages. Your influencer dashboard will notify you when it’s time to reply or follow up, avoiding the likelihood of oversight and forgetting to come back. This way, you can manage your influencer relationships and outreach consistently.
Furthermore, you can streamline your campaigns with customizable workflows to track every aspect, including payouts, product deliveries, content creation, and progress monitoring.
Offers opportunities to generate more sales
Every business aims to drive higher sales, and influencer platforms are built for this purpose.
Influencer platforms provide mechanisms that your influencers can add to their content to generate sales.
These mechanisms include promo codes, discount vouchers, coupons, and referral links. They encourage clients or customers to click on them to learn more about their favorite influencers’ promotions. Concurrently, they can use them upon checkout to enjoy discounts or free shipping.
Influencer platforms can also provide customizable commission structures that you’ll set up based on your contract’s terms and conditions. They are incentive systems that ensure rightful compensation to motivate your influencers to work on future projects and promote your products or services even after the campaigns end.
Track your campaign performance and progress
One pitfall to avoid in every marketing campaign is leaving it stagnant. Just because you’ve launched the campaign doesn’t mean you’ll immediately gain traction. That’s why progress and performance tracking is an essential influencer platform tool.
An influencer platform’s performance and progress tracker has data analytics to measure clicks, reach, engagement, and promo code usage. The insights it provides can identify strengths and weaknesses to help you make informed decisions.
Concurrently, the analytics can also monitor the latest trends suitable for your brand, allowing you and your influencers to create hyper-targeted campaigns and establish more emotional connections to increase brand affinities.
Tips for Choosing the Best Influencer Platform for Your Business
Each influencer platform has distinct characteristics. One feature from a well-known influencer platform may not be available on some, and vice versa. These considerations can make it challenging to search for one that can ensure growth and success.
These tips can help you find and choose the best influencer platform for your small business.
Assess whether the user interface is easy to use
Your influencer platform will run throughout the campaign development, launching, and monitoring processes. Since you’ll use it daily, you must ensure its user interface is easy to understand and use.
You can check an influencer platform’s interface by watching its developer’s tutorial videos. These videos provide a detailed overview of how to navigate the software. Alternatively, you can directly contact the platform’s agency to ask for quick assistance.
Remember to determine your influencer marketing goals to see if the platform’s features suit your predicted outcomes.
Look for multi-platform integrations
You shouldn’t limit your influencer campaigns to one social media channel. Branching them out on various social networks to reach more prospects is the standard. For this reason, choosing an influencer solution with multi-platform integrations is ideal.
Multi-platform integrations enable you to partner with influencers and create campaigns on multiple social networks like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. Partnering with influencers in different social channels can help you target different audience demographics.
As such, always review an influencer’s platform’s limitations to ensure its functionalities align with your goals and requirements.
Get an initial look through demos or free trials
Switching platforms can be a hassle, so you want to ensure an influencer platform’s long-term functionality. Check this aspect by getting an initial look through demos or free trials.
Demos and free trials can help you see how an influencer platform works. Influencer platform developers allow clients to request demos to showcase how to navigate their software. Meanwhile, free trials are usage opportunities within a limited period—usually up to 30 days.
While you can watch demo videos, booking a session with the developers might be best. Developers can assist you in real-time to ensure you thoroughly understand all the details. You can then purchase the free trial plan if it’s available.
Take the time to evaluate reviews and case studies
Errors and malfunctions are sometimes inevitable in influencer platforms. Even the most popular software isn’t immune to mishaps. That’s why evaluating client reviews and case studies is essential.
Client reviews are social proof of an influencer platform’s service and reliability. These written statements can explain how the platform performed for previous clients. They also inform you of potential errors you might experience, helping you understand the risks.
Another type of client review is testimonials, which you can find on the platform’s website homepage. These testimonials involve notable and reputable clients endorsing the platform.
Case studies are analyses of particular brands the influencer platform provider has handled. They are another social proof demonstrating an influencer platform’s capability through quantifiable assessments. Together with client reviews, they provide significant insights to help you make an informed choice.
Some client reviews and case studies are fraudulent, so take the time to assess their legitimacy.
Ensure that the platform has a marketing analytics feature
Your influencer platform must deliver progress-monitoring tools with marketing analytics to measure and analyze your campaigns.
Built-in analytics tools can reduce time spent toggling between solutions. They can also deliver assessments with valuable insights into engagement rates, impressions, and clicks.
Furthermore, the platform should provide real-time updates so you can address issues immediately. This way, you can refine your campaigns as needed.
Go for the most suitable plan or package pricing
Using an influencer platform is an investment. While free services are available, most solutions are paid, requiring you to prepare a budget. However, this shouldn’t discourage you. There are budget-friendly influencer platforms with plans suitable for small businesses like yours.
Compare prices from different solutions to assess which platform has the best value. You can create an initial list of your top 10 choices and then scale it down after further assessments. From the demos, free trials, reviews, and case studies, you can immediately see which can provide the utmost support you require.
You’ll pay for an influencer platform monthly or annually, so choose the one that suits your financial resources. A platform’s offers, plans, and package inclusions are on the provider’s website. This information should be available and transparent.
Strengthen Your Influencer Campaigns with Influencer Platforms
With influencer marketing, nano- and micro-influencers can help you grow your small business. Thanks to influencer platforms, your influencer campaigns don’t have to be as complex as you think. The tips above can help you choose the right solution that guarantees optimal benefits for your small business.
