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Buyer's Guide: Influencer Marketing Platforms
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users highlight the ease of use of Impact.com, praising its intuitive setup and user-friendly interface.
Users love the user-friendly platform of impact.com, which streamlines partnership management with automation and analytics.
Users appreciate the great service and impressive selection of partner programs offered by Impact.com for affiliate marketing.
Users find the interface of Impact.com not intuitive, as navigating and managing multiple domains can be frustrating.
Users find the learning curve steep, as the initial setup and navigation can be overwhelming despite the benefits.
Users find the complex interface of impact.com confusing and lacking intuitiveness compared to competitors.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users value the ease of use of Later Influence, enjoying organized campaigns and seamless communication with managers.
Users applaud the efficient campaign management of Later Influence, enhancing their experience as both brands and influencers.
Users highlight the supportive team and user-friendly platform of Later Influencer, enhancing the influencer marketing experience.
Users often face technical issues with Later Influence, experiencing login difficulties and occasional platform bugs.
Users find Later Influence's complexity challenging, with difficulties in onboarding and navigating the interface effectively.
Users face creator issues with sourcing and communication, impacting quality and efficiency in influencer campaigns.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users commend Captiv8 for its ease of use in campaign management, streamlining setup and automated payments seamlessly.
Users love the insightful influencer management from Captiv8, enhancing collaboration and campaign success across organizations.
Users find Captiv8's platform to be extremely user-friendly, streamlining both setup and influencer campaign management effectively.
Users find the complexity of Captiv8's manual processes and learning curve frustrating and time-consuming.
Users note a difficult learning curve with Captiv8, often feeling overwhelmed during the onboarding process.
Users find the inefficient search system frustrating, often leading to incorrect results and tedious manual processes.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users appreciate the ability to discover influential connections easily, enhancing their marketing strategies and brand alignment.
Users appreciate the simplicity and efficiency of Sprout Social's influencer management for handling partnerships and campaigns.
Users find Sprout Social Influencer Marketing easy to use, simplifying campaign management and enhancing organization and performance tracking.
Users face challenges with limited influencer visibility on Sprout Social, complicating niche connections and content discovery.
Users struggle with inaccurate profiles and incomplete data on Sprout Social, impacting influencer discovery and trustworthiness.
Users experience search functionality issues with irrelevant results and missing essential creator data, affecting usability.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users value the comprehensive influencer management capabilities of GRIN, finding it essential for strategic decision-making.
Users find GRIN to be extremely user-friendly, making affiliate program management intuitive and efficient.
Users highlight the outstanding customer service of GRIN, ensuring prompt assistance for every inquiry and issue.
Users face technical issues like bugs and slow loading times, impacting their overall experience with GRIN.
Users miss having a dedicated Customer Success Manager and report delays in receiving timely support for issues.
Users experience slow loading times on GRIN, leading to frustrating delays and complicated workflows.
This description is provided by the seller.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users love the variety of offers for creators, allowing them to find perfect UGC content opportunities effortlessly.
Users value the options variety in Insense, finding numerous offers that match their UGC content needs.
Users value the extensive UGC opportunities Insense offers, allowing creators to find ideal brand collaborations easily.
Users find the creator compensation inadequate, especially established creators who feel offers are often insulting.
Users find the high costs of Insense frustrating, especially when offers do not match market rates.
Users find the below market rate offers from Limited Brands to be unappealing, especially for established creators.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users appreciate the ease of use of Afluencer, finding it simple and efficient to navigate and utilize.
Users appreciate the effective influencer connections Afluencer provides, boosting brand visibility and driving traffic efficiently.
Users value the diverse opportunities available on Afluencer, making it easy to connect with brands and projects.
Users find limited options for Indian influencers, hindering opportunities for newcomers and affecting campaign outcomes.
Users note the limited offers available for lower subscription plans, missing out on premium collaboration opportunities.
Users find the limited credits for collaboration applications constraining, especially for micro members seeking opportunities.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users find PartnerStack to have a user-friendly interface, making it easy to access insights and promotional materials.
Users enjoy the seamless partner management of PartnerStack, making affiliate marketing easy and hands-off for newcomers.
Users enjoy the user-friendly interface of PartnerStack, making affiliate marketing management effortless and efficient.
Users face payment issues that complicate fund transfers and commission tracking, adding an administrative burden in product management.
Users find the reporting features limited, struggling with detailed data and complications from commission tracking discrepancies.
Users struggle with partnership challenges due to complexity and management of inactive programs, affecting communication efficiency.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users value the user-friendly interface of HypeAuditor, appreciating the smooth experience in accessing influencer analytics.
Users value the quality review capabilities of HypeAuditor, facilitating informed decisions on influencer partnerships.
Users value the helpfulness of the team at HypeAuditor, enhancing their overall experience and efficiency with the tool.
Users find missing features in HypeAuditor limiting, as it hinders campaign efficiency and influencer evaluation.
Users find HypeAuditor to be quite expensive, necessitating careful consideration of their team's needs before purchase.
Users find HypeAuditor has limited analytics, making it challenging to generate detailed and dynamic reports.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users value the ease of use of Meltwater, enhancing navigation and overall user experience significantly.
Users value Meltwater for its helpful customer service, ensuring support is always available when needed most.
Users appreciate the excellent training and customer support from Meltwater, making onboarding and report generation seamless.
Users find that Meltwater's features are overly complex for smaller organizations, causing frustration and inefficiencies.
Users find the learning curve steep with Meltwater, as it can be challenging for new users to navigate effectively.
Users find Meltwater to be not intuitive, causing challenges with navigation and dashboard setup despite extensive training.
Written by G2’s researcher using verified user reviews and product data, with no personal bias.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users commend Tracknow for its user-friendly interface and efficient multitier affiliate system, simplifying campaign management and performance optimization.
Users appreciate the ease of use of Tracknow, enjoying its user-friendly dashboard and seamless setup.
Users appreciate the excellent tracking features of Tracknow, simplifying affiliate crediting and enhancing overall efficiency.
Users find the technical issues with Tracknow, such as setup delays and complex reports, frustrating during onboarding.
Users find Tracknow's interface complicated, with confusing timezone settings and a steep learning curve for new users.
Users find the difficult learning process due to a lack of comprehensive resources and detailed tutorials on Tracknow.
This description is provided by the seller.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users highlight the ease of use of Lefty, simplifying influencer content tracking and campaign reporting efficiently.
Users appreciate the streamlined influencer management of Lefty, enhancing workflow and reporting efficiency for campaigns.
Users commend Lefty's exceptional customer support, highlighting its availability and helpfulness in managing influencer tasks.
Users find Lefty to be a costly investment, particularly challenging for small entrepreneurial studios despite its value.
Users find the inaccuracy in reported metrics frustrating, desiring more reliable data on diverse profiles.
Users feel that pricing issues arise from high costs and limitations on influencer tracking based on their plan.
This description is provided by the seller.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users highlight the effective data export and detailed insights of Influencers.club, enhancing creator discovery and recruitment.
Users value the effective campaign management tools for easily finding creators by niche and location.
Users appreciate the ease of use of Influencers.club, simplifying creator discovery and enhancing recruitment efforts effectively.
Users find the inconsistent quality of prospects troubling, impacting trust in the matching process and selection criteria.
Users express concerns about inconsistent creator quality, highlighting a need for improved clarity in selection processes.
Users express concerns about the inaccuracy of prospect data, impacting trust in the influencer matching process.
This description is provided by the seller.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users appreciate the attentive customer support from CreatorIQ, enhancing their experience and helping navigate challenges effectively.
Users value the regular updates and in-depth analytics provided by CreatorIQ, enhancing their reporting and content review capabilities.
Users appreciate the versatile campaign management in CreatorIQ, facilitating efficient tracking and valuable insights for their strategies.
Users find the complexity of processes in CreatorIQ cumbersome, particularly with manual tasks and data confusion.
Users report facing technical issues including glitches and outdated analytics that hinder functionality and data accuracy.
Users find content management challenging due to fluctuating statistics and issues in sourcing new creators efficiently.
This description is provided by the seller.
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Users appreciate the ease of use of Traackr, enjoying its user-friendly interface and seamless integration.
Users value the efficient influencer campaign management in Traackr, enjoying insights and collaboration simplification.
Users appreciate the efficient campaign management tools of Traackr, enabling precise tracking and insightful performance evaluations.
Users find the slow loading times of Traackr frustrating, often requiring extra time for navigation and modifications.
Users experience technical issues with Traackr, including bugs, slow performance, and platform stability problems.
Users often face inaccuracy issues with Traackr's data, leading to frustrations in measuring campaign success and strategies.
Influencer marketing software is an important solution for any organization that invests heavily in influencer campaigns. Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy that aims to build mutually beneficial relationships between brands and individuals known as “influencers." In social media, an influencer is anyone with the power to impact the buying habits or actions of others through their expertise, authority, or relationship with their audience. Brands also often refer to their influencers as ambassadors or creators.
Influencer marketing platforms offer a variety of tools that streamline most or all aspects of the influencer marketing process. The most common features include influencer discovery, campaign management, and campaign analytics. Some solutions enable businesses to identify the most relevant influencers across social media while others maintain a proprietary marketplace of content creators. In addition to discovery, marketers can leverage communication and automation tools to manage their relationships with creators, as well as analytics features to measure the performance of their influencer campaigns.
Key Benefits of Influencer Marketing Platforms
Influencer marketing can be an extremely effective strategy for building brand awareness, generating sales, and even promoting consumer trust. In general, people are more likely to accept product and service recommendations from someone they already know. Many influencers have highly engaged followers who like and admire them; with influencer marketing software, businesses can partner with the right influencers to reach those audiences.
Influencer recruitment — Influencer marketing software is designed specifically to help users reach out to influencers. These platforms either allow users to sift through influencer marketplaces or scan social media channels. The software identifies which influencer is the best match for a company’s brand and campaign initiatives. For example, a pet product brand might wish to promote their new grain-free food to pet owners. The company could use an influencer marketing platform to discover and reach out to the most relevant influencers to partner with for a promotion—in this case, cat- and dog-focused social media accounts with large and highly engaged audiences.
Campaign management and analytics — Productive influencer marketing solutions offer built-in social analytics capabilities, which help users gauge the success of influencer-led campaigns. Brands with mature influencer marketing programs may run dozens of campaigns at a time. Influencer marketing software enables these brands to execute campaigns, communicate with influencers in their network, and measure the impact of each creator’s content. It is challenging to measure the true return-on-investment (ROI) of influencer marketing campaigns since this type of content cannot always be directly attributed to sales or leads. Most campaigns act as one touchpoint among many which contribute to a consumer’s decision to make a purchase. However, influencer marketing software can help marketers benchmark their efforts with analytics such as cost per engagement, cost per follower, and more.
User-generated content (UGC) — User-generated content is a by-product of the relationship between brands and influencers. When an influencer creates and posts sponsored content on social media, businesses can reuse that content for their own marketing purposes. For example, imagine a luxury travel brand partners with Instagram influencers to promote their line of luggage. The influencers then post photos of themselves travelling with the luggage in beautiful, foreign destinations. The brand can then use these photos on their own social channels, on their website, and in digital advertisements.
Influencer marketing software is mainly used by business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, especially those that sell consumer packaged goods (CPG) such as clothing, makeup, food, and household products. It is also a popular strategy among e-commerce brands since influencer content can easily link to an online store, where consumers can purchase a product immediately.
Marketers — Within an organization, marketing teams will be the primary users of influencer marketing software. Influencer campaigns require a significant amount of attention and resources as they involve managing relationships, compensating influencers, delivering samples, monitoring engagement, measuring performance, and more. As a result, these platforms are leveraged by businesses with mature social media marketing programs.
Influencers — Some influencer marketing platforms offer brands access to a proprietary database or marketplace of influencers. Content creators can join these marketplaces to indicate their interest in partnering with businesses. These platforms often provide influencers the ability to reach out to businesses directly, negotiate pay rates, and measure their own campaign performance.
Influencer recruitment — Influencer marketing software enables companies to locate and recruit social influencers, either through a proprietary influencer marketplace or through an AI-powered algorithm which searches for influencers across social networks. Recruitment tools help marketers build digital profiles of relevant influencers with information about them and their audience.
Influencer scoring — Influencer scoring features help businesses identify which influencers will be most relevant to their brand’s message or products, and help provide the most engagement. Platforms use proprietary algorithms to “score" influencers and assess their authority within a business’s target market.
Audience analysis — Influencer marketing platforms analyze the demographic and psychographic characteristics of influencers and their followers. Marketers can use this feature to understand an influencer’s brand affinities, interests, and aesthetic. For example, a beauty brand can use audience analysis to target influencers who are interested in makeup or skincare products.
Influencer segmentation — Segmentation features allow brands to separate their influencers into groups based on specific characteristics, such as their past work on brand initiatives, follower count, or campaign engagement. These tools help marketers manage groups of influencers according to the business’s needs, as well as target the appropriate creators for each campaign.
Influencer collaboration — Influencer marketing software acts as an influencer CRM of sorts, enabling marketers to maintain records of past partnerships and communications. Collaboration tools ensure all members of a marketing team can view and access their business’s past engagement with influencers so everyone is on the same page.
User-generated content (UGC) management — Influencer campaigns generate large quantities of user-generated content for brands. UGC management tools help them schedule, publish, and optimize this content for their own purposes. From a centralized platform, marketers can configure content usage and ownership rights for the various types of content their ambassadors produce.
Workflow capability — Since influencer campaigns are essentially paid advertisements, businesses need to approve the content before the influencer posts it on social media. Influencer marketing software provides workflow capabilities that allow marketers to automate the review and approval processes.
Influencer analysis — Influencer analytics features evaluate the performance of influencers and their associated campaigns. These tools rank influencers according to their impact on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, brand mentions, and contributed work.
Reporting and dashboards — Campaign analytics features are essential for measuring the success of a business’s influencer marketing strategy. Influencer marketing software allows marketers to monitor and visualize all influencer campaigns through a dashboard that displays key success metrics in real time. These platforms can also generate comprehensive reports to be distributed to relevant stakeholders.
Data importing and exporting — Import tools enable marketers to import their existing list of brand ambassadors to an influencer marketing platform. Businesses can create more detailed profiles for their influencers and manage relationships directly from the platform. Export tools allow marketers to export influencer data from the platform, such as contact information and audience analytics.
Other Features of Influencer Marketing Platforms: E-commerce integration, Influencer compensation, Influencer database, Influencer whitelisting, Opt-in network, Social commerce
Influencer fraud — As brands seek to engage with the most relevant and prominent influencers in their market, they should be wary of scams and fraudulent activity. In order to appear more influential, some social media accounts may purchase fake followers or engagement. These fake influencers pay for bots to follow their accounts, “like" their content, or comment on posts. They can then use these inflated follower counts and engagement activity to entice brands to partner with them. It was estimated that influencer fraud would cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019 alone. However, many influencer marketing platforms are incorporating enhanced algorithms to detect influencer fraud and determine if an influencer’s followers and engagement rates are genuine.