Jay LeonardOne of the biggest struggles with influencer marketing campaigns is finding the right influencers to reach out to. In any given niche or industry, there are hundreds, if not thousands of potential influencers – so, how do you find the right ones for you? In this blog post, I’m going to share 4 top influencer marketing tools to help you find the right influencers for your business.
What to look for in a social influencer
Before starting to look for influencers, it’s important to establish what your requirements are; here are a few quick tips on what to look for in a social influencer:
- Relevancy: first and foremost, the influencer needs to be relevant. Not just in terms of the content they usually cover and share, but also in terms of their audience. In order to get results from your campaigns, you need to reach your target audience. It doesn’t matter how big or successful an influencer is if their audience won’t be genuinely interested in your product or service. Before starting your campaign, take the time to list out your target audience – this way, you can check that the influencers you find share a similar audience.
- Reach and engagement: reach is important, but not nearly as important as engagement. Take a look at their social accounts as well as their blog/vlog/podcast (or whatever other media they produce) to see how their audience engages with them: do they get comments, shares, questions, and so on? Engagement is much more telling than their number of followers.
Obviously, there are other important factors to consider as well, particularly the cost. Big influencers (those with at least 500k followers) can be very costly; but, it’s important to note that smaller influencers can be just as effective.
In fact, smaller influencers might actually have a closer relationship with their readers and social media followers. The simple reason for that is that as one grows their influence, the less time they’ll have to actually engage with their audience. And I’m not the only one who thinks so – there is plenty of evidence to suggest that micro-influencers (those with under 100k followers) can actually be more effective than those with hugely popular social media accounts.
Now that we’ve gone through the basics of what to look for in an influencer, here are some of the best tools to help you find and connect with social influencers:
Upfluence
Upfluence is full-suite influencer marketing software, with tools for:
- Searching and discovering relevant social influencer
- Influencer marketing campaign management
- Monitoring and analyzing your campaign’s success
Upfluence has a huge database of over 1 million influencers that you can search through:
Add your keywords, and use the filters provided to narrow down your search; for example, by their language or location, by their preferred social channels, as well as based on whether they have blog or email.
I love the fact that you can target to this degree, as it increases the chances of you finding truly relevant influencers as quickly as possible.
Once your search is done, you’ll be able to access important information about each influencer, so you can tell a glance if they’re the right solution for you (for example, their social media engagement stats, their latest blog post, and their estimated monthly visitors). But what’s really cool about Upfluence and what makes it stand out is that you can actually search for influencers based on their audiences (their ages, location, gender, and so on). As I mentioned earlier, their audience determines the influencers’ relevancy to your needs so this feature comes in very handy.
Beyond influencer research, you also have access to influencer outreach tools to create your campaigns and set up email templates, as well as for monitoring and reporting your results.
Famebit
Famebit is an influencer marketing platform powered by YouTube which aims to connect brands with the right content creators.
Because of this, it works a bit differently to other influencer marketing platforms; in fact, the influencers come to you.
Here’s how it works:
- You start your campaign and establish the guidelines: what platforms you want to target, what kind of sponsorship, as well as what your overall budget is
- The creators using the platform can then send you proposals of types of content they can create to help you promote your brand (as well as their fee and a timeframe for creating the content)
- You can then filter then filter all of these proposals to find the right audience for you; for example, you can filter by their audience’s age and their location
And finally, you just need to approve the content you want – simple, easy, and a great way to cut down on research.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is an influencer search engine and influencer outreach tool – with a focus on bloggers.
They have a massive database of over 15 million bloggers that you can easily search through using all kinds of filters – or, you can also add your own list of influencers by importing them (via .csv files, URL, or contacts).
Once your search criteria is set, you can easily go through the results to approve or remove influencers for your campaigns.
Next, you can start the outreach using the same tool; create your email templates and start sending them out in a quick and efficient manner.
You can then monitor your campaigns from your dashboard and clearly see at a glance what outreach stage they’re in (if they’ve been contacted or not), when you spoke last, and the point of contact between the two of you.
Reelio
Reelio is another top influencer marketing tool with tools to help you discover the right influencers as well as campaign management and monitoring of results.
There are actually a few different ways that you can search for influencers on Reelio:
- The ‘normal’ way where you search for influencers based on your keywords (work with YouTube and Facebook API)
- Browse through curated lists with the top performing social influencers in a variety of different categories
- Get someone from Reelio to put together a custom list of influencers
- And finally, you can advertise your idea in their creators community so that relevant influencers can reach out to your with their pitch and content idea (like with Famebit earlier)
Beyond finding influencers, you can also use the platform to closely track your influencer marketing collaborations so you know exactly what stage you’re in at any point.
Additionally, there is an analytics dashboard where you can check and review the performance of your campaigns’ content.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing can get very complicated and time consuming if you don’t have tools to help with research, outreach, and tracking your campaigns. When creating an influencer marketing campaign, it’s not unheard of to work with dozens of social influencers at a time – and not to mention, you’ll need to find and reach out to way more than that to get the right influencers on your team.
What influencer marketing software tools have you tried so far? Which ones do you prefer, which do you dislike, and why? Let me know in the comments section – I’m always on the lookout for new tools to try (and some, to avoid!).
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
Learn how to publish your content on B2C
Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
Add B2C to your Google News Feed
Or you can hire a top notch agency like Talent Resources to handle everything, from influencer selection, contracts, payments and measurement.