The Secrets Of Influencer Marketing Software

 

Explaining What An Influencer Is? Done! Next Stop, Influencer Marketing Software!

 
Influencer marketplace collaborations involve brands and businesses working with influencers to promote their products/ services. This is where Influencer Marketing Software (IMS) steps in. It is a comprehensive tool that helps businesses organize their influencer campaigns. Like enterprises need tools to manage their finances, benchmarking, and logistics, they need tools like IMS to cultivate an authentic influencer or content creators network.

The software discovers influencers in various niches, helps develop a relationship with them, and manages all interactions. It also tracks your campaign KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as engagement, audience demographics, creates customized reports, and illustrates analytics such as vital statistics in easily digestible graphs and numbers.

Essentially, it's like the Swiss Army knife of Influencer Marketing - a single tool with multiple valuable facets which a brand advocates to its potential audience demographics.

So, How Does An IMS Really Work?

If you think about it, a product as simple as a laptop can be endorsed by influencers associated with electronics, gaming, device benchmarking, or even tech blogging. Using an IMS reduces the effort required to identify suitable influencers for marketing campaigns associated with particular products or services. How do you ask?

The software allows users to import existing influencers' data into the inbuilt CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool and then use the Discovery feature to find similar influencers. If you're starting a new marketing campaign with no relevant social media influencers in that niche, no worries; the software can identify appropriate potential influencers for you through a global social influencer search on its database. (Think of it like viewing potential dates on Tinder but with the ability to filter profiles as per your taste. That would undoubtedly make Tindering so much easier!). The software has a mailing tool that helps marketers reach out to influencers through targeted email campaigns and track their responses.

That's not all - integrating with e-commerce stores, you can create discount codes or affiliate links, ship products to influencers for review (and track the orders within the tool), etc. The software has in-built analytics features that track important metrics such as engagement, sales, and ROI, giving you a detailed report on each influencer profile. As we said - this tool is an all-rounder and you gotta sign him this season!

Now that we have understood how this software and its social networks work let's discover its unique features.
 

Features Of Influencer Marketing Software

Yes, several solutions are available, but purchasing a specific IMS will depend on its features on engagement. Some software focuses solely on outreach, while others provide comprehensive CRM and influencer analytics capabilities. Here we'll list some standard features and tools available in most Influencer Marketing Software.
 

• Discovery And Recruitment

  Arguably, the most crucial aspect of using an IMS is how it identifies and helps recruit new influencers. The Discovery feature lets you input current influencers and find new ones with a similar target audience, engagement, brand awareness, marketers, etc. Some software even allows users to identify top influencer profiles for its customers - cause who's a better influencer than someone genuinely invested in the product, right? ​

• Relationship Management

  Recruiting relevant influencers, collaborating on campaigns, deciding on a payment schedule - all of it requires developing a good rapport and setting the right expectations with them. Hence, IMS provides all the CRM capabilities (Gmail, Slack, Contact Management, etc.) necessary to build and nurture valuable influencer relationships.

• Content Management

  The content management feature helps you keep all your creative content (influencer content with multiple influencers and user-generated content) in one place - images, videos, gifs - you name it. Furthermore, you can view your online content along with its reach, engagement rate, social listening, number of likes, shares, social media monitoring, and comments on a single platform culminating in brand awareness and ROI.​

• Reporting And Analytics

  "Did it work?", that's the question you'll find yourself asking after every influencer collaboration. Did it boost my engagement or my merchandise sales or site traffic? It's tough to know without crunching some numbers - which is precisely what the Analytics feature does! Campaign management and analytics you can track audience demographics with content engagement rate, total spending, and revenue per influencer, the number of conversions, ROI (Return on Investment) per influencer, etc., and get detailed reports.

• Payments

  As each Influencer Marketing campaign is unique, it might be challenging to keep an accurate record of all the transactions - that is, unless you have an IMS. The payment tool helps send payments to influencers, track payment history, automate monthly payments, etc. What's more, most platforms are regional tax compliant, so you don't have to worry about the taxing (pun intended) documentation required for each transaction.

 

What Are The Benefits Of Using An IMS?

So, what do you call a viral influencer who has caught a bad cold? An Influenza. (#DadJoke!)

Okay, that was quite dreadful but what is not dreadful at all are the potential benefits of using Influencer Marketing Software for your business.

An IMS lets you discover some of the leading influencers in niche domains using the global influencer marketplace or database. Filtering by relevant influencer attributes and audience demographics, you can get refined search results. This enables you to identify which influencers' marketing strategy best aligns with your marketing objectives and goals - no matter what the business niche is.

The reporting and analytics feature helps with budgeting and keeping track of all transactions, which allows you to evaluate each campaign's success. However, the most critical advantage is the scalability this tool offers - it doesn't matter if your marketing campaign has 20 influencers or 200 - the software optimizes your marketing campaign and streamlines the time-consuming processes.

No need to spend time on tiresome analytical tasks anymore - just let the software do the donkey work while you catch up on last night's baseball highlights!
 

How Does The Future Look Like For Influencer Marketing Software?

 
The tide's latest turn in Influencer Marketing is micro-influencers, having no more than 10,000 followers. Micro-influencers may have fewer followers, but that means they're entirely invested in their specific niche, have higher engagement rates, and make more affordable collaborations.

Marketing experts believe that the future lies with micro-influencers - a perfect example of the adage "less is more." Hence, many IMS developers are enhancing their services' capability to detect more micro-influencers. Brands will soon assess beforehand whether it makes more sense to collaborate with a leading influencer or an Influencer marketing platform with ten micro-influencers for a specific marketing campaign. Yes, dear marketers, the future is (almost) here!

Talking about ever-expanding databases, IMS is focusing more on topic matching and accuracy. Tools are beginning to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze media, documents, and webpages by a brand and create a signature "voice" or "messaging" of the brand. These are then matched with the signatures of influencers based on their social media content posted on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, youtube other such social networks, and engagement derived from it. So, brands end up finding their #perfectmatch. A few platforms also introduce Sentiment Analysis Tools that will 'listen' to social media and influencer marketing campaigns with engagements between influencers and followers to determine what emotions are being expressed. This can help businesses understand the consumer's mindset and outlook on specific campaigns. Pretty cool, right?