Influencer marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years as brands realize the tremendous value of partnering with individuals with large followers on social media platforms. In fact, according to a study, companies generate on average $5.78 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing, which has led to the global industry value of influencer marketing having doubled since 2019.
While many brands have started embracing this trend, finding the right influencers for your brand can be tricky. After all, there are so many factors that go into choosing an influencer who will be able to represent your brand well and share similar values with you. Moreover, with it comes unprecedented complexity and the question of being able to plan, execute, manage and track these campaigns.
That’s where an influencer management platform comes into play. It provides a streamlined way to keep track of all your influencer relationships in one place, so you can focus on what matters most: working with your partners to create content that brings in new customers.
What is an influencer management platform?
An influencer management platform (or IFP) is a software platform that helps you manage relationships with influencers and their audience. It allows you to see what types of posts work well with each influencer so that you can tailor your campaigns accordingly.
Influencer marketing is an increasingly important part of most companies’ marketing mix and is becoming indispensable in their marketing ammunition. As companies scale, the need to plan, structure, and track influencer marketing campaigns grows. However, spreadsheets have limits, and an Influencer Management Platform outnumbers them in several ways. It is not a regular database that stores details of influencers but a whole powerhouse that fuels your influencer marketing campaigns.
What does an influencer management platform do?
Finding the right influencer can be challenging—especially if you are looking for someone who is highly engaged with your target audience, has strong reach and influence in their niche, is open to working with other brands, and has the time to manage collaborations.
Then there’s managing the collaboration: negotiating terms, sending out contracts, and managing ongoing communications between the two parties. Again, this can take up lots of time and resources—resources that could instead be used for other parts of your business.
An influencer management platform helps brands do just that – in a few clicks! It enables them to manage all their influencer marketing activities in one place. In addition, it helps marketing teams do the following:
1. Discover the right set of influencers
Most influencer management platforms either have a built-in database of active influencers or have access to one. Using these databases, you can discover a vast set of influencers who’d otherwise remain elusive if you use manual search methods on social media. These databases include influencer-level metadata—the genre of content, activity patterns (daily vs. weekly vs. monthly posting frequency), areas of interest, brand mentions, etc.—and based on this metadata, brands can make informed choices of influencers for their campaign.
2. Managing influencer relationships
An influencer management platform allows brands to manage relationships with influencers. Reactivation campaigns, barter deals based on goodwill, product launch announcements, etc., are a few things brands do to regularly engage with their influencer pool. An influencer management platform lets you manage and utilize details like payout, last date of posting on social media, email touch basing, etc.
3. Managing influencer campaigns
An influencer management platform lets you systematically plan and execute influencer marketing campaigns. For example, you can use the tools to apportion budget and choose influencers of different statures accordingly. You can also track the campaign’s progress after its launch (e.g., how many influencers have posted and when).
4. Analyze influencer and campaign performance
One of the biggest advantages of using an influencer management platform is the ability to access analytics on campaign performance. You can see your RoI in real-time and make changes to the campaign accordingly. You’ll be able to see no. of impressions, mentions, engagement on the posts, etc. in one place. You can analyze them at a more significant level and also go down to the level of checking the performance of each influencer. This learning goes a long way in planning your next campaign with only the high-return yielding influencers from the campaign.
5. Generate easy-to-consume campaign reports
Lastly, an influencer management platform lets you consume updated campaign reports at a click of a button. No more stressing over manual errors in data entry in Excel sheets! And no more breaking your heads over writing macros or beseeching the analyst for actionable reports. Instead, an influencer management platform has you sorted with automated reports that lead to super-efficient, actionable insights.
Important things to look for in an influencer management platform
1. Ease of use
An influencer management platform must be easy to use. You don’t want to be dunked into a spiral of technical terms and tools that make you lose it! A good influencer management platform should have an easy-to-glance-through dashboard and a set of easy-to-use tools to set up and manage a campaign. The user interface should be conducive and not cluttered with technical terms thrown in out of context for a general marketer. You can make an informed choice by requesting a product demo before signing up for their services. Any good and credible platform will never deny you one!
2. Influencer search capabilities
Another thing to look for in an influencer management platform is its search capabilities. A good search tool will allow you to find and target the right influencers for your business based on their niche, reach, engagement level, and other essential criteria.
It should also allow you to search by location and language so that you can reach out only to those who speak the language of your audience and are located in countries where your products are sold. You should also be able to filter results by follower count, likes/comments/shares per post, and average engagement rate per post.
3. Campaign management
End-to-end campaign management tools and capabilities is the hallmark of a good influencer management platform. From being able to create a new campaign using preset, comprehensive templates to seeing campaign performance – all of it should take just a few clicks. Campaign management also includes being able to track deliverables for each of the influencers i.e.:
- Date and time of posting
- Hashtags and descriptions used
- Tags added, etc.
4. Covers all Social platforms
A lot of influencer management platforms focus on just 1-2 key social media platforms. That however isn’t the most ideal case. Today, influencer marketing campaigns span TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn! Look out for a platform that supports most, if not all, of these social media platforms.
5. Social media listening
Tracking the conversations initiated by the influencers is also very important so that you can respond to them, tap into opportunities and drive business. Social media listening is all about tracking and identifying mentions of your brand and conversations around it. A lot of times with good social media listening capabilities brands are able to subvert negative PR and boost positive conversations.
6. Sentiment analysis
Influencer marketing doesn’t just target direct sales out of an influencer. It also targets a build-up of good word of mouth about the brand by the influencers. Hence, a good influencer management platform should be able to analyze the sentiment behind all the conversations an influencer generates around the brand (or the campaign). This gives the marketers a double-click on the campaign’s RoI. The qualitative insights from sentiment analysis are often the most precious fruit one can expect to harvest from an influencer marketing campaign. The sales of course follow a good sentiment!
7. Data depth and collection
Influencers often beef up their follower count by spending some bucks on buying bots. They can also mislead you at times with planted comments and mentions. Hence, the depth of data collected by an influencer management platform becomes critical to a campaign’s success. A good influencer management platform will go two levels deeper into the influencers’ profiles and track things like:
- Follower count across different social media platforms
- Follower demographics (age, gender, geography, etc.)
- Audience credibility score
- Average engagement rate
- Average impressions per post
- Video vs. static post comparisons in terms of engagement rate, etc.
8. Influencer communication management capabilities
Managing unstructured influencer conversations often wastes a large part of a marketing team’s effort. An influencer management platform can help you keep a track of these conversations while facilitating them. So, you don’t have to go to every influencer’s profile literally, request for their WhatsApp no. and chat! It can all be done through the platform itself and hence, this is one capability you must look out for.
9. Cost management and customer support
Lastly, while choosing an influencer management platform, you must be aware of the costs involved. Most platforms offer different packages for access to different tech capabilities. Depending on your campaign’s requirements and long-term plans, you can choose a plan that suits you the best. Often, companies choose mid-to-long-term plans since they’re the most cost-optimal. Striking the right cost and capability trade-off is of the essence and every marketer must choose with utmost understanding.
Also, the platform you choose must offer post-subscription support. It means if you get stuck while using the platform, you should have an automated chatbot and a customer care rep at your help. And trust us, as a new user you will need support at one point or the other while setting up your first few campaigns – no matter how easy-to-use an interface it is!
Radarr is the game-changer your influencer marketing strategy needs!
There’s no question that influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness.
But you can’t just throw money at an influencer campaign and hope for the best. You need to be able to measure it, optimize it, and get the most bang for your buck. You need to use a tool that will help you find the best influencers for your brand, who will work within your budget and deliver on their promises.
Radarr gives you a competitive edge over other companies when it comes to influencer marketing. We help you optimize your campaigns so that you can get the most out of them. Because when it comes to influencer marketing, there’s no room for guesswork—or for traditional tools that won’t help with social listening and sentiment analysis.
Our AI-powered solution aggregates all digital conversations into a unified dashboard, making it easy to understand your audience, identify brand sentiment, manage reputation (and crises), predict and keep up with trends and everything your marketing strategy needs!
Are you ready to try out an influencer management platform that’s super easy to use and extremely effective?
Here is the complete guide for How to run influencer marketing campaigns.
