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Remember that saying: Good word travels fast? It turns out this is true now more than ever. And a good word from a proper influencer can make wonders for your campaign.

With the growing power of social media, influencers got themselves celebrity status. Their voices are loud, their reach pretty wide, and their social channels often turn into a fan-based community of followers.

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What does this mean for advertisers and affiliate marketers?

One word – opportunity. To grasp the attention of huge audiences and present them with their offers. To establish a relationship of trust with brand new users almost instantly – based on the influencer’s endorsement and support. 

With a well-thought-out influencer marketing strategy and reliable influencer marketing platform at your disposal, you can skyrocket your campaign performance.

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What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that entirely revolves around a person considered to have a great impact on his/her social media followers. 

Moreover, their opinion is often taken as social proof that works best in terms of nudging the users to give it a go and invest in a concrete product or service.

We wrote about influencer marketing a while back – we explained what it is and what are its main advantages. Check the post below and learn how it works within this 3-step guide:

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How do marketers use influencer marketing?

The biggest strength of an influencer lies in their credibility. That, and their big audience base represent a powerful tide that has the capacity to lure new interested parties with the smallest of efforts. 

Which is why advertisers, affiliate marketers, and media buyers reach out to popular social media content creators with a plea to publicly endorse and promote specific products or services. 

Note: Clearly, you will need to have a clear understanding with a creator, and permission to use their name, image, or materials within your campaign.

To get a picture of what numbers you will be dealing with, there are some estimations on influencers’ average rates → for Instagram posts you will have to pay between $500 and $10.000 (depending mostly on the number of followers); for TikTok video, the average cost is $2.700, and for YouTube content rates are even higher – from $5.000 (mid-tier influencers) to $20.000 (macro-influencers).

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What are influencer marketing platforms?

These platforms are software that are designed to help advertisers create and kick-start influencer marketing campaigns.

The process usually looks like this:

• Step 1 – you register and start searching for an influencer relevant to your offer
• Step 2 – you make contact and start discussing the strategy, or you leave the announcement that you are looking to partner with creators
• Step 3 – you establish a collaboration and start tracking the campaign performance
• Step 4 – you optimize a campaign if needed; now, this is not software but a person you need to make arrangements with, so a friendly approach and understanding they cannot accept all of your ideas are preferable
• Step 5 – depending on the deal, you handle the payment of an influencer in the end

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Top influencer marketing platforms to rely on 

Here’s a list of the very best platforms you can use as jumping boards when you feel ready to dive into influencer marketing strategizing. 

#1 Upfluence

Upfluence is a perfect place for influencer discovery. This platform offers the ability to search through thousands of vetted creators, some of whom, might happen, already love your brand, and pick the right ones based on their content, audience and their performance metrics.

Cool features:

• AI-powered mailing assistant to communicate with influencers you would like to work with and streamline the hiring process
• Engagement rate calculator and fake followers check
• Historical performance metrics on influencers and their audiences
• Easy e-commerce and marketing tools integration

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#2 Tagger

Trusted by some of the world’s largest brands and agencies, Tagger by Sprout Social is a great tool to drive influencer marketing strategies. It allows you to find the right influencer through an advanced search that places alignment between influencer and brand values in the main focus. Their extensive database has thousands of search filter combinations.

You can activate and scale your influencer marketing campaigns with customizable workflows. Multiple-team collaboration for perfect campaign execution, performance checking, ROI measurements, reports and deep analytics is what you can count on with Tagger. 

Cool features:

• Social intelligence engine for trends monitoring and influencer data analysis
• Affinity engine that uses machine learning and audience psychographics to identify a strong affinity among specific brands and creators 
• Campaign management tool for achieving a 100% customizable campaign flow
• Platform integrations – this allows to import ad data from Meta platforms for instance, and get an overall campaign performance stats in one place

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#3 Brandwatch

Finding the right influencer for your business can be difficult. With that in mind, Brandwatch created a system that makes it possible to locate social media creators suitable for your brand, based on the metrics and topics you believe are the most important. There are 30+ million creators from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and other social platforms in their database.

And when you do establish a collaboration, you can track the performance and ROI metrics across all major social networks, and even get customizable reports you can share with other parties via shareable URLs.

Cool features:

• Iris, the AI companion – to help with research or content creation
• Advanced search by interest, brand affinities, prior work, credibility, etc.
• Branded campaign reporting in 13 different languages
• Private influencer network + customizable influencer onboarding process

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#4 Grin

Here’s another influencer marketing platform you can use to recruit social media creators and include them in your campaign to boost its performance. With six years of experience, they have a good understanding of all the processes within the influencer marketing sphere, so they managed to cover all the bases.

Cool features:

• Ability to integrate social platforms, communication tools, and eCommerce solutions
• Collect and repurpose everything content creators post across social
• Super simple relationship management tool for nurturing authentic brand relationships
• Influencer analysis that covers all engagement metrics

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#5 Afluencer

Looking for a safe and trusted marketplace where brands and creators meet? Afluencer is the place to go. Define your own criteria – interests, demographics, channels, number of followers, whatever you think is crucial to make the best match. Afluencer has 71 interest categories, so you can narrow down the search easily. 

Cool features:

• All collab opportunities enlisted under the “Popular Programs” category
• Influencer spotlights – to get to know more about potential partners
• Direct communication with influencers via chat room

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#6 Influencity

One hub to make the whole streamline neat and sweet. Influencity allows you to pinpoint ideal creators, access unbiased stats fast, to organize and manage influencers, and analyze campaign performance on the go. You can also optimize it and integrate it with the Shopify store.

The tool makes sure you save money and time, but also it boosts campaign results in just a couple of steps. The best thing is that you can create and customize your influencer marketing pool. And what the platform promises is usability and support, all the way through.

Cool features:

• Unlocked insights that show metrics not available on social media
• Creator opt-in page – to easily find creators who already believe in your brand
• Advanced audience analytics tools (discovers fake followers among other things)

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#7 Later

What used to be Mavrck is now called Later Influence – it’s the same service but rebranded to better represent the company’s values and current growth path. This is one of the award-winning platforms that can simplify your day-to-day influencer management, bring you insightful reports and deliver real results.

Cool features:

• Built-in creator identification and authentication
• Automated campaign applications and recruitment tools
• 20 filters to customize your search
• Track and refer conversions with their trackable codes

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#8 Creator.co

Here is an all-in-one platform to scale affiliate and influencer marketing campaigns. That’s right, Creator.co is focusing on affiliate marketing as well, making sure you earn more money by including influencers in your marketing strategy.

Cool features:

• Integration with affiliate networks
• Strategy building with an account manager
• Narrow down the search by creating very specific collab offers 

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#9 LTK

In search of opportunities to make your CR higher, you might come across LTK. And just so you know, it’s a good place to make your dream a reality – whether it is to increase your sales, establish a global community of supporters, or grow your brand.

LTK gathered hundreds of thousands influencers worldwide, and has around 3.2 billion euros in annual brand sales. But they are more than just an influencer platform – they created a space for creators, brands and retailers to expand their businesses and reach new heights. 

Cool features:

• Cross-channel sales – to maximize your revenue opportunities
• End-to-end campaign execution
• Uncomplicated analytics – real-time and post-collaboration reporting
• LTK shopping app powered by influencer content

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#10 Heepsy

Heepsy is a powerful global search platform that makes it possible for marketers to look for influencers all over the world, based on their location, vertical they are covering, and social media platform. Their interface is simple and very convenient to use.

Cool features:

• Filter creators by authenticity – to understand influencer’s true impact
• In-depth reporting to maximize ROI and create future strategies
• Comparison of influencer’s proposals to make sure you find a perfect match

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#11 Skeepers

Skeepers likes to talk numbers. They claim there’s a 58% increase in brand visibility after using their services of connecting marketers with influencers. Also, they are highlighting the fact that 71% of shoppers tend to buy a product if a recommendation comes from an influencer they trust – which is the very reason we are here today.

Cool features:

• Content KPIs monitoring in real-time
• Adding a CTA to a video for maximizing CRs; the video can be attached to the product page later on
• Legal permissions and licensing rights coverage

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Instead of conclusion

We are well aware that this is where it all starts for you. Deciding on which influencer marketing platform to bet on, how to define your strategy, even whether you feel ready to enter this specific branch of digital marketing world.

Which is why we won’t conclude the subject but give you a couple of useful tips instead:

1. Wait no more. Influencer marketing is the main social media strategy to invest in – if you haven’t noticed, influencers are taking over the world.

2. Only a few of these platforms offer free trials or some other benefits for newcomers, but almost all of them are inviting you to book a demo. So do it, book a slot and see from close up what these platforms have to offer, how the system works. 

3. If you need to integrate influencer marketing software with the existing Finance, eCommerce, Educational, Beauty, Health, or any other platform, make sure they are compatible before you close the deal.

4. Strategize with your social media budget. We assume only a part of it will go to subscribing to an influencer platform and paying a fee to content creators you partner with. Do the calculations before you step into this new marketing field, but don’t hesitate to invest in it – it will for sure pay off.