6 Influencer Marketing Platforms for Brands
As some of the most visual social channels, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest have become important tools for brand marketers. These are also the channels most likely to be used by so-called “influencers,” the social media stars who frequently partner with brands to promote products to their online followers. Influencer marketing has become a big business, with 31% of retailers now working with brand advocates to become influencers and 28% using paid celebrity influencers to spread the word about their products and services.
With so many brands partnering with influencers on paid social media campaigns, it was only a matter of time before a new martech vertical popped up — influencer marketing platforms for brands. Although each influencer marketing platform has its own unique features and benefits, they almost all provide tools to help brands manage their relationships with social media influencers, including workflow automation, referral tracking, and performance forecasting.
Here are six popular influencer marketing platforms being used by retailers and brands right now.
1. Mavrck
Mavrck is an influencer marketing platform designed for the enterprise. The all-in-one solution gives brands a way to discover and activate influencers through automation. Mavrck says its clients activate an average of 250 influencers per month, utilizing a combination of relationship management, workflow automation, and end-to-end measurement tools. Mavrck also offers automated fraud and brand safety detection, helping brands ensure that the influencers they’re partnering with are actually a good fit for their companies.
2. IZEA
A well-known name in the influencer marketing space, IZEA’s platform was designed to help global brands discover, engage with, and measure the performance of social media influencers. Brands and agencies generally start each project using the IZEAx Discovery search tool to find influencers and creators for their projects. A visual search tool, dubbed VizSearch, also helps brands search through visual content developed by the creators on IZEA’s platform. The entire brand-influencer relationship stays within IZEA, so brands can assign projects, track performance results, and even manage payments in a secure and transparent way.
3. Popular Pays
Using the Popular Pays platform, brands can find creators who they partner with to create the type of visual content that’s likely to go viral. Brands post brief descriptions of the campaigns they’re trying to create, along with any content requirements, and they can browse the “content creators” who’ve signed on to Popular Pay’s platform. Popular Pay’s content creators include social media influencers and other digital marketing experts with experience creating viral online campaigns. Once their campaigns have gone live, marketers can measure the performance of both paid and organic social content through the Popular Pays platform.
4. Tapinfluence
Founded in 2009 as a community platform for bloggers, Tapinfluence has more than a decade of experience working with content creators. Brands can tap into that expertise by joining the company’s influencer marketplace. The marketplace is divided into three main parts—discover, workflow, and measure. Brands can browse Tapinfluence’s directory of more than 50,000 influencers to find the best fit for their campaigns, and they can use Tapinfluence’s automation tools to quickly build and launch new projects. All aspects of influencer communication, content creation and review, content scheduling, and social activation are managed through the platform. After their campaigns have gone live, brands can dig into the analytics and learn which influencers are generating the greatest ROI for their companies.
5. Famebit
Famebit is a self-service influencer marketing platform that was acquired by Google to connect YouTube creators with marketers. Like other platforms in this vertical, Famebit uses algorithms to help brands pinpoint the influencers most likely to be effective in their campaigns. Brands can then hire these influencers to create visual content—primarily videos on YouTube. Brands receive the content to approve before it goes live, and then track all related metrics through the Famebit platform. The cost for brands to run projects on Famebit starts at just $100.
6. Extole
With its referral marketing platform, Extole works to help companies find influencers to serve as brand ambassadors. Extole is a little different from some other platforms on this list, in that the company really focuses on helping brands build out their own referral programs. These referral programs are what encourages influencers to recommend a brand’s products. By participating in referral programs, influencers are rewarded financially or through other incentives. Extole’s platform makes it easy for brands to pinpoint who their top referrers actually are, so they can form even deeper partnerships with the influencers who drive real sales.
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
