5 Tools to Ace Influencer Marketing in 2020 and Beyond

Influencer marketing has been a key marketing strategy for years now, and will surely continue to go on strong, as consumers continue to make choices based on recommendations from people they know and trust. Influencers and thought leaders abound from every type of industry, even the most niche, and are an extremely effective way to promote your product or service to previously untapped pools of audiences.

But implementing a successful influencer marketing strategy isn’t always easy, and it’s good to have tools to drive and shape your strategy through all  stages, from determining what kind of influencer marketing campaign you want to deploy , to identifying which  influencers you want to work with, and all the way to analyzing your campaigns afterward and keeping up with the influencers you have worked with. 

That’s why we have come up with a list of tools that can help you along with all the steps of your influencer marketing campaigns!

1. Analyze Your  Influencer Environment with Social Media Listening

Getting into influencer marketing isn’t always easy and sometimes it can be hard to know where to start. Digimind Social is a very good tool to begin to visualize your social media environment, to see where and how your brand and your industry is mentioned the most, and where it makes the most sense to locate influencers in the first place in order to reach your target audience.

Map out different influencers depending on their influence and involvement in your monitored conversations.

Social media listening is a very practical tool for  identifying influencers in your industry, and detecting  their scope of influence and the subjects they talk about most frequently. Social listening softwares like Digimind Social also allow you to see which influencers are already talking about your brand, what they are saying about your competitors, and how each and every content creator relates to the conversation at large on social media.

Digimind Social’s Influencer Network allows you to see the links between the influencers of your industry.

With this holistic view of your influencer environment, you can easily start to get an idea of who you would like to work with, and how you would like to run your influencer marketing campaign.

2. Benchmark and Shortlist Your Influencers 

Socialbakers, a social media management tool, takes it further by allowing you to easily visualize the influencers you are interested in, and  create a shortlist of the influencers you would like to collaborate with. The platform enables you to discover which influencers have a positive affinity towards your brand.

Influencer data from Socialbakers.

Now that you have created a shortlist of various influencers, you should benchmark them according to a set of criteria you have determined important for your campaign. There are many options to qualify your influencers, such as whether they are business or creator profiles, which can enhance your campaign’s legitimacy, as well as past brands they have collaborated with. Socialbakers is a highly collaborative platform on which you can create custom lists and add notes of things specific to your campaign.

All these tools will help you to find the perfect influencers for your campaign and you can start to get an idea of what your campaign will look like and how you will collaborate with the influencers you have chosen.

3. Identify Inauthentic Influencers with Inflated Follower Counts

With the influencer marketing phenomenon poised to grow bigger and bigger, an increasing number of inauthentic influencers have emerged to capitalize on the hype. With unscrupulous businesses offering the possibility to buy followers, likes, and comments, such creators lack in authentic engagement and actual followers, which is what marketers like you are after when launching an influencer marketing campaign.

As a brand that wants to create awareness and reach an active audience that will hopefully be interested in what you have to offer, it is of the utmost importance that you make sure that the influencers you plan on collaborating with are authentic and have solid engagement rates.

That’s where HypeAuditor comes in handy, as it specializes in auditing influencers on the main social networks  commonly used by influencers: Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. They have a huge database of around 10M influencers with many various metrics, so you can not only see if the influencers you are planning to collaborate with are not only real but also are the perfect fit for your brand. 

Hypeauditor gives you relevant data on influencers so you can determine if they are authentic or not.

HypeAuditor has various free influencer marketing tools to help you check an influencer’s engagement rate and quality on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. They also offer full reports on influencers’ audience and other key metrics, to enable you to better understand their reach.

4. Communicating with Influencers

Once you have chosen the influencers you would like to work with and are sure that they are the “right fit” for your brand, it’s time to contact the influencers and start negotiating with them to create your perfect campaign. 

For this  you have many options. You may choose to contact them directly, or through an influencer management platform. Social Sensei is a good option for creating  campaigns with influencers, regardless of whether you are working with macro-influencers or with micro-influencers. Social Sensei allows you to:  

• Create awareness of your brand by including you in accounts to follow for giveaways and competitions run by celebrities and macro-influencers, or 
• Create more personalized campaigns with micro-influencers 
  
  

Social Sensei simplifies the communication process with influencers so you can easily see how the collaboration will go, how much it will cost you, and follow the creative process from start to finish.  You can take it step by step from the first contact, to post creation, post validation, and knowing exactly when it will be published so you can then evaluate its performance.

5. Tracking and Measuring the Performance of Your Campaign

Now that you’ve found your perfect influencer or influencers and they have posted about your brand, your work isn’t finished! It’s now time to start measuring the performance of your campaign.

Traackr is a platform that is great for viewing and analyzing the impact of your influencer marketing campaign. What’s most interesting is its budgeting option, which allows you to track how much you are spending on each influencer campaign, while analyzing their respective performance, thus optimizing your ROI. 

With Traackr you can easily track and benchmark all your campaigns.

A Data-Driven Approach to Influencer Marketing

To create a great influencer marketing campaign, it is essential to choose the right influencers whose branding and images are close to your brand and prominently feature in your industry. Take stock of the influencer environment in your industry, benchmark your chosen influencers, and make sure they are authentic. Take the time to really communicate with them to create a campaign that will be beneficial to both parties and measure your campaign’s performance of the campaign from start to finish.

Finally make sure that you maintain a good relationship with the influencers you work with, so you can turn them into long-term ambassadors of your brand.