Influence Marketing (IM) is the process by which you identify those who influence the decisions of your customers so as to create, manage, and measure relationships with those influencers to the benefit of your brand or business (for examples of recent Influence Marketing campaigns click here or check out our case studies here).
They key is to NOT treat influencers like a sales partner, but like a customer, that you need to identify, engage, and win-over.
To help you get started, here’s five Influence Marketing software tools or platforms we recommend:
InNetwork
InNetwork is an Influence Marketplace that empowers your business to find trusted social media influencers that can deliver your brand message to your defined target audience, with easy to use tools. InNetwork lets you search for influencers by categories, geography, gender, and language and sort your list by your target audience. Last I checked it was still only available in Canada but would be rolling out is US soon.
InkyBee
I’ve covered InkyBee in a previous post. It’s an Influence Marketing tool for anyone targeting or working with Bloggers, specifically: finding the most relevant blogs to target, deciding which ones are the most “influential”, managing the whole process in one place and keeping track of the work done in building relationships with bloggers, and measuring the results of any outreach.
Traackr
Traackr enables marketers to focus their social initiatives on the people who have the greatest ability to impact their objectives. The platform discovers, monitors and measures online influencers and the content they produce. Neat features include real-time listening, sentiment analysis, and share of voice reporting which monitors your compared to the competition.
Appinions
Appinions wants to make Influence Marketing scientific. The platform provides six ignition modules that produce trust points to optimize your marketing efforts and serve your larger business objectives, including: Executive Influence, Launch Marketing, Content Marketing, Corporate Social Responsibility, Earned Display, and Event Optimization.
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is a blogger outreach platform used to identify, analyze, and manage relationships with bloggers. It helps agencies and brands streamline their blog outreach efforts by surfacing high-quality and active blogs via its search engine. The software then automates the research of social and SEO metrics and provides a portal where you can track and organize blogger relationships and communication.
No matter which Influence Marketing software tool you choose, it’s about engagement, engagement, engagement.
UPDATED August 2016:
NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is an influencer marketing software designed to help you find bloggers and influencers. It provide metrics such as number of shares per post, who shared them, Domain Authority, Alexa rank, Number of Backlinks, and Number of followers in an influencer’s social profile. Once you have created your list, you can do the outreach within the tool and track your analytics for open, clicks, and response rate. It also gives you a window to track your relationship with each prospect.
Thanks for the GroupHigh shout out! Let me know if you ever have any questions kristen@grouphigh.com
Kristen Matthews Will do Kristen, (Group) High Five 🙂
Great list, thanks for including InNetwork – just an update, we are available in the US.
ValerieKeast Thanks Valerie 🙂
Hi Robert, while the influencer marketing platforms and services mentioned focus on renting or contracting influencers, one influencer source all brands have that often goes overlooked is their existing customer base. Mavrck (www.mavrck.co) enables brands to discover and activate their existing customers with influence to share branded content on social at scale, converting their friends at a higher rate than other influencer categories and paid social ads.
Hi Robert, while the influencer marketing platforms and services mentioned focus on renting or contracting influencers, one influencer source all brands have that often goes overlooked is their existing customer base. Mavrck (www.mavrck.co) enables brands to discover and activate their existing customers with influence to share branded content on social at scale, converting their friends at a higher rate than other influencer categories and paid social ads.