Influencer marketing strategy tip
Continually search for new tools. Even the smallest efficiency improvements can have massive effects on campaign management.
16 Tools to Help Manage Influencer Marketing Campaigns
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The average full service influencer marketing platform costs more than $2,000 USD per month. The reality is that for small businesses, $2,000 each month just isn’t feasible. We compiled a list of 16 tools that will help your influencer marketing campaign become more efficient and effective. Each of these tools are priced reasonably for small businesses, free, or have free trials to test the waters. Influencer management tools can make a massive difference to your in house influencer strategy.
The buck doesn’t stop just at influencer management; we have helpful tools for influencer analytics & insights, sourcing, and outreach strategy as well.
Influencer Analytics: Recording and Tracking Your Influencers
Influencer Marketing Hub offers an earned media value calculator which helps give you a sense of how much value your influencer or social posts are “worth”. Earned media value (EMV) is becoming a popular metric among many marketers to track in their influencer marketing efforts since it’s more rigid and can produce a more stable ROI than the purchase value. Choosing to measure the ROI of campaign purchases means using discount codes which decrease authenticity of a post, or relying on shaky attribution paths.
One downside to EMV is that it’s heavily based on social reach and fails to take into account the actual influence someone carries. So if your campaign is heavily nano-influencer and micro-influencer based, your EMV will look low. Compared to a macro-influencer campaign where EMV would look much higher. In reality, the nano-influencer campaign will likely return a much higher purchase ROI than the macro. Just be aware of the expectations of EMV for nano-influencers vs macro-influencers.
Use the Influencer Marketing Hub calculator for free.
Effin Amazing makes a super easy to use UTM builder. For those who are not familiar, a UTM code is a special piece of code, you attach to the end of a custom URL to track any particular link. The UTM code allows you to go into your Google Analytics account and track the clicks made on it, clicks that lead to conversions, and a whole array of other neat data points. This UTM code builder is easy, clean, and allows you to copy the new link with one click. UTM codes are perfect for campaigns with ambassadors that you want to put a link in their bio. The ambassador can place the link in their bio, and then you can track how many sales each ambassador is responsible for – provided the customer purchased through that link and not through the link in your Instagram page’s bio. This kind of data collection leads to tremendous testing and learning opportunities.
Say, you’re an organic juice brand and you’ve always assumed that yoga moms are the influencers driving the bulk of your influencer traffic and sales, but then you come to find out through the use of your UTM tracking, that it’s actually marathon moms who are more into training are doing the best job of getting juice lovers to your website. A shift in what type of ambassador you’re targeting can lead to increased ROIs.
Try building a UTM code for the next influencer to join the team for free.
MightyScout is a massive time saver. All you Marketing Managers out there with the gnarly Google Sheets set-up, manually recording and tracking each and every influencer post that gets uploaded – you’re going to love this. Or worse, you poor, poor overworked Social Media Managers who don’t even have time to record all the posts uploaded, this is for you.
MightyScout allows you to add as many as 25 influencers per campaign. Once they’re added, it will capture each sponsored post and Instagram Story your influencers upload for your brand. How awesome is that? MightyScout has built-in reporting and shows a neat dashboard of all your campaigns content. Get a quick view of how your influencers engagement rates stack up, how much social reach your campaign has gathered, and even discover new influencers to partner with.
Try MightyScout for as low as $99 per month. MightyScout’s dashboard is great for sharing reports with directors or just being able to get a sense of the campaign as a whole at a glance.
Schedule Your Social Media
Get yourself scheduled. Scheduling both your own social media and your influencer campaign has tremendous benefits. Scheduling your own social media means consistency. Give yourself the benefit of not having to worry about uploading each and every day. On the flip side, being scheduled with your influencer campaign has just as much, if not more of a benefit. Having the ability to schedule your influencer posts gives your campaign more structure and organization. It means you can have predictable uploads which you can base other facets of your business around.
Later is a very cool social media scheduling tool. Easily link Instagram and Facebook posts to be uploaded automatically. Using Later ensures that your Instagram page is never left dormant for extended periods of time.
You can use Later for free to schedule posts as much as 30 days in advance. Spend a few hours creating content, schedule it, and wait for the uploads to come all month long. Later has a similar user experience to competitors like Hootsuite, but is a little more intuitive and is free to use forever. Lastly, the Later blog is actually really active and well done. They send valuable articles to your inbox if you subscribe and don’t spam with unnecessary junk.
Try Later and get organized with your posting schedule!
Calendly has an array of uses, and many of you have probably used it when booking demos with sales folks, or scheduling meetings internally perhaps. But if you’re not using an influencer marketing platform, then scheduling is a bit of a pain in the ass. So here’s what you do:
Sign up for a Calendly account and edit the available dates and times to plan when you wish for your influencer team to post. This accomplishes two things: first, it means you can control the frequency of how often posts go up – once one slot is taken, it can be set to not allow double-bookings, giving your campaign a nice steady diet of posts. Second, it allows you to give the influencer enough flexibility that they can pick a time that works for them, and it doesn’t feel like you’re ordering them around.
Calendly also allows you to set reminders with custom messages to your influencers. It can then sync nicely with Slack or your Google Calendar so that you can easily keep track of who is supposed to post and when.
You can use Calendly for free, or get it with all the bells and whistles for only $12/month.
Influencer Management and Administration
Influencer management can slowly eat away a lot of the time that you didn’t plan for. Responding to influencer questions that pop up can add up to a significant amount of time over the span of a few weeks. Sending, printing, and signing contracts can eat away at your time as well. Here are some tools that will help the person managing the day-to-day relations with your influencers.
LawDepot is an online contract template builder. For influencer relations, a simple service agreement will do. Take five minutes to walk through the step-by-step builder and at the end, enter any custom clauses specific to your needs. Make sure you’re familiar with all the clauses an influencer agreement typically has so you can ensure that you’re covered.
You can use LawDepot for free on a 14-day trial and then use it for $39 month after that.
Now that you’ve got a contract that you feel comfortable sending all your influencers, why don’t we make the whole signing and sending process a little easier? Docusign allows you to sign PDF documents and contracts without ever printing a page. A little quicker, and a lot better for the environment.
Sending and signing contracts doesn’t seem like a problem until you’re at scale. You can waste close to an hour a day messing around with printers and scanners if you’re working with a high volume of influencers.
Try DocuSign on a free trial and then use it regularly for as little as $10 monthly.
Canva is one of our personal favourites. It’s where we create all of our campaign briefs – which saves possibly the most time of anything on this list. Canva is great for designing campaign briefs that you can send to your influencers at the beginning of each campaign. A campaign brief outlines everything they need to know and everything you expect from them. Using Canva keeps it fresh, appealing and fun for your influencers to digest. A good campaign brief will save you endless hours of email communication and do a fabulous job of setting expectations for a healthy campaign. It’s an often overlooked, but critical part of a strategic influencer marketing campaign. Learn how you can increase the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign with a campaign brief if you’re not already doing so.
Honestly, we’ve tried the paid version and didn’t find that it had enough features to make it worthwhile. Start using Canva for free!
Influencer Insights
9. Fake Follower & Likes Checker
The name of this one doesn’t leave any ambiguity, does it? Fake followers and likes are the worst. They ruin campaigns, make your data unreliable, and your report-based decisions ungrounded. Inviting influencers with fake followers and fake engagement into your brand circle can have very ugly consequences. Even worse, is when you have these kinds of influencers in your campaign but aren’t aware of it.
These metrics are crucial to check before starting a campaign because you need to be aware of the real value of your influencers. Don’t fret if you see a small percentage of your influencers with very low levels of fake followers and fake engagement. The reality is that bots are out there following, liking, and engaging with all sorts of influencers. Completely innocent influencers can fall victim to fake engagement numbers, but they will be insignificant. The most important thing you need to do as a marketing manager is to adjust your reports accordingly.
10. Phlanx Engagement Calculator
Before you use an engagement calculator, you should be familiar with influencer averages. Generally, for a micro-influencer campaign, you should be looking for engagement rates between 2-6%. Anything below that and you’re starting behind the eightball. Bring some nano-influencers into the fold to take advantage of even higher engagement rates. Many nano-influencers are fetching engagement rates above 10%.
Do some research for your particular industry, then find the benchmark for engagement rates in that industry and create your own internal benchmark. For example, in the food and beverage industry, the average micro-influencer engagement rate might be around 3% – you obviously want your campaign to perform better than average, so you may assign an internal minimum engagement rate of 4% for influencers joining your campaign.
Put this engagement calculator to use and get better results with your campaign management.
11. Upfluence Chrome Extension
You’ll geek out on this one. This Chrome extension shows all kinds of data upon viewing an Instagram profile. Upfluence is one of the most robust influencer management tools we’ve seen.
You can quickly see the average engagement rate for any given influencer, along with the age and location breakdowns showed above.
Location breakdown is really important for brands that have products and services offered in limited geographical areas. Typically, an influencer’s followers will be from the same area they are from. However, as we can see above – that isn’t always the case!
If you run a Toronto based organic juice brand that doesn’t ship to the United States, this would be a major concern for you. If you were to use the above influencer who has 13,000 followers, only 1,690 would actually be in your target demographic! The vast majority wouldn’t even be able to get their hands on your product, even if they wanted to.
Great tool for getting a better understanding of who you’re truly reaching with your influencers.
Get the Upfluence Chrome extension today for a better grasp of your audiences.
SocialBlade tracks account growth over time. It’s a very useful tool to see overarching trends or changes over time. It’s often used as a fact checker. Allow me to explain: if we identify an account that has had a relatively large jump in followers, we have to look for a reason why. Large spikes in followers growth happen for a few reasons: the first of which, is a shoutout from another influencer like how Bronny James grew 100k followers in one hour after his dad, LeBron James gave him a shoutout. Alternatively, there could be a news article, an appearance on a talk show, or some other public event that would explain a sudden spike in follower growth. Most of the time you can find the reason. Simply identify the date the spike occurred on and search the name of the influencer on Google with that date. If nothing shows up, we turn our attention to possibility number three. Somebody dipped into the fake follower jar.
Check our your own follower growth with SocialBlade.
Influencer Outreach Strategy
An efficient strategy for reaching out to influencers can make your campaign run much smoother and will result in finding better-qualified influencers for your brand. Lock in the perfect influencer outreach strategy and use these tools to help you along the way.
Rebump is a neat tool that’s used in conjunction with Gmail. The best way to contact influencers is by email, but the trouble is that following up is a real pain. Rebump allows you to automatically send follow up emails to the influencers who don’t respond to your initial email. You can expect anywhere between a 15-20% increase in your response rate with this tool!
Improve your response rate and try Rebump.
14. Multi Hashtag Search & Hashtag Collector
You can use both of these tools to search relevant hashtags in your industry. Finding the people who are already engaging in your communities is a great way to source influencers for your campaign. Try using hashtags that have more than 10,000 uses, but less than 750,000 – this way you’ll be able to sort through them without being totally overwhelmed by volume.
Facebook Group extractor is an open source API call that allows you to get the information of any Facebook Group that you’re a part of. If you can find a highly targeted group of customers or advocates for your brand, it could be a gold mine of nano-influencers.
16. Instagram Follower Extractor
This tool works essentially the same as the Facebook Group extractor. If you find an influencer who aligns very well with your brand, there could be a lot of influencers following them. Use the Instagram follower extractor to find influencers among your influencers.
Use these influencer management tools and influencer insights tools to help you on your next campaign. These tools are intended to give small businesses the ability to get into the game without worrying about overspending. Comment below with any tools you’ve found helpful or have given you better results on your influencer campaigns.
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