With so many brands all sharing the same space in even the most niche markets, getting your business to stand out can be a challenge today. Getting a visibility boost is tricky, but it’s not impossible. Influencer marketing is one of the ways you can get your brand name in front of more eyes without losing credibility.
By collaborating with socially visible people such as athletes, celebrities, or popular online content creators, you can bring your product center stage for certain demographics and target groups. Because of the nature of social media platforms, individuals with high community engagement can bring a lot of attention to your brand, drive traffic to landing pages, and give you a high ROI for every marketing dollar you spend on them.
How Do You Find the Right influencers?
Deciding to use influencer marketing doesn’t make it any easier to find the people you want to collaborate with. You can’t just jump on the nearest account with a high follower account. The influencers who will give you the highest ROI are people with true engagement numbers, proven results for other clients, and an audience made up of your target customers.
How do you find these influencers? You could search endlessly through social media platforms, or try out an influencer marketing program.
Using an influencer marketing program has many benefits, but the biggest benefit is that these programs make it simple to find a compatible influencer for your campaign. Most programs run software that allows for an online hub or community between owners and influencers. Through this, you can run custom searches to find individuals who fit your image, audience expectations, reach parameters, etc. Or, you can post an ad seeking out influencers who meet certain criteria.
Other key benefits of these programs are:
- Simple management of payments
- Easily track community engagement
- Greater access to a diverse range of influencers
- Marketing project management
If you are an influencer looking for more opportunities, there are also benefits for you! These include:
- Direct access to clients looking for influencers of all sizes
- Advanced accountability systems that help you prove your value
- Secure payment platforms
- Greater exposure and money-making potential
Influencer Marketing Programs to Try in 2020
Now that you’re getting interested in using an influencer marketing program… Which one should you try out? There are so many platforms popping up, but some are more useful than others.
Here are some of our recommendations, based on user feedback, customer support options (in-app chats, call center phone support, email, etc.), features, benefits, price, and availability of a free trial:
1. AspireIQ
Formerly known as Revfluence, AspireIQ has over 500,000 influencers on their database and continues growing. The database is easily searchable with more than 5 different filtering options.
Top brands like Bare Minerals, Walgreens, and GrubHub are on this site searching for and working with influencers. Influencers of all sizes can use the platform and find work.
Once an agreement is made between parties, AspireIQ has a platform to help you manage the workflow and payments from both sides. You can also collaborate on content directly on the platform rather than switching to a third-party service.
A free trial is available for this platform.
2. Hypr
The main draw of Hypr is the sheer scale of influencers and the audience data listed. There are more than 10 million influencers small and large on their database. That number itself is a little overwhelming, but it’s a searchable database that lets you narrow down what you’re looking for in a good fit.
To further simplify the search, every influencer’s audience data is listed plainly for clients to see. This helps you as the client to narrow down your shortlist to influencers who have the right eyes on their content, and it helps the influencers themselves to reduce the number of incompatible clients reaching out. Brands like Pepsi, Hulu, and Bloomberg use Hypr.
On Hypr, direct contact information is allowed to be listed. This makes it a lot easier for clients and influencers to get in touch with each other. Free trials are available.
Read also: Choosing the Best Influencer for Viral Marketing
3. Upfluence
Upfluence is well-designed for businesses of any size to find influencers of any size or reach. With more than 600,000 influencer profiles in their database, you can search for exactly the type of influencer you want with more than 20 filter options.
Each influencer’s direct contact information is listed on their profile and can be exported together when you compile a list of suitable profiles. Influencers can also be contacted through the app itself. Recent posts and live analytics of influencer posts are viewable on an influencer’s profile or searchable.
Large brands like Microsoft, Ralph Lauren, and Paypal have found and worked with influencers through Upfluence, but smaller brands also frequent the site. It has a very convenient project workflow system that’s simple to use and gives both the brand and the influencer all the information they need to keep track of the success of a project. You can get a free trial of the service.
4. Influencerdb
Although Influencerdb doesn’t have the scale of influencers in their database that some of the larger influencer marketing programs do, they have some incredibly useful features to help brands and influencers find each other.
To protect people from fraud, Influencerdb has a built-in fraud detection mechanism that helps to track when influencer engagement analytics are faked. This helps brands get a better ROI by working with influencers who have a legitimate audience rather than falsified engagement statistics.
This platform also keeps track of influencer analytics in general along with your specific campaign analytics. You can opt to track mentions of your competitors from influencers in the database to observe what your competition is doing and how their campaigns are working. A free demo is available for this service.
5. Neoreach
Neoreach is an influencer marketing platform specifically designed for medium to large businesses, not small businesses. Their database includes more than 3 million influencers of all sizes, with dynamic search filters that help brands to narrow down the criteria for specific results.
Brands can track analytics produced by the influencers as the campaign goes on, or they can see the statistics of an influencer before deciding to work with them. You can pull up historical analytics across different social media platforms where the influencer is present, allowing you to analyze their audience demographics in different places and their social footprint.
AirBnB, Investigation Discovery, and TLC have all worked through Neoreach. No free trial is available.
Influencer marketing is the best way for most brands to stand out in the market today. If you’re looking for a way to get your content in front of more interested eyes, or if you’re an influencer looking to grow your client portfolio, using an influencer marketing program is a natural step forward.
These programs are some of the best available in 2020. Try your luck and see if you can get connected to the right influencer or influencer marketing agency to jumpstart your digital marketing efforts.
Author Bio:
Georgi Todorov is a digital marketer, specializing in Outreach strategies, International SEO and Influencer Marketing. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing called DigitalNovas and joined GetVoIP to provide his marketing expertise.
Photos courtesy of gettyimages.com
