Influencer marketing has hit the mainstream. In fact, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, it’s projected to be a $10 billion industry by 2020. Just like any other form of digital advertising, there are a lot of options for brands looking to work with influencers.
With all those choices, it can be difficult for a marketer to decide which platform will best suit their needs.
Here are 11 questions you need to ask before signing up with an influencer marketing platform:
1. Do You Have an Influencer Search Engine That Will Allow Me to Discover all Influential Creators?
There are a lot of ways to find influencers, but the most effective way is through an influencer search engine.
A tool like this allows you to filter your results based on the type of content they create, their reach and engagement rate, their cost per post and more.
- What’s your strategy when it comes to measuring content performance?
It’s important for any influencer marketing platform to be able to measure content performance accurately so that you can see which strategies are working best for your brand (and which ones aren’t).
Here’s an sample of overall performance of an influencer from Qoruz platform:
This information will help guide future campaigns and make sure that each campaign is successful from start to finish.
2. Will I be Able to Work With an Unlimited Number of Creators?
You’d be surprised how many advertisers think they can handle influencer marketing on their own. After all, it’s just a few emails here and there, how hard could it be?
Unfortunately, the truth is that influencer marketing is not the same as running any other advertising campaign. Influencers aren’t just another form of earned media; they are relationships in which you have to invest time and energy.
And unlike direct-response campaigns where you can easily track ROI using conversion rates or sales data, working with creators requires a different mindset altogether: one that values trust over ROI (or at least an understanding of how those two things are related).
As such, when choosing an influencer marketing platform, look for one that will allow you to work with multiple creators at once so that you can keep your options open for future collaborations and campaigns.
3. Do You Have an Influencer Marketplace?
To answer this, you’ll need to know what an influencer marketplace is. An influencer marketplace is where you can find a community of social media stars willing to partner with brands on sponsored content campaigns.
The key question here is how do I find the right influencers for my campaign? And what are the benefits of using an influencer marketplace?
An appropriate answer would include:
“We do the work for you! We connect your brand with top performing influencers in your industry and provide our extensive research on each one so that you can make informed decisions about who will be best suited for your campaign.
In addition, we have a dedicated team that works only with brands, so we know exactly what it takes to drive sales through social media influence.”
4. Do You Have Social Listening Tools to Allow Me to Find Brand Audience?
Social listening tools use algorithms to find the most relevant content from your target audience. More of like a content inspiration of what your target audience might like.
These tools can help you identify both your brand’s fans and competitors’ fans, which is great for two reasons:
- It gives you a pool of people to reach out to, increasing the likelihood that they’ll engage with your content.
- It gives you insight into what kind of content your target audience likes, so that when you create new branded posts, they’ll be more likely to love it!
5. How Robust Is Your Influencer CRM?
Your influencer marketing platform should have a robust CRM that helps you keep track of your relationships with influencers and campaigns.
The CRM needs to be able to do several things:
- Help you find the right influencers for your campaigns (as well as their contact information)
- Help you manage everything from contracts to payments to reporting on campaign results.
6. Is it Possible to Manage all my Campaigns on One Platform? (If not, is there an integration with another tool?).
It may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s essential to check the platform’s functionality. You should be able to manage all your campaigns on one platform, and if not, is there an integration with another tool?
For example, some platforms have an integration with HubSpot or Marketo that allows you to create marketing automation emails from Influencer Marketing campaigns.
Other tools include:
- SocialBakers – A social media analytics tool that helps brands measure performance across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
- Hootsuite – A social media management application for companies or organizations looking for marketing solutions in multiple channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.,
- Buffer – A scheduling tool for bloggers which lets users plan their tweets & posts ahead of time so they can manage them efficiently without having to worry about missing out on important updates
7. How Flexible Are Your Campaign Workflows to Support my Programs as They Evolve Over Time?
If you want to optimize the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s important that your influencer marketing platform is able to support a range of campaign types. The platform should be able to accommodate everything from simple one-off campaigns to complex multi-channel programs that require customized workflows.
It’s also crucial that the platform has a flexible workflow feature so the team can launch in minutes and make changes on-the-fly with just a few clicks.
8. Which Social Media Channels Can I Track in The Analytics Dashboards?
Let’s start with the basics: what channels does this platform support?
The most common social media platforms to be supported by a platform are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. All of these platforms have robust analytics dashboards that will give you insights into campaign performance (e.g., impressions created), audience demographics (age, gender), and influencer engagement (retweets).
For example, if you’re using Instagram as your main channel for running influencer marketing campaigns then you’ll want to make sure that the platform has an integration with Google Analytics so that your data can be properly tracked on social media platforms.
This way when they look at their dashboard they’ll see all relevant data related to their campaign including impressions created across all channels which will help them understand where more efforts need to be invested in order increase ROI.
9. How Will Your Platform Help Me Measure Long-Term and Short-Term Value?
While measuring long-term value is important, it’s equally important to measure short-term value.
Long-term value is about how the audience interacts with your brand three to six months after engaging with an influencer campaign.
Short term value is about how they interact with you in the first few weeks or months of the campaign.
You want to know what KPIs are most relevant for your organization so that you can track them over time and see whether or not these campaigns have long lasting effects on your business.
10. How Accurate Is Your Analytics Data? Are You Integrated With the Instagram API?
We need to know that you’re not just presenting us with a pile of statistical nonsense.
If you can’t tell us how accurate your data is, and whether it’s more or less accurate than other platforms, then we should probably keep looking for a platform that does have some numbers to back up its claims.
If your platform is able to integrate with the Instagram API, then great!
This means that it’ll be able to pull in information about specific accounts’ followers and engagement rates a feature that’s not available on many other platforms (and one which can make all the difference).
11. Can You Measure Influencer-Specific Metrics and KPIs?
You need to be able to measure the ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns. If you can’t prove that it’s working, why are you doing it?
The best platform for measuring influencer-specific metrics and KPIs will give you insights into how many leads each campaign generated, how many sales were made directly because of the campaign (and which ones), and more.
Conclusion
To sum up, picking the right influencer marketing platform will depend on your business needs and budget. If you have any questions about these influencer platforms, feel free to ask them in the comment section below!
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