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Influencer marketing is a top strategy used by marketers to expand their brand reach, generate new leads and foster growth. They see influencers as a new medium to effectively reach their target audiences.
But finding the relevant talent or an influencer aligning with your brand values requires using the right influencer outreach tools.
These tools use machine learning and AI technology to analyse the impact of the creator and the content they share on social media channels. You can find top creators on social media using filters like brand affinities, audience, interest, demographics, hashtags, mentions, etc.
You can easily import their contact information, send bulk proposals, deliver products, execute payouts, and measure ROI. In this article, we have listed the top influencer outreach tools used widely by brands and marketers.
But before that, let's understand how tools are better than manual search and what you should look for before picking one.
Let's get started!
Imagine spending hours of manual labour and thousands of dollars on influencer marketing campaigns and not getting the desired results. Sounds annoying, right?
Manual search makes influencer discovery complicated and eats up a lot of your time and money. You look for hashtags, go through each profile, find their contact information, and reach out to them individually. Then, you wait for their approval on collaboration, which might take days. And even if you're able to pull this off, you can't be sure if you picked the right influencer for your brand — all that effort goes for nothing.
Influencer outreach tools are your best bet as they save time, money, and resources spent on manual search by automating the entire process.
These AI-driven tools use advanced filters like demographics, audience, and brand affinity to search for specific influencers. You get access to this vetted database, where you can pick relevant content creators. You can outreach influencers in bulk by creating a customised proposal page and sending across the product you want to get endorsed.
All the information gets collected in one place, eliminating the deep diving into spreadsheets. Since the tool captures real-time data such as likes, shares, comments and engagement, it helps you make informed decisions to run persuasive and successful campaigns.
You should know what you're investing in to get the maximum returns as a brand. So before you put your money on a platform, first understand whether it will fulfil your expectations.
Let's understand how to choose the right platform for your campaigns.
Is hiring influencers manually taking up a lot of your time? Use affable.ai to hire influencers in one go!
Various outreach tools have entered the market in the last few years, and it is critical to analyse their services. Here's a checklist of features for choosing the right influencer outreach platform.
The platform you pick should have a database of experienced and talented creators to choose the right one for your brand.
More importantly, you should know whether the platform picks creators through a screening process or invitations. The screening process reduces the possibility of working with unfit creators.
Through an influencer outreach platform, you determine the relevance of the influencer for your campaigns using performance metrics like engagement rate, audience distribution, branded content distribution, brand affinity, and audience interests.
For example, an influencer with a huge following and low engagement rate would not bring sales to you. At the same time, a high engagement rate shows that the audience is interested in their content. Such a creator has the power to convince the audience and boost your sales. This information is crucial to know before you hire the creator.
Pick a platform that provides such performance-related information before hiring influencers.
Not conducting a proper background check increases the chances of onboarding a fake influencer. Such influencers don't bring any traction to your business and can damage your reputation.
The right influencer outreach platform has a feature to spot fake influencers, bot accounts, and suspicious activities so that you can be free of fraud.
Influencer outreach tools have an inbuilt search engine that helps find influencers from a database. You can use filters like hashtags, industry names, etc., to find creators that fit your brand.
Often these tools offer advanced filters like location, audience demographics, brand affinities, interests, biography, and followers to narrow down your search and reach specific creators.
For example, if you're looking for a social media influencer in sports and fashion with a female audience in the USA ranging from 18 to 40 years of age. You can apply filters such as location, brands, biography, gender etc., to reach the influencers with your target audience segment.
KOA, a beverage company that produces sugar-free and calorie-free juices, used influencer marketing to target health-conscious audiences. It used outreach tools to hire niche creators in the health and fitness sector, having a high engagement rate and reach. The campaign enabled the brand to convey its message to the target audience.
Image-based and exclusion searches are some advanced features that list influencers who previously worked with competing brands. In exclusion search, if you are a brand in a beauty niche and want only a specific set of beauty influencers who do not promote alcohol. The tool searches through creator profiles and their post titles, descriptions, and account bios to churn out the best beauty influencers, eliminating those who endorsed alcohol on social media.
These features narrow down your search further and help you connect with relevant creators. However, not many influencer outreach tools allow smart search, so make sure to pick the one that does.
Many influencer outreach platforms have an inbuilt influencer relationship management (IRM) tool to manage campaigns. The IRM should offer features that help you send bulk emails, track content and stories in real-time, monitor competitor campaigns, execute payouts in one go and do more.
Such features make campaign management a lot easier than doing everything manually.
You can build a long term and strong relationship with influencers by managing and tracking communication constantly and reviewing their progress.
For instance, Travelocity, a popular travel website owned by Expedia Group, leverages influencer outreach tools to find US-based creators interested in the travel niche. Besides this, the platform helps the company improve its creator connections and achieve high engagement.
Picking the right social media platform is crucial to running a successful campaign. If a large proportion of your audience is on Instagram, you should run campaigns on the same. For this, you will need to hire Instagram influencers. The outreach tool you choose should have influencers from your target platform.
Some influencer outreach platforms help you carry out product seeding. They integrate with your Shopify and WooCommerce stores directly to send out products selected by the influencer for review or promotion. The tool tracks every detail from shipment to delivery, saving countless man-hours and extensive effort required in this process.
It creates custom discount codes for influencers to track sales. Influencers can give it to their followers, and whenever someone makes a purchase using the code, you will know the sales they're bringing in.
Even if you manage everything from start to end and run engaging campaigns using tools, it should bring in sales or leads. So it would help if you had a concrete idea about how to measure the ROI of your campaigns.
Therefore, an influencer outreach tool should have features like:
Founding Year: 2017
Affable.ai is a leading influencer outreach platform in the market. It helps you find relevant creators for your campaign with a database of over 6M+ creators.
The platform provides 20+ filters like audience demographics, interests, brand affinities etc., to help you find niche influencers in minutes. You can go through their profiles and look for performance metrics like branded content, audience distribution, audience interests, engagement rate, suspicious activities, fake followers, brand affinities, etc. It helps you find creators and look for experts in the industry.
In addition to this, the platform's IRM enables you to build long-term relationships with the influencers by managing their responses in one place.
Affable.ai has empowered 100+ global eCommerce brands, D2C companies, and agencies in the market. The team at affable.ai provides full support to its clients to ensure their campaigns are a success.
For people who wish to learn more about influencer marketing, it has a resource centre covering topics like how to find influencers, top agencies in the industry, and influencer marketing guides.
Clients: BlendJet, Wipro, Foodpanda, Sugar Cosmetics, Pomelo, Ogilvy, Huckleberry Labs, BeTagged
Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok
Read the customer success stories of affable.ai.
Founding Year: 2013
Upfluence is an influencer outreach platform that helps brands, agencies and nonprofit firms upscale their campaigns. Its features like influencer discovery, analysis, management, product seeding, bulk payouts etc., help you run end-to-end campaigns.
Integration with content management systems (CMS), email software, and analysis tools allows you to manage your community from one place. Moreover, you can connect the Upfluence account to WooCommerce and Shopify accounts to look for influencers in your customer base.
With their affiliate marketing tool, you can create custom links and codes and track sales. Their free influencer analytics tool gives you access to creator profiles and metrics, making it easier to analyse them.
The campaign analytics tool gives you insights into influencer engagement, competitor campaigns, and performance and ROI. They have three pricing packages to suit the needs of every client – Growth, Scale, and Enterprise.
Clients: Zappos, Kayak, Verzon, Mapiful, Havas, Amazon
Social Media Platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, WordPress, TikTok
Upfluence lacks essential features like sentiment analysis, exclusion search, etc. See how affable.ai is a better option for you.
Founding Year: 2014
GRIN is a creator management tool that helps eCommerce brands build authentic creator partnerships. Their network of 33M+ global creators allows you to find niche influencers on social media. Tools like influencer analysis, influencer lookalike, fake follower detection etc., will enable you to analyse creator profiles and pick the ones that fit your brand.
GRIN syncs with a brand's Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce stores to carry out product shipment and enables automated payouts. You can connect communication platforms like Gmail, Slack, and Outlook to import contacts and carry out email sequencing. Above this, it pulls out your user-generated content and collects it in one place for you to access it anytime you want.
This influencer outreach platform also helps you with PR and communications, customer advocacy, athlete marketing, and digital services.
Clients: First Aid Beauty, Tonal, Macy's, Lorna Jane, Organifi, Bellami
Social Media Platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram
Unlike GRIN, affable.ai offers features like smart search, audience analysis, etc. Learn more on how affable.ai is a better alternative to GRIN.
Founding Year: 2013
Aspire.io, an influencer outreach platform for eCommerce brands, gives access to 100M+ vetted creator profiles. You can find them with the help of filters like interests, demographics, aesthetics, and industry.
The feature of building custom landing pages helps you invite several influencers to take part in your campaign. The platform claims to bring hundreds of proposals in just a week.
The social listening tool helps you identify existing customers with a significant following and invite them to promote your brand. In addition to that, they have image recognition, product gifting, and content management features that help you manage operations at every step.
Clients: Skinn, Ruggable, Future, Empress, Modern Fertility
Social Media Platforms: Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest, Youtube
Compared to affable.ai, Aspire.io does not include features like exclusion search and sentiment analysis. Let's see how affable.ai is a better choice for you.
Founding Year: 2015
Hunter.io, an email finding tool, enables you to find and verify professional emails. Its email indexing technology creates a list of all the working professionals in different companies, organisations and schools. Notably, it has indexed 100M+ email addresses.
With the help of search filters, you can find personal or position based email IDs. Brands often use this tool to find and verify the email addresses of leads, influential bloggers and authors. Their outreach tool helps you download the required contact information into a file.
The Hunter Campaign tool allows you to send and schedule bulk emails, manage conversations, and check if people have engaged with the emails. It links multiple accounts like Pipedrive, Salesforce, Gmail, and Outlook to the platform.
Some of their features are free for users, whereas others require a paid subscription. They have four packages based on the level of services you need - Starter, Growth, Pro, and Business.
Clients: Goldie Agency, Belkins, Amnis, Moosend
Social Media Platforms: NA
Founding Year: 2015
Taggermedia works as a creator listening search engine that enables creator partnerships, profile assessment, and content analysis. It helps you connect with influencers, activate campaigns, make payments, and analyse campaigns. You can pick suiting creators from their database of 6M+ influencers.
It lets you analyse competitor campaigns and stay ahead of them. With their content analysis tool, you can compare 'sponsored' vs 'organic' content to see what is working. It assembles data from campaigns to give you detailed insights.
Their brand ambassador tool, 'Sync', can create custom landing pages to call out new creators and ambassadors and ask them to endorse your products.
Clients: Pepsico, Ketchum, Bose, HBO Max, Tinder, Omnicom Public Relations Group
Social Media Platforms: Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch, Instagram
Unlike tagger, affable.ai allows you to carry out product deliveries, eCommerce integrations, etc. Read here why affable.ai is a suitable alternative for you.
Founding Year: 2013
Pitchbox, a leading content marketing and influencer outreach platform, caters to brands, SEO agencies, and publishing companies. You can search for influencers or bloggers by using relevant keywords. Other features include link building, email management, and analytics.
With their CRM, you can manage your workflow, review emails, and streamline collaborations. The platform's features like email sequencing and scheduling allow you to follow up with leads and prospects. It integrates Slack, SEMrush, Moz, Zapier, and GDS to sync all your work on one dashboard.
Clients: Skyscanner, offers.com, FreshBooks, Point Visible, Webris, Copypress, The Hoth, IMI, Move Digital
Social Media Platforms: NA
Founding Year: 2011
Klear allows eCommerce brands, enterprises, and agencies to find niche influencers, manage partnerships, and measure campaign success. You can apply filters like audience, location, and category to find creators that align with your goals. The platform uses AI metrics to give a 0-100 score for influencers' impact on the audience.
You can deep dive into the creator's audience, verify and approve content, and automate communications.
It also offers multiple free tools like a pricing calculator, Facebook page analysis, and Twitter analysis to help you gain valuable insights. This influencer outreach platform also invites creators to work with the top brands.
Clients: IBM, VisitBritain, Coca-cola, Kayak, Unilever, Adidas, Wunderman, turner, JP Morgan Chase
Social Media Platforms: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok
Unlike Klear, affable.ai allows Shopify integration to carry out product seeding. Let's learn how affable.ai is a better choice for you.
Founding Year: 2014
BuzzSumo allows you to gain content insights, identify influencers, and monitor performance.
The tool helps you find content creators and authors with the help of a content analyser. You can choose a topic relevant to your brand and search for the people actively talking about it.
This influencer outreach platform also allows you to monitor brand mentions, industry updates, and competitor strategies. They have one free and three paid packages with different levels of features for brands and nonprofit firms.
BuzzSumo gives you access to other tools like content discovery, SEO, crisis alerting, digital PR, competitor intelligence, and more to help make marketing simple.
Clients: Digitas, BuzzFeed, the telegraph, Hubspot, Expedia
Social Media Platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook
Founding Year: 2014
Ninja Outreach is an influencer outreach tool that helps you find niche creators, bloggers, journalists, executives, and companies in multiple locations. You can search for them using keywords and get their contact information.
Its in-built CRM enables users to manage conversations, organise leads, add notes, and track clicks and comments.
The tool works like a link building platform and a blogger outreach tool for brands and agencies. Ninja Outreach's Twitter outreach tool allows you to schedule campaigns at a specific date and send automated messages to the shortlisted influencers.
Clients: Drama Mayhem, Fiddler's dream music, Covertica, global child tv, TOAD Diaries, Utama Spices
Social Media Platforms: Instagram, Youtube, Twitter
Influencer outreach tools increase your chances of making actionable decisions. With real-time tracking of influencers' content, you get valuable data that you can use to fine-tune your campaigns. It ensures that your campaigns are on the right track. And if they're not, you can easily make the required changes to spearhead it in the desired direction.
So, if you want a budget-friendly tool with advanced features, valuable data, and excellent customer experience, try affable.ai!
Request for a free trial today.
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