How to pick a YouTube influencer marketing platform: A complete guide

Undoubtedly, YouTube is the most popular platform for video streaming and distribution. 

Since its inception in 2005, it has grown into the second largest search engine after Google. Interestingly, YouTube introduced content creators to the world before Instagram or TikTok influencers jumped on the bandwagon.

But many brands are still unaware of YouTube influencer marketing platforms that can help scale and automate their marketing campaigns. For many, identifying influencers or measuring and understanding their effectiveness is still a  humongous exercise!

But if you are looking for one such platform for your campaigns, it is critical to learn about the easiest and fastest ways to search and manage influencers and measure their ROI. ‍

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1)Youtube Search and Discovery Function 

Believe it or not, an estimated 500 hours of video content is uploaded every minute on YouTube. It prioritises relevance, engagement and quality of the video to find the best for your query. However, complex algorithms work in this process.

It is, therefore, suggested to narrow down your search to only specific keywords. For example: if you are a health fitness brand, keywords like workout, fitness first, exercise, diet, nutrition - can be used to search influencers. The search can also be based on brand/product or service name, interest or audience demographics to find the right YouTube influencer fitting your requirement. 

2) Check the Trending on Youtube Tab

An easy way to find YouTube influencers can be through the platform's trending feature. You can choose the most talked about content creators whose video has gone viral. By scrolling through the trending section, you can trace influencers who align with your brand value and are capable of reaching out to your target audience. 

3) Search through Hashtag 

Hashtags are words relevant to your brand but preceded with the #symbol to help categorize the content.  Like if you are a beauty brand,  hashtag #beauty will aggregate all video content from YouTube, helping you to discover content more easily.

 It can easily connect you to relevant and authentic influencers who have created similar content using the same hashtags. These Influencers may not be known celebrities with millions of followers, but their video content is popular among loyal subscribers, who can also be your ideal target audience. 

4) Work with YouTube Influencer Marketing Agency

Considering the heavy inflow of content on the social media platform, many YouTube influencer marketing agencies have come into the foray. They are, however, no different than other influencer marketing platforms that provide services across all social media channels and not just a specific platform.  

Opting for these traditional approaches comes with its drawbacks, like, 

1)Manual and Time-consuming

Whether it is the search function, hashtag or trending list, these all take a manual effort in identifying the right influencer. It takes up ample of your time to first identify these influencers, then look for their contact on Google or other social media platforms for reaching out to them. 

2)Delay in Campaign Execution

If enough time is consumed only in manual search and fetching contact details from multiple sources, your marketing campaign might likely get delayed by months. Besides, in the later stages of campaign execution, it can get challenging to streamline influencer relationship management and measure the conversation around your brand.  

3) Huge budget involvement 

Be it hiring any YouTube influencer marketing agency or creating the team internally, all of it comes with a heavy cost burden. You can exceed the overall campaign cost due to the high pricing plans of the marketing agency. And if you plan to implement it internally, then also workforce deployment takes up a heavy chunk of the campaign budget. 

The easiest and the fastest way to get your campaigns off the ground is to go for automated solutions. AI-driven YouTube influencer marketing platforms have a huge database of creators and innovative features to manage bulk outreach and influencer conversations. They can track engagement, sentiment and sales too.  

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Ideally, a Youtube influencer marketing platform should have the ability to connect with as many YouTube influencers with just one click, eliminating the manual task. But other features should be equally considered, like, 

1. Advanced Demographic Segmentation- It is like presenting a well-rounded picture of the selected YouTube influencer’s subscribers or followers. You need a platform with inbuilt advanced demographics like  age, gender, location, lifestyle, the interest of the subscriber to ensure you work with best creators and who could ultimately target the right audience for your influencer marketing campaign.‍

2. Segmentation by interest:  Whichever your niche may be - beauty, health, wellness, travel or even blockchain - an ideal YouTube influencer marketing platform will identify only those influencers that align with your brand. ‍

3. Segmentation by Subscribers: Vetting influencer’s audience is pivotal to spreading your brand’s message. But influencers can be unworthy of the title in some cases. We tend to incline towards influencers having a large number of subscribers. But these numbers do not imply the success of the influencer. They can be fake followers or bots, which make your marketing efforts futile. 

4. Content Discovery Function- AI-driven platforms can search relevant YouTube influencers through meaningful content like captions, hashtags, personal bios, interest or location. An influencer marketing platform like affable.ai can also read multi-lingual texts, emojis and user tags for better results. 

5.  Managing CRM for Influencer Outreach: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is critical to optimize the influencer marketing strategy. You can track influencers for the campaign, reach out to them and manage all conversations in one place. A good CRM automatically updates you on the daily videos shared by influencers on a regular basis without letting you take up the manual effort. 

6. Measuring the effectiveness of the campaign: A good influencer marketing platform should have robust analytics for a brand to understand the effectiveness of its campaigns. It could give an overview of the number of views, likes on the video, estimated reach and impressions.  

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Many influencer marketing platforms identify and manage the best YouTube influencers based on a brand’s requirements. Like,

1. affable.ai: It is a SaaS tool for brands/agencies to search the best YouTube creators active in  different genres, manages conversations and effectively measures ROI of any campaign.  

2. Open Influence:  It identifies top performing creators. But their search for influencers is limited to only a few industries.

3. Aspire: The platform runs affiliate programmes and estimates the investment return of the campaign.  

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How do you find Youtube Influencers for your business?

There are two ways - manual and automated - to search YouTube influencers for your business. The manual process is time-consuming and requires workforce deployment, whereas the automated service by an influencer marketing platform gives a 360 degree view from advanced demographics to campaign analytics and measuring ROI. It saves hundreds of hours in executing an efficient and effective influencer marketing campaign. 

Which type of business can use Youtube Influencer Marketing?

Businesses of all sizes, any enterprise, agency or D2C eCommerce brand can use YouTube influencer marketing to run campaigns to create brand awareness and increase sales. 

How much do youtube Influencers charge per post?

Many YouTube influencers charge on video views. A nano influencer can charge  $20–$200 per video, whereas a micro-influencer takes $200–$1,000 per video. A macro influencer charges $10,000–$20,000 per post, and a mega influencer can exceed $20,000+ per post.

How does affable.ai differ from other  platforms?
Affable.ai is an all-in-one platform with a database of more than 6 million influencers across all social media platforms. It is easy to set up with an inbuilt CRM and  has advanced features like sentiment analysis etc., to manage the outreach and track conversations around your brand. While other platforms have a fixed pricing, Affable.ai offers customised subscription plans along with a free trial for business of every type.