How a Great Influencer Marketing Platform Can Elevate Your Brand and Earnings

Influencer marketing has become a huge focus for digital marketing plans of businesses large and small, and for good reason: The majority of marketers find that influencer content outperforms their branded content. But, there’s a lot to consider with influencer marketing no matter how seasoned a digital marketer you may be, from partner recruitment and management to payouts and providing solid resources. You’re likely going to need help, and that’s where the right influencer marketing platform comes in.

Keep reading to learn more about:

• What influencer marketing platforms are
• When you should consider using an influencer marketing platform
• Benefits of influencer marketing platforms
• Choosing the best influencer marketing platform for your needs

What Are Influencer Marketing Platforms?

Influencer marketing platforms are digital tools that scale, streamline, and speed up the process of finding and managing influencers and marketing campaigns for your brand and products. They help you to:

• Source and connect with influencers relevant to your brand and business, through features like marketplaces or opt-ins.
• Manage communication, campaigns, and payment.
• Maintain quality relationships with influencers.
• Boost sales using marketing resources, affiliate links, discount codes, and promotions.
• Track and monitor analytics on your marketing campaigns’ ROI.

These tools are invaluable if you’re wanting to work with multiple influencers on multiple campaigns since the platforms automate processes and save you tons of time and effort. A good influencer marketing platform will relieve you of manual processes and transactions so that you can spend time on more strategic aspects of your business and foster relationships with the partners working with you.

When Do Influencer Marketing Platforms Fit Into Your Plans?

If you’re just starting out with your business, chances are you’re manually working through many processes and tasks and haven’t had a chance to really see where automation and support from a digital platform might benefit your business. But once you have, you’ll understand how necessary a platform is to scale your business and earn more.

Plus, the ability to link sales directly to a campaign is key to understanding your ROI. Since you by now know that you’re getting some return on the investment, effort, and time spent on campaigns – however you’ve been handling them – you also know that you’ll get some sort of return on your influencer marketing platform investment, too.

As well, if you’re wanting to level up your campaigns and make your brand more official and prominent, you’ll need to create and automate proper influencer, ambassador, and affiliate programs. And this is where an influencer marketing platform shines. There are tons of options out there, but when you use a solid, all-in-one tool like GrowthHero, you’ll know you’re getting quality SaaS and ecommerce influencer and affiliate program software that easily allows you to recruit and manage partners who drive sales and make you successful.

How Influencer Marketing Platforms Can Benefit Your Business

There are so many ways that influencer marketing platforms can benefit your business and help you elevate your brand or achieve the marketing goals you have your sights set on. No matter your plans, if budget, scaling, and gaining more control over your campaigns are important, an influencer marketing platform is going to set you up for success.

Not only do these platforms help you improve your reach, relationships, and partnership opportunities with ideal influencers in your industry, but they also save your time and boost your ROI on campaigns (super important since businesses like yours earn up to $18 per dollar invested on them). Let’s dive a bit deeper into the perks you’ll enjoy and ways your life will be easier when you use the right tool.

Spend less time finding the right influencers

You may well know the sheer amount of time it takes to comb through several social platforms and evaluate potential influencers, one by one. You can literally get sucked into a deep, dark rabbit hole with no end in sight.

This is where the right influencer marketing platform scales your effort with the ability to search key elements like location, keyword, aesthetic, industry or niche, audience demographics, and engagement metrics. The flip side of this is that great platforms actually bring potential partners to you – again, saving precious time and energy – with features like a recruitment marketplace, ecommerce integrations, multi-level marketing, and partner tiers. The great news is GrowthHero offers all of these things and more.

Automate and streamline manual campaign tasks & processes

No matter what your business or industry is, efficiency and maximizing time will be key to a bigger bottom line. That means there isn’t much time or space for manually monitoring and executing work. Instead, customized workflows efficiently tracking each phase of a campaign is what will bring you that time back into your day for things that matter most. Tools like GrowthHero also automate transactional emails and remind you when to follow up with people, so nothing gets left by the wayside.

Manage your influencer relationships in one spot

There’s a pretty strong case for influencer relationships being your top partner program success factor, or close to it at least. After all, without good influencers by your side promoting your brand and products, you’ll likely fall behind your competitors’ programs. And to keep up with that competition and launch successful programs and campaigns, you need to nurture those relationships. Yet, you only have so many hours in your day, so how do you do this well?

Good question. It comes down to consistently monitoring each influencer relationship’s lifecycle, and to do this effectively and efficiently requires a good CRM integration. Whether you use your existing one or one tied to a platform, a CRM database helps you organize your influencers’ information and where they’re at in the lifecycle of a given campaign or program.

Through your CRM integration, you’ll see who your top performers are and maybe deserving of a virtual high-five or incentive, and who could use a friendly nudge in the right direction. Then, you can bulk-email segments of your influencer contacts with the right message. Your communication and campaigns get saved for future reference, helping to maintain or build that relationship down the road, however it blossoms.

Track progress and measure ROI

Every business needs to track their progress and success in what they’re earning, in any initiative they take on or investment they make. Influencer marketing campaigns are no different, so you need a reliable, efficient way to track their numbers and, over time, compare them to a benchmark.

The right influencer platform makes it easy to capture the data you need to assess and then get insight into ROI on various campaigns and programs – whether you’re tracking clicks, reach, impressions, shares, comments, discount code usage, sales, or something else. This is a huge help with making the right decisions for the future (like attributing metrics to each influencer to understand their personal success) and feeling confident that you’re as well informed as possible when making those decisions.

How to Choose The Right Influencer Platform for Your Business

There are many important considerations to make when it comes to picking the best influencer marketing platform for your business. And this can definitely feel overwhelming – there’s no doubt about that. Critically thinking about what you need will help narrow down your options and make the decision-making process that much easier.

First and foremost, be sure you truly need an influencer platform. Maybe your entrepreneur friends run a partner program and have been raving about the latest and greatest platform, or maybe you were super impressed by a particular product’s features. Whatever the case is, you need to consider whether you truly need an influencer platform at this point. If you’ve been doing influencer marketing for some time and work with a trusted, high-performing group already, chances are you don’t need a platform.

But, if you’re new to influencer marketing or haven’t had the best luck with it for a while, a good platform will likely help you achieve more successful outcomes, much faster than going it alone with a manual process. Plus, since over 85% of marketers feel their main influencer marketing goal is brand awareness this should be a top priority for you, and influencer marketing platforms are a great tool to help create that brand awareness.

So, if you feel you’re ready to take your partner programs to the next level, carry on with these questions to help you find the best influencer marketing platform for your needs.

Questions to ask when choosing an influencer marketing platform

Depending on your business and digital marketing strategy, there are several questions you’ll probably want to ask about any influencer marketing platform you’re considering. Here are some common ones to consider.

How easy is it to use?

Generally speaking, if a tool isn’t intuitive and straightforward, you’re going to have a hard time with its learning curve for a bit. And you have way more important things to do with your time than waste it on learning a complex tool, especially when many equal or better options are easier to learn for a lower cost. Plus, you’ll want to get going quickly with your campaigns.

This is one area that a platform like GrowthHero stands out: not only is it simple to navigate with a super user-friendly interface, it comes with a free 14-day trial and 1-1 demo, so you can spend that time getting to know it and having all of your questions answered before you even commit to a plan (which are reasonably priced, by the way).

What features does the platform offer?

As with anything else, not all influencer platforms are made equal. You’ll get different features with different products, so you’ll definitely need to assess your options to be sure you’ll actually need and use the bulk of what’s at your disposal. Then you’ll know you’re making a wise investment. For example, you might want to consider things like how:

• The tool lets you communicate with influencer partners and whether doing so is built-in or external to the platform.
• Performance is tracked and how transparent each influencer’s campaign success is – this will help you understand how effective they are and how much value they bring to your business over time.
• You pay influencers through the platform and what your payment method options are.
• Content rights are handled – do you get them automatically or negotiate them with each campaign or partner?
• Fees are set – are they fixed per influencer or do you negotiate individually?

GrowthHero does all of this and more

A tool like GrowthHero addresses these areas well. For instance, it’s very easy to communicate with and manage influencer partners through a dedicated Partner Portal (your brand can even be customized to it so partners get a seamless, cohesive experience). And, you can track, view, and analyze performance via analytics and make changes to campaigns with segments and experiments like A/B testing. Check out the video below to learn more about this.

As well, GrowthHero gives you the flexibility and freedom to pay your partners through different methods at different times, as needed. And, you can motivate them with Partner Tiers – so the better they perform, the more they’re rewarded.

How straightforward is it to find the influencers you need?

A critical piece of the influencer marketing platform puzzle is being able to source and choose the best-suited influencers for your campaign and brand. It should be quick and simple to filter or drill down through lists of influencer options. Look for people who are relevant to what you do and sell, who have strong engagement between their content and audience, and who have a decent-sized following within the market you’re targeting.

Part of the process is knowing that certain platforms are targeted to certain types of influencers and industries – like those just for Instagram covering only food or travel content, for instance. But, it’s a fine balance. While you need to find partners specialized enough in what you’re doing, you also don’t want to specify too much at the outset and limit your potential future pool and the audiences they engage with.

Affiliate and Influencer Hunt

This is where a feature like GrowthHero’s Affiliate and Influencer Hunt is great: You can quickly search for and reach out to the right influencers for your brand and partner program. Likewise, the tool’s Marketplace Listings let them come to you – save time by listing your program in advance, then sit back and wait to be contacted by potential partners.

Oh, and don’t forget about quality over quantity, too, as you need to make strong connections to succeed in influencer marketing. It’s better to have a few of the right partners than dozens of the wrong ones. A great way to scope out the quality of a platform’s influencer pool before diving in is to look at customer testimonials. Along with other platforms, GrowthHero has many happy customers who have shared their experiences and successes with the tool.

You should now have a better understanding of what influencer marketing platforms are, when you’re wise to consider using one, the benefits they can bring to your business, and how to go about choosing the right platform. Armed with this knowledge, you’re in a better position to level up your influencer marketing partnerships, strategy, and campaigns and enjoy more success!