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How Do I Choose An Influencer Marketing Platform?
Instagram Marketing
If your brand is considering a social media influencer marketing strategy, you’ll know that there are a lot of factors to keep in mind. You have to find the right influencers, reach out to them, manage your influencer partners, and track the campaign results. That can add up to many hours of work for your marketing team, not to mention stress and frustration.
Rather than managing all those tasks yourself, there is a better option — working with an influencer marketing platform. These influencer marketing software tools help brands successfully execute influencer marketing campaigns. They are also platforms for influencers to connect with brands.
Choosing an influencer marketing platform is a big decision, so staying informed about your options and key differentiators between platforms is essential. Here’s what you need to know:
What Platform Is Used Most For Influencer Marketing?
You can execute influencer marketing campaigns on any social media platform with influencers on it. However, some social media platforms are better suited to influencer marketing than others.
As of 2023, Instagram is the platform that marketers use for influencer marketing most often. 44.6% of spending on influencer marketing in the U.S. goes toward Instagram influencer marketing campaigns, totaling over $2.2 billion. Instagram is followed by YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook to round out the top four platforms for influencer marketing. TikTok has grown in popularity tremendously over the last few years — with users and marketers alike — and is expected to overtake YouTube to become the second most popular platform for influencer marketing by 2024.
One reason it makes sense that these social media platforms are the most popular is that they offer a poignant connection with the audience. They provide a vivid replica to the audience of what it is like to interact with your brand and product. From browsing your website to the joy of unboxing and opening your custom poly mailers to actually using your product, the audience gets a real sense of what it would be like to order from your company.
You can use an influencer marketing platform to connect with influencers on these social media sites. Most influencer marketing agencies work with influencers across various social media platforms, but you can also find agencies specializing in a specific social media platform like YouTube.
When you’re deciding which platform is best for influencer marketing for your brand, you have to consider several things. For example:
- Which social media platform is best for brands in your niche?
- Which platform emphasizes the media type (e.g. photo, video, audio) best suited to your brand?
- Which platform is the most affordable for running an influencer marketing campaign?
These questions can guide your decision about which platform to use in your campaign.
What Are The Most Popular Influencer Marketing Platforms?
So if you’re interested in working with an influencer platform, what options are there? The list of best influencer marketing platforms includes:
- Lionize
- Grin
- Traackr
- Upfluence
- Influencity
Other influencer marketing platforms exist, but these are some of the most popular and highly-rated options. You can also find some free influencer marketing platforms — just keep in mind that they offer limited features and may not be the right choice for your brand, depending on your needs.
Lionize, for example, stands out among influencer marketing platform options thanks to some of its unique, powerful features such as:
- An intuitive platform that anyone can use, regardless of experience level or knowledge of influencer marketing.
- Detailed, AI-powered matchmaking between your brand and the ideal influencers according to your company’s needs.
- Automated influencer outreach and influencer campaign management to eliminate tedious tasks.
- Comprehensive tracking and reporting of the results of your influencer marketing campaigns.
If you’re wondering, “how do I choose an influencer marketing platform?” you have to consider the most important features to your brand. Maybe you just need help connecting with social media influencers. Maybe you want an all-in-one solution that simplifies influencer marketing. Spend some time thinking about what you want to get out of working with an influencer marketing platform before you start your search.
How Do Brands Connect With Influencers?
Connecting with relevant influencers to get them to participate in your campaign can be one of the most difficult parts of influencer marketing. The good news is that you can try a few different strategies.
Say, for example, you want to find micro influencers — influencers with between 1,000 and 100,000 followers — for your campaign. One option to find these influencers for your campaign is simply to manually search on your chosen social media site like Instagram or Facebook for micro-influencers in your brand’s niche. That’s one answer to the question, “how do I connect with influencers for free?” You can also search through a standard search engine for a list of applicable micro-influencers, but that may yield mixed results.
The prospect of sorting through dozens or even hundreds of social media profiles to find the right influencers for your target audience can be time-consuming. Another option is to look for influencer platforms for micro-influencers. These platforms work specifically with micro-influencers and can help you connect with the best ones for your campaign. Lionize’s influencer platform specializes in matching brands with micro-influencers in specific niches to create effective campaigns from day one.
How Lionize Can Help With Influencer Campaigns
Any brand can successfully manage an Instagram influencer marketing campaign with the help of an influencer marketing software platform like Lionize.
Lionize’s influencer marketplace platform will do all the heavy lifting, from influencer discovery to influencer relationship management, so you can sit back and reap the rewards of an influencer marketing strategy. Book a discovery call today to see how Lionize can help with your influencer marketing efforts.
For Brands
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For Agencies
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