What is an Influencer Marketing Platform? | The Influence
Today there are millions of influencers creating billions of messages across dozens of different channels 24 hours a day seven days a week. It is simply not possible to effectively manage any kind of influencer marketing program at scale without an Influencer Marketing Platform (IMP).
So what is an Influencer Marketing Platform? An IMP is a collection of software modules relating to influencer marketing typically delivered as an integrated Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) package in the cloud. Brands in the space include IZEA, Mavrck, Upfluence, Traackr, and Captiv8 among others.
According to new research by MarketsandMarkets, the value of the IMP business is expected to grow from $6 billion per annum in 2020 to $24 billion a year by 2025. One major reason for this growth will be the reduction in what is considered ‘traditional’ advertising spend — and a growing dependence by marketers on influencers as a way to reach their target markets.
What do Influencer Marketing Platforms do?
Although the individual IMP modules vary from provider to provider, they all cover the following basic tasks that an influencer marketing manager must do to set up and manage any influencer campaign.
1. Find the right influencers
This is usually called the ‘Locate’, ‘Discover’, or ‘Search’ module. Any good IMP will enable a user to quickly search through thousands of potential influencers and filter the search by things like channel (YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, etc), location, follower numbers & demographics, engagement, price, and other important metrics. With the filters applied, the discovery process generates a more easily manageable list of potential influencers to move to stage 2.
Influencers provide this information when they opt into these search databases. For example, IZEA provides a free app in the Apple store that enables influencers to list themselves on the platform and engage with campaign opportunities.
2. Engage with your shortlist
The best Influencer Marketing Platforms will have done the hard work of collecting all the communications details for every influencer. The platform should enable you to reach out to thousands of potential influencers simultaneously with an offer, or invite them to bid on a project.
3. Campaign Management
An influencer campaign will typically involve multiple different projects, influencers, and staff on your team. The components of the campaign will include creating content assets like articles, graphics & infographics, videos, podcasts e.t.c — in addition to a wide range of brand assets, legal documents, payment processing, and team messaging. Although the specific campaign management tools integrated into an IMP vary a lot from platform to platform, their goal is to make it easier to collaborate on and coordinate the wide range of activities involved in a campaign — building efficiency into the workflow.
4. Campaign analytics
The measurement phase. There is no shortage of ways to spend your budgets conducting an influencer campaign. The industry is still young and the ultimate golden rules of influencer marketing best practice have yet to be written.
Ultimately, the responsibility falls on influencer marketing managers to analyze their campaigns and decide which metrics are the most important in terms of measuring return on investment (ROI). To that end, the IMPs do provide a wide range of specific tools and metric indicators. At the least, you should expect to see graphing functionality, exportable data, at-glance-insight, and a range of built-in ROI metrics. Most campaign analytics modules will include the following;
- Influencer statistics — most views, shares, engagement.
- Impressions and click-through rates
- Cost-per engagement calculation
- Sales conversions
- Most shared content
- Comma & Tab Separated Values (CSV & TSV) exports.
- Customizable reporting
- Total earned media valuation
- Best ROI channel (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc)
- Best overall creators in ROI terms
- Share of social voice
- Growth in organic brand mentions
What do Influencer Marketing Platforms cost?
Influencer marketing platforms are expensive, but it is not easy to say definitively what an IMP should cost. Unfortunately none of the brands mentioned in this article post specific pricing on their websites. This is unusual in the SAAS space in general, where providers will usually have a comprehensive pricing page, typically broken into 3 pricing tiers of Basic, Pro, and Elite. Many online reviews of the Upfluence IMP say they were charged $800 a month, with a 12-month minimum contract — so $9600 for an annual subscription. For its part, IZEA offers a Discovery version of its IMP for $149 a month, but this is search only, with very limited functionality. Overall, this lack of transparency around pricing is disappointing, but the upside for marketers appears to be that this is an industry in its early stages — and pricing may well be negotiable.
Pros and cons of using an Influencer Marketing Platform
Reviews of existing IMPs reveal that most users are very satisfied with the capacity of the systems to filter and find a selection of influencers — saving the marketers countless hours of non-productive work trying to do this manually. Campaign management modules are also well-liked, as teams are able to collaborate easily using the platform — and move away from using a patchwork of spreadsheets and shared docs to manage campaigns. On the downside, many users across a range of platforms complained about the communications with the influencers themselves — with many influencers not responding to offers and projects, even though they had opted in and appear to be a good fit. Many users also complained about the steep learning curves required to use the software, and bugs and glitches in the platforms were not uncommon.
Summary
Influencer Marketing Platforms offer a potential lifeline to overworked marketing managers. The number of influencers, channels, and competitors in the influencer marketing space is increasing at an epic pace and will continue to do so — so tools like these will be a must-have in due course. That said, it will be some time before IMPs can flawlessly deliver on a marketer’s every desire. The huge amount of data processing required to deliver actionable insights via these platforms should not be underestimated. Also, the platforms themselves are not agents for the influencers and have little control over their responsiveness or professionalism. Given the sizeable investment, It is recommended that marketers take their time evaluating any package before purchase and seek legal advice before signing long term contracts.
Originally published at https://theinfluence.biz on December 29, 2020.
