Influencer marketing tech must haves

Influencer marketing has become a hugely profitable industry, valued at nearly $13.8 billion in 2021 alone. As brands recognize the power of thought leaders’ voices on the Internet, influencer marketing campaigns are becoming more complex – being managed across different influencers, various platforms and with diverse content strategies. Therefore, more brands are turning to technological influencer data and campaign management solutions, like IMAI’s, to get a holistic view of their influencer marketing campaigns.

What are some of the must-have features to look for in an influencer marketing tech solution?

Discovery features

Because influencer marketing can be costly for brands, sometimes even reaching five or six figures, it is important for brands to identify the best fitting influencers who can help achieve campaign goals. That’s why discovery features that allow brands to search influencers according to interest, related tags and hashtags, and past promotional partnerships (among a ton of other metrics), are really key to any influencer marketing solution. Our artificial intelligence-based solution allows users to access the industry’s largest database of over 120 million influencers across the top social platforms, which is critical for brands looking to get their marketing spend right. That’s a lot of potential influencers to discover!

Fake followers indication

This is another really critical, and sometimes overlooked, aspect of influencer discovery. It’s best to try to use a platform that has a built-in indication of how many fake or bot followers an influencer has, as this is an increasingly common occurrence among influencers, both mega and micro. Without an accurate indication of how many genuine followers an influencer actually has, your brand can’t effective translate the campaign KPIs into realistic reflections on the desired ROI. Make yourself look better by always checking out the number of fake followers first!

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Precise campaign estimation and measurement 

Just as it’s important for brands to know all about the influencer they are investing in working with, they should also get a sense of how successful the campaign will be, if possible prior to the launch. This will help marketing teams set more realistic engagement goals for the campaign while also providing an idea if the selected influencer marketing strategy works. Some of the parameters it makes sense to estimate include engagement rate, follower additions, post exposure and even ROI. Once the campaign is launched, it makes sense to measure its performance in an organized fashion, which is made possible on IMAI’s solution by allowing users to build lists where they can analyze specific parameters, like hashtag performance or how the ads are performing with specific audience segments. 

Understanding impact on overall social reach

Another aspect that brands should keep close track of is how the campaign impacts their social reach overall. This could be by monitoring the brand’s engagement before and after the campaign, or tracking the number of new followers added to the page. For social commerce campaigns, it makes sense to track the clicks to conversions and clicks to purchases ratio to ensure that the content is working and helping to achieve the desired ROI.

These are only a sampling of the features that you should look for in an influencer marketing technology solution, and as the field continues to grow, there will definitely be more specific drilldowns and interesting data available.