Unleashing the Power of Influencer Marketing Platforms: Your Guide to Success

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways for brands to get their products and services in front of an established and engaged audience. Yet both companies and influencers can struggle to find the right partnerships.

If only things were as simple as swiping left or right on a dating app, right?

Well, some influencer marketing platforms streamline the process tremendously. Check out this guide to discover the best influencer marketplace sites and how to use them to strike new successful deals, no matter if you’re a brand or an influencer.

The Impact of Influencer Marketing Platforms

Influencer marketing is worth billions, literally, and the industry is expected to reach $21.1 billion in 2023. Compare that to $16.1 in 2016, when the industry was just getting started.

Today, it’s fairly common to see people of any size following on social platforms working with brands. But if a few years ago, these partnerships required more manual labor to set up, the growing popularity of influencer marketing platforms helped streamline the process tremendously.

Essentially, instead of reaching out to an influencer in their DMs (or vice versa), brands and influencers can use these sites to meet each other. Many of these sites help facilitate these connections by making it easier to find companies or influencers based on their industry, niches, following, and other key factors both parties need to know.

Choosing the Right Influencer Marketing Platform

Finding the right influencer in marketing is sometimes as difficult as finding the right influencer or brand. With so many options available, getting through all the potential sites can be tricky.

Here are some things you should consider when looking for a new influencer platform:

1. Your target audience: Influencer marketing works if the brand and influencer have overlapping audiences. Influencer platforms with a larger audience offer everyone the best chances of finding suitable partnerships. You can get started with Grin, which has over 33 million influencers in its marketplace.
2. Your niche: Similar to the target audience, a partnership works best when the influencer and brand are active in the same industry, or at least in complementary ones you can reasonably see interacting. Some sites, like Upfluence, help all parties connect based on their industry and save a lot of time in the process.
3. Your objectives: Both the brand and the influencer have something to gain out of a partnership, and the best collaborations result when these objectives are also somewhat connected. An influencer platform like Klear can offer powerful tools to track campaigns so everyone can see if these objectives were met or not.

Features and Benefits

Influencer marketing platforms can work differently, but most will offer these key features:

1. Search: First, an influencer marketing platform is supposed to help brands search for influencers. In the case of content creators, though you might not be able to search for companies on these sites, you can set up an account to boost your visibility and be discovered by companies.
2. Communication: Instead of DMs or other third-party communications, an influencer platform will help both parties engage with each other directly on the platform.
3. Analysis: Some influencer platforms also have analytics features to help you track your campaign efforts and see results.
4. Payments: A great influencer marketing platform will also facilitate payments between the company and the content creator.

The most notable benefit of an influencer marketing platform is saving time when trying to find an influencer or connect with a brand. But some other perks should encourage you to use these services:

1. Increased safety: Since both the payments and communications are facilitated through the influencer marketing platform, both parties can be protected from scammers.
2. Advanced tools: These solutions work as a marketing ecosystem specifically for influencer campaigns. They enable better marketing efforts that can help both pirates reach their goals.
3. Pre-vetting: Influencer marketing platforms (the good ones, at least) will vet both influencers and brands to determine if they’re legitimate before allowing them on their platforms. This again ties into safety, but it can also save both parties time with vetting.

Navigating Influencer Marketplaces

An influencer marketplace is a website specifically designed to help brands connect with influencers. They are somewhat different from influencer marketing platforms since they often lack advanced tools like campaign analytics.

In most cases, an influencer marketplace is just a digital space for both parties to meet. They can have the added benefit of building larger audiences than other types of platforms, which increases your chances of finding a suitable match.

Moreover, influencer marketplaces can provide more detailed search functions to help brands find a content creator in their specific niche. In most cases, it’s the brand that will reach out to the influencer, while the content creator will sign up for the service and wait for a company to reach out.

Micro-Influencer Platforms

Micro and nano-influencers may have a smaller following, but their engagement metrics remain stronger when compared to people with bigger audiences.

Smaller influencers often speak to a niche group and have better-established expertise on a particular subject. They also provide a level of authenticity that macro-influencers cannot, which is why brands want to work with them.

There are even lots of great examples of brands working with micro-influencers, such as the Honest Company’s Brand Ambassador program, where the only listed criteria for entering is content niche (specifically moms) and not audience size.

Mandala AI Tools for Influencers

Mandala AI makes it easier for both influencers and brands to establish the right partnerships and track their campaign performance.

This suite provides enhanced social listening features and trend identification software to help you identify the people or companies that you can reach out to and monitor your engagements and interactions.

You can learn more about tools such as Top Channels and Top Mentions here.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing platforms technically make it easier for these types of platforms to take place, but choosing the right one for you shouldn’t be done on a whim.

Have you tried these influencer marketing platforms before? Let us know in the comments and share your experience!

Don’t forget to check out Mandala AI’s powerful influencer marketing tools and see how they can help you build stronger campaigns.