Influencer marketing tools for 2023: 13 apps for in-depth research and tips on how to use them

20 minutes read

Don’t be discouraged

Every marketer and their mother is talking about how awesome influencer marketing is — and they are not wrong. Even though it has been repeatedly included in the "20xx trends" for at least the last ten years, it’s there for a reason. 

This strategy has had some changes over time, but it remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there.

According to the 2020 survey conducted by the Influencer Marketing Hub, 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations. Perhaps that's why 91% of the survey respondents (i.e. social media marketing professionals) believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing. So, of course, businesses and agencies are interested in influencer marketing tools.

The best thing about this strategy is that this type of social media marketing is universal and affordable for almost every business. You can work with brand advocates effectively regardless of the niche your company belongs to. All you need to do is plan out your influencer outreach and invest time in influencer relationship management. Because the pool of influencers is just as diverse as the population of planet earth. 

However, as I mentioned before, there have been a lot of changes introduced to the way we carry out influencer marketing campaigns. So, how can you be sure that your influencer marketing strategy is not outdated? Are the tools you have the best you can use? Or, will you lag behind your competitors?

You can check it with this article! 

We gathered the most up-to-date influencer marketing tips to show what you should and shouldn't do in 2023. This advice is based on influencer marketing trends that we could observe in 2021/2.

So let's refresh your influencer marketing strategy according to influencer marketing 2023 trends for any influencer tool.

At the end of the article, we recommend influencer marketing software for any needs, so make sure you read everything!

Tip 1: Work with micro-influencers

For newbie marketers, the more followers an influencer has, the more leads their campaign will generate, right? Wrong! The biggest mistake a marketer can make is to go chasing follower numbers. A study by Experticity found that 82% of consumers are “highly likely” to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

Oftentimes, micro-influencers focus on a specific niche: they can talk about growing plants, reading Tarot cards, reviewing different bikes, visiting interesting tourist destinations, and so on. This helps you choose an influencer whose followers are certainly in your target audience. Micro-influencers often have the cred and likeability that bigger stars do not, which plays in your favor.

Influencer location can also be an advantage. You can include brand advocates from a pool of bloggers who live in your business location. It will be much easier to drive influencer relationship management and keep in contact with influencers who live in the same postal code area as you—think hyper relevance. Laser-focused marketing is the best kind of marketing!

Another advantage of micro-influencers is their relationships with their audience. Due to the size of their following, they are able to build a more genuine and authentic connection with their followers, and, as such, people trust their recommendations much more than those of a macro-influencer.

For these reasons, it might be more beneficial for your brand to contact a smaller influencer for an influencer marketing campaign. So, start your first influencer research by analyzing micro-bloggers that have the same target audience. (Spoiler: You can use influencer marketing tools for this! Social listening tools and analytics marketing software a perfect for doing niche influencer search).

Tip 2: Pay attention to analytics

As we learned, marketers are convinced that influencer marketing works. But it's not enough to believe that it works. In the marketing world, social media marketing data is everything and you need to back up your beliefs with robust analytics. That's where influencer marketing tools come in.

Analytics should be the basis of your influencer marketing strategy—the first step.

When you set up an influencer campaign, it's most likely you check the number of clicks and purchases from URLs you provide the influencer with. Many marketers stop at that. However, this is not enough to analyze an influencer's performance.

It's becoming more and more common to ask influencers for deeper analytics such as:

You can also use social listening to check how much buzz your campaign generated and among which demographics it was more popular.

Analyzing all these numbers, you can understand if your collaboration was successful. Some marketers use Influencer KPIs to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each blogger they work with.

For instance, they measure influencer responsibility by checking how long they take to respond to their emails or DMs, and how many times they postponed the publication of their posts. It is a useful approach to find the best brand advocates with fantastic outputs.  

You can check out the influencer marketing tools list at the end of this article to figure out which tool's analytics will work best for you.

Tip 3: Get creative with influencer campaigns

In 2020 and especially 2021, it's no longer enough to post a picture of your products and say you like it to convince people to buy it. Your influencer marketing strategy needs to be creative.

Both brands and influencers are getting more creative with their influencer campaigns and using different mediums, formats, and types of content to convert consumers.

Take a look at this paid partnership post by Hannah Witton. The Old Vic theatre partnered with Hannah to promote their online Christmas performances and asked her to play Jingle Bells with the handbells they've sent her.

They partnered with her for several reasons:

Because of all this, she matches their target audience great!

This campaign is a perfect example of a сreative influencer marketing strategy. Don't just give your influencers a short pitch with a product description and call it a day. Use your imagination!

Tip 4: Say yes to long-term partnerships

More and more brands are prioritizing long-term influencer marketing relationships with creators over one-time collaborations. For example, in the make-up world, brands create PR lists with trusted influencers and send them every new product they launch, invite them for their events (in pre-COVID times, obviously), take them on trips, and invite them to host their online streams — all to nurture their influencer marketing strategy and relationships with opinion leaders.

Of course, building relationships requires more effort than collaborating on one social media post, but the influencer marketing ROI can be incredible. The audience of the influencer is getting reminded of your brand more and more often and, as a result, becomes more and more interested in it.

Moreover, relationship management with creators you've known for a long time is much easier than setting up completely new arrangements.

Besides, long-term collaboration is a sign of a brand's quality: you wouldn't use a product more than one time if it was a bad product or service. It is true for Twitch influencers first but for other platforms where influencer marketing is thriving, it's a rule as well.

For example, this influencer has been partnering with Glossier for the last 3 years and many of her followers learned about the brand through her videos. That's a great influencer marketing move on Glossier's part — they get to show their brand many times and create a strong association between the blogger and her lifestyle and their brand. What a perfect example of influencer marketing done right!

Tip 5: Invite influencers to host virtual events

Speaking about online streams, with many people locked inside to stop the spread of COVID-19 or other seasonal viruses, online events are more popular than ever. Influencer marketing is not an exception.

An online event doesn't have to be a huge deal like an award show or something like that, it can be just a live-stream on Instagram, a Q&A session, a LinkedIn how-to clip, or something else as easily produced. The influencer's followers will be happy to tune in to see their favourite creator and you raise your brand awareness through influencer marketing in return.

This tactic was successfully used by Joe Biden during his presidential campaign. The future president invited influencers from different niches, from young women rights activists to mommy bloggers, and they interviewed him on their topic of interest. The interviews were streamed on Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram.

It would be presumptuous to say that influencer marketing helped Joe Biden win the elections but it certainly worked. All the more reasons to try it yourself!

Plus! Online events aren’t just to avoid getting sick. They’re a perfect way to expand your audience, as people from all over the world can participate.

Tip 6: Use reputation analysis and influencer marketing tools

Influencer analysis on the whole is vital to influencer marketers. Track your influencer and their growth, but give particular attention to their reputation.

When choosing an influencer, it's extremely important to monitor their reputation. You need to make sure that you won't stir up controversy or straight-up cause a PR crisis by partnering with an unlucky Internet personality. 

Reputation analysis is an integral part of relationship management in influencer marketing.

Luckily, modern marketing technology allows you to run a check of someone's reputation much quicker and on a much deeper level than a simple Google search could do. Today, you can start detailed influencer research and analysis with any free or paid influencer marketing tool you would like!

In addition to that, online reputation management tools are often using social listening technology, so you can employ them for influencer search as well. With a powerful influencer research tool, you can find influencers based on keywords related to your niche. As a quick point, we wrote a more thorough guide on how to find influencers if you want to check it out!

Finding influencers that fit your influencer strategy is never easy. That's where influencer marketing tools and social listening tools can help.

There are many services that make influencer marketing easier. To give you some idea of what top reputation analysis and influencer marketing tools look like, here's a small list!

Influencer marketing tools

1. Awario

 

Awario is a social listening tool that helps you monitor and manage your online reputation. It also has a dedicated Influencers report that ranks influencers in your niche based on their reach i.e. how many people see their posts. So, you can use it as an influencer research tool as well.

Influencer search can be done through Mention Feed — you just sort the influencer content by reach, find the authors with the highest number of followers, and check their profiles.

Awario's real-time sentiment analysis tackles reputation and relationship management easily. It allows you to quickly process how people talk about specific creators online.

In the Influencers report, you can measure the influence, see how prominent voices in your industry talk about your brand and related topics, what kind of sentiment they express, how often they mention them, and so on. The report links to influencers' profiles, so you can connect with them right away.

Awario also can help with brand monitoring, lead generation, link-building, target audience research and more depending on your goals. You can try it for free for 7 days. 

2. Klear

Klear is the first influencer database on our list. It is an influencer marketing platform to help you find and manage online influencers.

The tool helps you to find influencers, analyze their popularity, demographics of their audience, facilitate your reach out and collaborations. Klear also analyzes the results of your collaboration: the all-important aspect that we highlighted in our article. 

There are no free plans for Klear. However, you can schedule a demo to try it.

3. Upfluence

Upfluence is a full-scale influencer platform, offering a well-rounded set of features including an influencer search and discovery engine. It's one of these influencer management tools that covers everything from the influencer search, to outreach, to deals, and more.

The platform analyzes each piece of content an influencer produces for reach and engagement rate. It's more of a database of influencers than a social listening tool that searches for influencers online, but with more than 3 million influencers it should be more than enough to find someone who is a perfect fit for your brand.

A free trial for this influencer marketing tool is not available, unfortunately.

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is not your average influencer marketing platform. It is primarily a content analysis tool, but it has a separate dashboard dedicated to influencers. It includes an Influencers and Outreach section which allows you to find, analyze, and follow influencers. You can sort this in many ways to determine who are the most important influencers on social media in your niche.

Since the tool works heavily with written content such as posts and articles, it also displays such stats as domain authority for blogs and websites, which is great if you're looking to collaborate with a blogger or a journalist.

You can test this influencer discovery tool for free for 30 days.

5. Buzzstream

Buzzstream is one of the marketing tools that works with social media and websites but focuses on websites and blogs specifically. You can analyze their social media presence as well as their website's audience. 

Then, you can easily add those influencers to sortable, filterable prospect lists. For example, you can sort by authority, or whether someone has promoted you in the past. 

Once you have your prospect lists with their email address, BuzzStream makes it easy to send out personalized emails and automated follow-ups, as well as see data on how effective your outreach efforts are. 

The influencer research tool has a free trial period.

6. NinjaOutreach

What’s about outreach marketing tools? For instance, NinjaOutreach can help you with influencer research on YouTube and Instagram. It works as a database with millions of social accounts. Filtering them by location, topic, niche, and other categories, you can reach out to bloggers that you feel are the best fit for your brand.

Additionally, NinjaOutreach is a shared work environment where your team can track influencer campaigns, organize your customers, monitor conversations, replies, and clicks.

Using the platform is free within 7 days.

7. Followerwonk 

Followerwonk (formerly a tool from Moz, an SEO solutions provider) is an ideal platform to build relationships with Twitter influencers. By the way, this influencer marketing tool is one of the dozens of free tools for Twitter monitoring. Type in any account to the search field, and the tool shows you all essential information around a page, including its Social Authority rate.

You can search Twitter profiles or Twitter bios only using keywords related to your industry. Also, there are a lot of useful in-app features such as Follow and Unfollow an account, compare up to three profiles, and analyze Twitter users by slicing them into actionable segments to find the most influential or identify dormant ones.  

Followerwonk offers free access with limited functionality.

8. Pitchbox

Pitchbox is a powerful influencer marketing platform that provides robust analytics. This is a content marketing and influencer outreach platform for publishers, SEO agencies, and companies. But you can use it for influencer research as well. 

Pitchbox has a big database of bloggers with a keyword search. Thanks to integrations with Moz, SEMRush, and other SEO tools, the platform detects the best websites for link building. Additionally, the platform provides outreach, campaign tracking and reporting features, CRM, and SEO email client.

A free trial is not available, but you can book a demo to try the tool for yourself.

9. Julius

Julius is another platform of thoroughly-checked influencers that can offer more than 120,000 accounts at your disposal. The platform provides all the tools you need to build an influencer marketing campaign or a long-term influencer discovery strategy.

You can reach out to influencers from the database on the platform, create and organize lists, track the influencers' activity, and tag and leave notes on their profiles.

In addition to that, the platform itself uses automation to flag any suspicious profiles that could have bought followers or engagement to check for their authenticity.

Unlike other search platforms, you pay an annual fee for Julius—there is no monthly option. The specific price you’ll pay depends on the number of users you want to give access to the software. Each case is different.

10. Creator.co

Creator.co is an Instagram-specific platform that aims to connect brands with Instagram creators. Essentially, it's an influencer marketplace or database where you can find creators for your campaigns.

What makes it stand out is that this platform primarily focuses on small businesses and unique brands.

You can use their tool for influencer discovery, taking advantage of the 500 million creator profiles from their database, or encourage influencers to find you. Here's how it works:

Creater.co allows you to build an influencer marketing campaign on their platform through the Community-Driven plan with all the information an influencer would need to participate. In their turn, creators can shop around and choose which campaigns to join and create content for. You have to accept or decline any influencer who applies to participate, but you don’t have to worry about running your campaign. 

Of course, this requires you to be very specific with the campaign description and the kind of influencer marketing content you want to see, but the task of influencer discovery is lifted off your shoulders.

11. HypeAuditor

If you're looking for influencers on the three main video platforms: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, HypeAuditor is the tool for you.

It combines all the aspects necessary to build a comprehensive workflow, including influencer discovery, influencer analytics, campaign management, and even market analysis.

HyperAuditor's database includes almost 60 million profiles across three social media platforms. All of them are vetted by their algorithm so you can be sure of the quality of creators you collaborate with.

The search is organized around the audiences' demographics, so it's exceptionally easy to find influencers that fit your campaign. Once you launch influencer discovery, you can create lists and track prospective influencers.

There are 28 different metrics and scores, giving users a thorough understanding of the potential collaborators. The main metric is the Audience Quality Score (AQS) which shows how likely the influencer's audience will be affected by their posts.

Unlike most influencer marketing platforms, HypeAuditor works on a Pay-As-You-Go model, no subscription required. You pay for tokens up front, and each token gets you one influencer report.

HyperAuditor also offers some free tools that allow you to check the eligibility of influencer accounts on social media platforms.

12. Peg

This is another network-specific platform, but this time it focuses on YouTube. While for YouTube it's already a full influencer marketplace, it has recently added Instagram influencer discovery as well.

Peg is more of a public influencer database than a research or analytics tool.

This influencer marketing tool does a lot of the same things that any other influencer marketplace does. You navigate around and see that you have the option of searching for influencers, creating and managing campaigns, inviting influencers to participate, messaging influencers, etc. However, Peg only works with 33,000 influencers, who meet its stringent criteria. Peg works in the background, parsing all influencers’ content and assigning them a “Safety Score.”

Peg was recently bought by Current, which has a larger infrastructure to manage such activities with its own payment platforms. So, hopefully, we’ll see some exciting things in the future.

13. LinkAssistant

Not an influencer marketing tool per se, this marketing tool works great for the outreach stage of your campaign. LinkAssistant is an SEO tool, so logically it's perfect for contacting prominent bloggers and influencers who have their own websites for link-building.

LinkAssistant helps you find prominent voices in your niche and contact them to pitch your guest post, product review, or maybe just a linked mention.

The tool is quite easy to use — you just enter your keywords and start running a search. The marketing tool will find relevant blogs and rank them for you in order of influencer, domain authority, and so on.

And that's it for the list of influencer platforms and tools! You did it. Now all that’s left is to make a plan and put it into action.

Before you go

Whether you are doubting whether to implement influencer marketing into your social media strategy or not, your competitors might already start their tools and activate their campaigns! It is the best reminder that you need to try it, too.

With the special marketing software you'll discover that social influencer marketing looks rather fascinating than time-consuming and daunting.