For startups that barely have any presence online, the key to getting an audience’s attention is to leverage the reach of influencers. These include bloggers, social media celebrities, actors, or anyone else who can sway the purchase decisions of potential customers.
There are many creative ways to connect with online influencers – from granting them early access to your product or tagging them frequently in your social media updates. To help you succeed, here are seven influencer marketing tools you can use.
Campaign Management
Traackr
This platform can help identify as well as engage potential influencers. With Traackr, you can also manage your relationships with influencers to scale and grow your brand with them. The company also offers training, support, and assistance when setting up your influencer marketing campaign. The service guarantees results, but it’s not exactly the cheapest.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream is another full-service platform similar to Traackr – only cheaper. It is better-suited for smaller businesses on a tighter budget and want to be more involved with the relationship-building process. It allows you to segment your list, create outreach emails with templates, manage your relationships, and more.
Influencer Research
Followerwonk
If you prefer to run an influencer marketing campaign on your own, the next thing you need is a tool that scans the web for prospective influencers. You can start big with a bio search tool like Followerwonk. Just type in a key word or phrase that describes your niche to look for popular accounts on Twitter. It is hosted free by Moz, but it also has a paid version where you can receive in-depth analytics, actionable data visualizations, and so on.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps owners to look for popular content and find the author’s name. If it’s a blog, click on the link and see if their name appears on the post itself. Although tools like BuzzSumo and Followerwonk can help you find potential influencers, take note that you still need a platform that will help you engage and work with them.
Outreach Tools
CoSchedule Subject Line Analyzer
The subject line alone can make the difference between a successful influencer relationship and just another email in the spam folder. As a rule of thumb, you should avoid generic subject lines and go for something captivating, unique, and on-point. Just make sure to run your subject line ideas on CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to check your headline’s score. The tool will also provide you with recommendations on how you can improve your subject lines and generate more clicks.
FollowUpThen
Don’t get discouraged easily if no one replies to your initial wave of outreach emails. Sometimes, they just need a simple reminder to make sure they haven’t forgotten about your proposition or overlooked your email by accident. For this, you can use the unique utility tool known as FollowUpThen, which works by letting you create automated follow-ups to yourself, the influencer, or you both.
Influencer marketing tools are important, but your success still boils down on how you use them. That said, be sure you have a sound influencer outreach strategy in place if you want results.