93% of marketers have used influencer marketing and for good reason: The average earned media value per £1 spent on influencer marketing last year was a very cushty £4.21. That’s a nice little return.
If you’ve experimented with an influencer marketing strategy yourself, you know just how much work is involved. You have to find the right people, get them on board, and track and measure their activity across several channels. It’s a lot of work. 😫
That’s why you should consider an influencer marketing tool. They’ve been designed to take the overwhelm out of influencer marketing and assist you at every step of the way, from finding relevant influencers to managing entire, cross-channel campaigns.
Time to ease the pressure? Here are our top picks for influencer marketing tools.
What to look for in an influencer marketing platform
As you’ll see from our list below, there are a lot of influencer tools to choose from (this is nowhere near exhaustive!). There are complete solutions that tackle every part of the process, as well as individual tools that specialise in specific tasks like finding influencers, pitching them, and setting up campaigns to use alongside other marketing apps.
There are plenty of benefits you can enjoy from influencer marketing. Choosing the right influencer tool can help you level-up your campaigns, build trust, and generate more sales.
All-in-one influencer tools for small brands
All-in-one influencer tools take care of the entire influencer marketing process, from finding the right influencers to managing campaigns and measuring results.
1. Upfluence - for finding and connect with influencers
Upfluence's influencer marketing software helps you find and connect with influencers that have a strong social following. It can be time-consuming trying to find relevant accounts that also have a decent audience, so this is a great way to speed up that process. You can also manage your influencer promotions, automate campaigns, and carry out payments all from one place.
Brands like Mapiful, Burrow, and Fuze Tea use Upfluence to run their influencer campaigns, so you’ll be in good company.
Price: there are multiple pricing options offered, depending on your needs. You can get in touch with them to find out more.
2. Tribe - for sending product samples
Tribe is a tool for discovering creators, running campaigns, and measuring the ROI of your influencers. They specalise in a handful of industries including retail and ecommerce - so you know you'll be in safe hands. You can also upload briefs and gather pitches from micro-influencers. This can help you discover talent you otherwise wouldn’t have found.
Tribe also helps you run an influencer campaign, from sending out product samples to getting content approval and sharing legal docs with your influencers. Carex and Logitech use Tribe for their influencer marketing.
Price: there’s the option to pay-per-use or you can get in touch for a quote.
3. Social Ladder - for measuring the ROI of your campaigns
Social Ladder handles every part of your influencer program for you. You can find and manage influencers and affiliates, and build your ambassador marketing strategies. You can even get ideas for social media challenges.
You can bulk assign tasks to your network, create interactive leaderboards to invoke a healthy dose of competition and generate highly-detailed and customisable reports. These are invaluable if you need to share your efforts with other team members or stakeholders. Brands including Tradlands and BeatBox Beverages use Social Ladder.
Price: Get in touch and they’ll give you a price based on the size of your business.
Tools for managing influencer marketing campaigns
Once you’ve chosen your influencers, it’s time to get those campaigns running. These tools will help you manage the moving parts of each campaign, from briefing and setup to tracking affiliate links and metrics.
4. Dash - for managing your influencer’s visuals
When you’re managing influencers, chances are you’ll be managing all of their visual content, too. Whether that’s curated user-generated content or product reviews from paid partnerships - you’ll need somewhere to store all that content.
Dash is a home for all your visual assets. You can organise, find and share all of your brand's images with your agencies. You can get influencers to upload content for your approval. And you can rate images based on how well they’re doing in your marketing campaigns.
Take a look at how pet food brand, Forthglade, uses Dash to get UGC from their customers and out onto their social channels.
Price: starts at £79/$109 per month.
5. Aspire - for campaign management
You might have known Aspire in its past life as Revfluence. With half a million influencers on its books and a constantly-crawling algorithm, it can provide a constant source of good-fit influencers to get in touch with.
But Aspire really comes into its own when you’ve found your influencers. Its suite of features includes campaign creation, campaign lifecycle management, product tracking, easy content collab tools, and detailed campaign analytics—everything you need to run a successful campaign. You can also encourage influencer whitelisting - which is where you'll get better control over what the influencer posts and the audience they're posting to.
Both Ruggable and SKINN use Aspire to manage their influencer campaigns.
Price: available on request.
6. Creator.co - for bespoke advice
Want a helping hand? Creator.co gives every new user the option to work with a dedicated campaign specialist (you can also choose to go it alone if you’d prefer). The boutique-managed service makes it easy to run hands-off campaigns and manage paid ads with your influencers, while the Collaboration Hub is the perfect place to get inspo for campaigns and generate feedback on your ideas. Big brands like Walmart and Colgate use Creator.co for their campaigns.
Price: start at £375 per month for a DIY account.
7. Lefty - for enterprise brands
Lefty is so much more than a social media influencer marketplace. Sure, you can search through a real-time list of five million accounts with more than 3,500 followers, but it’s the campaign management feature that really makes it shine. You can seamlessly set up campaigns, add influencers to new or existing campaigns, and manage integrated payments. Beauty brand Guerlain uses Lefty to manage its influencer campaigns.
Price: starts at £500 per month.
Tools for finding influencers
Finding the right influencers can be a struggle if you don’t know where to look. These tools help you find and filter influencers by their chosen platforms, followings, and engagement levels.
8. HypeAuditor - for searching for mega influencers
If you want instant access to a powerful influencer database (both big and small), HypeAuditor is a great addition to your arsenal. There are more than 50 million influencers signed up to the platform across Insta, YouTube, and TikTok, and you can narrow down your search with targeted audience demographics and filters. To speed things up, search for people that have already mentioned your brand, create an organised list of influencers, and share your findings with your team. You'll also get in-depth reports so you can measure things like your Instagram influencer analytics and flag fraud accounts. 🚩
Brands including Dior, L’Oreal, and H&M use HypeAuditor.
Price: available on request.
9. BuzzSumo - to discover who is talking about your brand
BuzzSumo’s Find Influencers feature lets you explore accounts based on your chosen filters. See who’s making the most noise in your industry, check out their stats on social and their blog, and see whose content gets shared the most. Easily save your search results so you can start contacting the best talent.
The Tab regularly uses BuzzSumo to find relevant influencers.
Price: free plan available. Prices start at £99 a month for a Pro plan.
10. Julius - for hand-picked influencers
Julius is a refined influencer discovery engine that doesn’t just take on any old account. The team behind the influencer management tool rigorously vets influencers and adds relevant information to the database by hand, so you know you’re getting a high-end service. There are 120,000 fully-vetted influencers to choose from, and the 50 different search filters make it easy to pick the best criteria for your brand.
Makeup brand NARS uses Julius to discover fresh social media talent.
Price: available on request.
11. Popular Pays - for collaborating with influencers at scale
Popular Pays is all about connecting and collaborating with influencers at scale. The tool lets you find and vet relevant content creators, segment them by different tags (that you can organise and choose), and even automate the brief-building process so you’re not creating tons of different briefs for each individual influencer. This is also a great tool for helping with your community-building strategy. Create lists of preferred partners and cultivate brand ambassadors to help you grow. 🚀
Brands including Kettle & Fire, Dyson, and Mother Raw use Popular Pays.
Price: available on request.
12. Klear - for building trust with your audience
Klear is a tool that helps you build trust between your target audience and your influencers. You can run searches for top talent and filter the results based on your ideal social networks, overall influence, and content creation skills.
Brands like Coca-Cola and Unilever use Klear to help kickstart their influencer campaigns.
Price: available on request.
13. Shopify Collabs - for finding niche influencers
Shopify Collabs (formerly Dovetale) specialises in connecting Shopify stores with niche influencers and helping them develop long-lasting relationships. You can set up a landing page with all the relevant info for your campaigns so influencers can make a quick decision about whether they want to work with you. Plus, store all the details of your influencer marketing efforts in one place so you can access campaign info, conversations, and affiliate links in just a couple of clicks.
Doe and Krave Beauty were both early adopters of Shopify Collabs.
Price: free for stores using Shopify.
Tools for influencer relationship management
Communicating with your influencers is critical to the success of your campaigns. Manage your relationships with these helpful tools.
14. Traackr - for communicating with lots of influencers
Traackr has been around for a long time, which means it’s refined its processes. It comes equipped with a host of influencer relationship management tools. Once you’ve found your chosen influencers through the database of handpicked and algorithm-gathered accounts, you can sort them by relationship stage—a.k.a. how close you are. It also stores every single piece of communication you have with your influencers so you never have to scroll through an endless email thread again. It's also no surprise that this is ideal for tracking your influencer marketing efforts.
Brands including Revlon and Amika use Traackr to manage their influencer relationships.
Price: available on request.
15. Grin - for building happy relationships
Grin's influencer marketing technology has a number of handy influencer marketing features—there’s the standard influencer search that lets you discover and connect with verified creators as well as the ability to track influencer KPIs and engagement. It’s also particularly good at handling the logistics of your influencer marketing to help you build healthy, happy relationships.
Everlane use Grin as part of their influencer campaigns.
Price: starts at £2,000 a month.
Tools for user-generated content
Sometimes your customers are your best influencers. Use these tools to discover content created by your customers and share it on your social media channels.
16. Mini Social - for building a library of UGC
Mini Social is a unique influencer marketplace because it specialises in bringing on board micro-influencers (people with less than 100,000 followers). As well as finding the best small-time accounts, you can build a library of user-generated content. A big selling point of Mini Social is there are no long-term fees: you simply pay based on the number of creators you want to work with. Ecommerce brands like Olipop, Union Wine, and Native use Mini Social.
Price: available on request.
17. Pixlee - for briefing your UGC campaigns
Pixlee is a well-known platform for collecting and curating user-generated content. As well as discovering accounts that are already posting content about your brand, you can manage your campaigns and brief influencers on your UGC campaigns. Even better, Pixlee makes it easy to publish shoppable content from your social media influencers across multiple different marketing channels.
Brands like Ooni and Wool and the Gang use Pixlee.
Price: available on request.
18. Yotpo - for discovering best-fit customers for UGC campaigns
Sometimes, your best influencers are your customers. These are people who love your brand and continue to buy from you—nothing like a good bit of word-of-mouth marketing! Yotpo helps you collect UGC about your brand from around the web and curate it in one central place. Brooklinen and Allbirds use Yotpo for UGC.
Price: there’s a free version available. Prices start at £19 for Pro plans.
Influencer marketing agencies
If you want a helping hand with your influencer marketing campaigns, these dedicated agencies are a good starting point.
19. HireInfluence - for small and growing brands
If you want an expert pair of hands working on your influencer campaigns, an agency like HireInfluence is a good shout. Calling themselves an “elite influencer agency”, the team has refined their processes to ensure every influencer campaign is set up for tons of success, from handpicking the right influencers to developing brand-appropriate campaigns on multiple social channels.
Big brands like Oreo and Adidas have worked with HireInfluence in the past.
Price: varies depending on the scope of your campaign.
20. The Influencer Marketing Factory - for enterprise companies
The clue is in the name. The Influencer Marketing Factory provides worldwide hands-on help with your influencer campaigns. It specialises in getting its clients in front of Gen Zers and Millennials on TikTok and Instagram. It also has big-name partners like Sony Music, Google, and Amazon in its portfolio.
Price: varies depending on the scope of your campaigns.
Managing your influencer assets with Dash
Working with influencers is an excellent way to increase engagement on your posts, but it’s important to collect and store your visual assets in an easy-to-access place. Failing to safely store your visuals in a central place can lead to lost assets, missing posts, and never-ending searches for “the picture that so-and-so made last week”.
Make it easy for everyone by managing your visual assets from the get-go with
Dash (that’s us 😇). Dash is a digital asset management (DAM) tool that helps you organise and curate your influencer-created content in a central hub.
You can approve and reject images, set expiry dates on photos and share content with your agencies. Your team - and your influencers - can get their hands on content for quick and easy sharing.
Lizzie Davey writes for ecommerce and marketing SaaS brands. She helps create B2B content strategies and is the Founder of Copy Revival and Freelance Magic.
