Aspire feature launch: A customizable influencer CRM & full suite of ROI measurement tools for ecommerce brands

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You asked and we answered. Over the past few years, we’ve worked closely with a number of top brands such as Purple, Coola, Bombas, Newell Brands, and Ruggable to understand how influencer marketing is evolving. 

Here are the 3 trends we’re seeing among the top performing e-commerce brands:

1. Brands are shifting away from one-off partnerships towards building longer-term relationships with top-performing influencers. What’s more, we’re seeing the relationships brands care about aren’t just traditionally defined influencers, but are expanding to include a wide-array of communities critical to generating word-of-mouth marketing. These communities include ambassadors, affiliates, customers, experts, thought leaders, fans, and more.

2. Brands are getting more diverse and sophisticated about how they engage with these influential communities. Their programs range from driving social engagement and awareness, to generating content for marketing channels, to co-creating products and getting feedback on launches, to kickstarting and activating local markets and communities.

3. Brands want to understand the full funnel impact influencer marketing has on their business growth. Until recently, most brands struggled to measure the true ROI of their influencer programs. However, with the rise of social commerce, more social media platforms are prioritizing the development tools and features to help brands measure ROI on their platforms. While most brands want to see how influencer marketing drives sales, they are also measuring the impact based on other marketing goals, such as the value of the content, awareness, and consideration.

Based on this feedback, we’re announcing a suite of new features to support this industry shift allowing any ecommerce brand to build a high performing influencer program, regardless of their sophistication level. 

Whether you are an influencer marketing newbie looking to reduce the manual processes associated with managing hundreds of influencer relationships, or a seasoned vet who needs a platform to grow and manage the complexities of your long-term ambassador strategy to stand out against competition, we’ve got you covered.

1. Work with anyone, any way you want

When we first started Aspire, the industry had yet to mature. Our goal was to streamline everything under our platform. Today, brands have naturally become more sophisticated in everything from who they want to work with and how, to influencer relationship management, to analytics and more.

For the first time, we’re decentralizing our platform of applications to allow brands to work with influencers in whatever manner they choose. This means that influencers no longer need to sign-up or sign-in to Aspire to work with brands. Instead, influencers and brands will maintain all of the same functionality that has made Aspire the best influencer platform on the market.

On top of that, we’ve built a ground-up CRM, purposefully designed for brands to work with influencers and ambassadors. This CRM gives brands unparalleled flexibility and customization to manage every aspect of their program. 

Here’s what’s new: 

• [New 🎉] Best-in-class CRM designed specifically for influencer marketing
  Manage all of your contacts in one place, however you like: Upload and organize your existing network of influencers, add custom fields, filter and group your influencers, and build custom automation for an even greater level of sophistication.  

• [New 🎉] System of record for all your communications with every partner
  Integrate with your Outlook or Gmail inbox to seamlessly track all communication between anyone on your team and every influencer you’re working with. That way, you always know what’s going on with every influencer in your program, regardless of whether they have signed up to the platform or not.

• [New 🎉] No platform sign-up required for influencers
  Work with anyone, without requiring them to sign up to the AspireIQ platform. All of our functionality now works natively over your own email, so you can work with 100% of your community, whether they’re celebrities, talent agents, or fans, all within AspireIQ. 

• [New 🎉] Social listening to discover brand fans
  People who are already fans of your brand will be the best advocates. See who is already talking about your brand organically on social and activate them.

• [New 🎉] Shopify ecommerce integration to see which customers are most influential 
  Discover influential people who have already bought your products and immediately invite them to your program. 

2. Build campaigns that allow you to scale and engage with anyone

Every brand runs influencer campaigns in a slightly different way. Some brands want a ton of structure, whereas other brands simply want to get their product into the hands of their target consumers. Because of these nuances, we ditched the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to our platform and prioritized giving you the tools to create the perfect workflow for your campaign.

We are the only platform that combines the ease of use of having step-by-step campaign workflows with the flexibility of customizing every part of the program journey and the entire CRM underneath, which means that no matter if you’re a sophisticated power user or a novice, we’ve got the right solution for you.
Here’s what’s new and why: 

• [New 🎉] Launch custom campaign landing pages to invite anyone to your campaigns
  Within minutes, create and launch a landing page that is customized to each of your campaigns. Whether you're launching an influencer campaign or an always-on ambassador program, these landing pages help get you more applicants for your campaign.

• [New 🎉] Customize your workflows to fit any type of campaign
  For each campaign, get fully customizable workflows that dictate the steps each influencer follows to complete the collaboration. Seeding products? Easily collect influencers addresses and ship items. Building longer-term contracts? Ask influencers to complete digital term sheets with due dates and content licensing agreements. Customize everything to fit the program you want.

• [New 🎉] Streamline product fulfillment with our Shopify integration
  Send your partners the products they love. If you sell through Shopify, we will integrate with your ordering system handling the payments, shipping and even share tracking information taking all the manual processes out of your hands.

Aspire is meant to grow with you, wherever you are in your influencer marketing journey. From ditching messy spreadsheets, to dramatically scaling your first influencer campaign, to building out influential communities as your strategies get more sophisticated, you have the tools and support you need.

3. Measure the true business impact of your influencer marketing

Every marketing program needs to drive sales in order to be successful. Influencer marketing is no different, and we’ve launched a couple of features to help exactly that.
Here’s what’s new: 

•  [New 🎉] Track affiliate sales and pay influencers based on performance
  Easily generate unique affiliate links for every influencer to capture any major conversion event, like sales, email signups, app downloads, and more. In addition, if you want to create incentive structures for your influencers, you can pay them based on conversions.

•  [New 🎉] Automatically generate promo codes with our Shopify integration and track success
  If you’ve got Shopify, you can easily create unique promo codes for every influencer in your program and easily track the results. Don’t have Shopify? Don’t worry, we’re building new functionalities for you later this year.

So… what does all of this mean for you?

With this new suite of tools, you can now :

1. Build a relationship with anyone who has the potential to grow your business, from brand fans to ambassadors to influencers. 
2. Balance flexibility and structure by leveraging customizable workflows that allow you to build campaigns that optimize how you engage. 
3. Tell an ROI story that shows your leadership team how the campaigns you are running drive real business growth in the short- and long-term. 

For brands that are attempting to take their influencer campaigns from spreadsheets to scale, we’ve got the tools you need to get started and prepare you for future success. For brands that are sophisticated and looking for a platform that can be customized the way you need it, AspireIQ is the most comprehensive solution on the market. 

For a demo of the latest version of Aspire, contact us today. Or join our active Slack community of smart marketers to keep up to date with all of the latest trends and network with like-minded peers.