5 Signs It’s Time to Invest in an Influencer Marketing Platform
There’s a reason so many leading brands are betting their dollars on influencer marketing. In the last decade or so, influencers have helped brands expand reach, generate high-quality content, boost conversions, and ultimately skyrocket business growth. But the truth is, running a successful influencer campaign may not be as easy as it seems — especially if you’re handling everything manually.
If you’ve been on the fence about investing in an influencer marketing platform, here are 5 signs it may be time to take the leap.
1. You’re partnering with the same influencers over and over again.
We’ve preached it time and time again: it’s extremely important to find the right influencer for your brand. However, there are only so many influencers you can find when you’re manually searching hashtags or scouring the Instagram Explore page — and let’s not forget how difficult it can be to actually get in touch with them.
By using an influencer marketing platform, you can expand your creator discovery channels and easily connect with better aligned influencers in a fraction of the time. Specifically on Aspire, we provide brands with 5 different avenues to find influencers:
- Influencer search engine: Similar to Google, you’re able to search the entire influencer universe across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and online web (i.e. blogs) to see data-rich profiles. You can also filter your search by keywords, location, social following size, and even aesthetic.
- Creator marketplace: Our marketplace is teeming with influencers who specifically signed up to be part of Aspire to be noticed by brands and to take part in campaigns. This means that you can submit your campaign to our marketplace and get hundreds of proposals from influencers who are interested in your brand within days.
- Social listening: This tool will gather every mention and hashtags of your brand, making it easy to understand campaign success, monitor your brand health, and find new creative influencers so that no opportunity is missed. We even provide monthly trend reports to help your campaign strategy and get the most successful results.
- Ecommerce integrations: Our ecommerce integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce provide a simple way for you to see which influencers are already buying your products and easily invite them to join your latest campaign.
- Custom landing pages: Our custom landing pages allow you to create a public facing-page for your influencer, ambassador, affiliate, or customer programs. With a custom landing page, you can bring on customers, nano-influencers, high-profile brand ambassadors — you name it — to be a part of your campaign. And to make it even easier, they don’t have to sign up for an Aspire account.
Take a look at how brands like SmartyPants, European Wax Center, and Ruggable were able to scale their programs exponentially by using Aspire.
“Once we started using Aspire, we were able to grow our influencer community by 300%. We went from working with about 4 influencers per month to working with over 20 per month.”
— Tori Herman, Associate Manager of Marketing Communications at SmartyPants
2. You don’t have the bandwidth to manage communications with multiple influencers.
As brands shift their focus from carrying out one-off partnerships to building more long-term relationships with influencers, having a solid relationship management program has never been more important. While it’s possible to keep track of each relationship manually through spreadsheets and emails, it’s much easier to handle all communications on an influencer marketing platform.
On Aspire, you’re able to keep track of not only the actual conversations you’re having with influencers, but also contracts, product shipments, content guidelines, content approvals, due dates, payment — really anything that goes into each influencer partnership.
“Being able to have everything in one platform keeps everything organized. We’re able to have transparency across our team for all campaigns which is something we couldn't manage with any other platform.”
— Nicole Rohrer, Senior Marketing Manager at iHerb
3. You want to build formal ambassador and affiliate programs.
If you’ve found a handful of influencers who align really well with your brand, it’s a good idea to turn them into brand ambassadors or long-term affiliates. By developing long-term relationships with these influencers, you’re able to co-create on a deeper level and carry out more authentic partnerships, thereby building trust with your target audience and boosting conversions.
With Aspire’s all-in-one management tool, you’re able to:
- Segment existing influencers and other community members into an ambassador or affiliate group
- Find new potential partners via custom landing pages, social listening, and ecommerce integrations
- Work with the Aspire team to build reward structures based on different levels of partnerships
- Engage with brand partners via 1:1 chat as well as mass communication features
- Seamlessly send out ambassador product kits, contracts, and more
- Track all of your ambassador/affiliate data in one place and use analytics to determine your top performers
- Capture all social content created by your brand partners
“Aspire's hybrid approach to influencer and affiliate marketing makes their platform the best available, especially in an always changing partnership landscape. Aspire has also been crucial in the implementation of our new affiliate program. Their helpful and knowledgeable staff worked hand-in-hand with us to launch the program and continue to provide stellar support when it comes to scaling our initiatives and learning best practices.”
— Jessicka Nebesni, Marketing Strategist at Mountain Rose Herbs
4. You have trouble tying sales to influencer efforts.
Trying to calculate influencer marketing ROI can be tricky — and it’s even more difficult when you’re trying to track all of your campaign metrics without an automated tool. In the past, we’ve seen marketers ask influencers for screenshots of their post performance, manually input it into spreadsheets, and come up with some sort of formula to track their return on investment. You can imagine how long this takes — not to mention, the inaccuracy of the data.
With an influencer marketing platform, you’re able to track important metrics in real-time that helps you extrapolate true ROI based on your primary goals. For instance, if your goal is:
- Brand awareness: The platform can help you keep tabs on true impressions, reach, social media mentions, web traffic from social media channels, and more.
- Brand engagement: The platform can help you measure engagement rate on social posts, social post saves, cost per engagement, follower growth, and more.
- Sales: The platform can help you track each influencer’s unique links and promo codes that are being used by their followers.
- Content: The platform can help you see total media value and content performance across various channels.
Of course, you should also pay attention to qualitative data, such as comment sentiment and follower authenticity. But the quantitative KPIs that are tracked by an influencer marketing platform are crucial in informing you of the true value of your influencer programs.
“Aspire’s Analyze tab is just heaven-sent for helping you see a single campaign’s success and also viewing all campaigns holistically. Being able to see everything from ROI to engagement to impressions is very helpful for letting us share out to our broader team how campaigns are doing in a way they understand, as well as showing what content and creators perform best for our brand.”
— Kara Salazar, Manager of Social Media & Influencer at European Wax Center
5. You don’t have a good way to keep track of and repurpose influencer content.
One of the biggest benefits of influencer marketing is the beautiful content you’re able to source as a result of your campaign. When repurposed — whether it’s on your organic social channels, paid ads, emails, or product pages — it can boost your engagement and conversions. In fact, studies show that influencer-generated content (IGC) garners double the engagement of brand-directed content and UGC-based ads (including content from influencers, customers, employees, and other members of a brand community) get 4x higher click-through rates.
That’s why you should be keeping track of every piece of content created by your influencers. You never know when it’ll come in handy!
With an influencer marketing platform like Aspire, you can automatically collect all IGC in a Content Library. Not only is it searchable — making it extra easy to find the content you’re looking for — but it’s also integrated with Google Drive, allowing you to share the creative assets across all teams within your organization.
"We love that Aspire saves every piece of content created by influencers within the platform for easy access. This is especially helpful for Instagram Stories with their limited live-time of 24 hours. Having all of the content saved in one easily accessible place allows us to repurpose the content on our schedule and ensures that no content pieces are lost in the shuffle."
— Rachel Bindl, Digital and Social Media Manager at Stella & Chewy's