While it is possible to participate in influencer marketing on the cheap, building relationships with influencers gradually and organically, it’s challenging work. If you factor in the time it takes for you (or an employee) to create the necessary relationships, it can also be relatively expensive. Many influencer marketing software tools make this process far more straightforward and are likely to save you money.
Although these software tools (also known as software platforms) initially just focused on influencer search and discovery, they have widened the services they now offer. Indeed, you can run virtually an entire influencer campaign using one or a combination of these apps or other types of software.
In addition to influencer discovery, you will find software platforms covering relationship management, campaign management, third party analytics, influencer content amplification, influencer marketplaces, and more.
We have reviewed each of these software tools, along with more, on our Influencer Marketing Platforms page. Each of the links below takes you to the relevant review.
Top Influencer Marketing Software Tools for 2021:
1. Grin
Grin capitalizes on the genuine influence of influencers. Its philosophy is that influencer marketing is marketing to the influencer – brands need to build a trusting relationship with potential influencers.
Grin customizes its pricing to match its clients’ needs. Companies of all sizes use the software, though Grin focuses on eCommerce businesses with integrations into the major shopping platforms.
It offers all the significant features that a top-tier marketing management software should and organizes it all into workflows so that users never get lost. Grin integrates with all the major social media channels, eCommerce software like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, email systems like Gmail and Outlook, real-time communications like SMS and Slack, and Office tools like Google Drive and Office 365.
2. CreatorIQ
CreatorIQ relies on its tech software to simplify the influencer marketing process and also solves some of the problems that have long plagued the industry as a whole, e.g., follower fraud, inflated reach metrics, and inauthentic/mercenary influencers. The company was named the Best Influencer Marketing platform at the 2019 MarTech Awards.
CreatorIQ integrates directly with social platform APIs and its AI-powered algorithm analyses over 1 billion public social accounts and their content. The marketing software considers more than 15 million creator accounts worthy of being indexed on the system. It is a discovery software tool that will show you influencers who are astoundingly relevant. The AI assigns each influencer an “Integrity Quotient.”
3. Upfluence
Upfluence analyzes nearly 3 million influencers with a collective reach of 82 billion followers. The software indexes and updates all their profiles in real-time, with every piece of content analyzed for reach and engagement.
A new tool, Live Capture, attempts to find the best influencers for your brand. It assumes that your customers are the best advocates for your brand and can become ambassadors to promote your products.
eCommerce businesses can connect their online store to Upfluence’s software to discover influencers who visit their website and activate them through dedicated campaigns
Brands and agencies can search through Upfluence to find influencers using as many keywords as necessary. You can place a relative weight on each keyword.
Upfluence covers all major social media platforms: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, and TikTok.
4. AspireIQ
AspireIQ was formerly Revfluence. It is an influencer marketplace, including influencer search & discovery, relationship management, and campaign management. Using software like AspireIQ to manage your influencers makes the process simple.
You can easily identify high-performing influencers and the software has the tools to nurture those relationships. Its recommendation engine points out similar influencers to the ones you’ve worked with. There are also tools for repurposing campaign content into paid ads. AspireIQ also includes social listening capabilities, helping you track mentions of your brand, keeping a list of those who do. You can even monitor the social activity of your competitors
Pricing for Aspire IQ’s three levels of service is customized and requires a yearly commitment.
5. NeoReach
NeoReach uses an algorithm that mines the social web for data and indexes it for search through the software. The NeoReach database features more than 3 million influencers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Every client receives custom pricing based on the number of users and a few other factors. However, its target customers are large companies with large marketing departments.
The heart of the NeoReach software is data. It features a mind-boggling array of information for each influencer in its database.
The interface is clean, and working with search results is very simple, even with the wealth of information attached to each profile. Users also receive recommendations from the software powered by AI that uses your performance data coupled with a brand affinity search.
6. Post For Rent
Post For Rent is marketplace software that describes the process of influencer marketing in its name. It serves all sizes of brands and has plenty of room for agencies and talent managers, as well.
Post for Rent offers a range of pricing levels, with four different rates for brands/agencies and three rates for talent managers. Their pricing model can be seen as a way to try and be all things to all companies.
As with most of this influencer software, Post for Rent includes a Discover tool to find influencers who’ll be a good fit for your brand. It includes a database of more than 154k profiles, although you can also look at people you already would like to work with. The influencer analysis for each profile is in-depth.
7. Fanbytes
Fanbytes places a strong emphasis on helping marketers reach Generation Z. Unsurprisingly, it focuses on the social networks most used by 13 – 24-year-olds – TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. In its early days, the Fanbytes software was very much Snap-based, but it has recognized the recent surge in TikTok usage, particularly by Generation Z.
Brands can work with influential Tik Tok users to create themed video challenges. Not only do audiences engage with a like or a comment, but they make their own videos, too, as a response to the challenge.
Brands work with Fanbytes on a campaign-by-campaign basis, spending whatever their budget will allow for each one.
8. PitchBoard
PitchBoard is an influencer marketplace, with its focus being on executing campaigns quickly and at scale. There’s no influencer discovery or relationship management software. It believes you can use separate influencer discovery software to find great influencers and data insights. As an influencer marketplace, PitchBoard believes it makes you more effective at reaching new and different influencers.
PitchBoard uses its own machine learning software to parse through influencer data from several sources and identify those whose audiences are most suitable for campaigns. They do this without customers ever having to scroll through lists of influencers then having to deliberate on each one.
9. Julius
Julius is now a full-fledged self-service influencer marketing suite, with nearly 120,000 influencers in its database. It includes over 50 different criteria for narrowing a search, with demographic and psychographic data for influencers and audience.
Julius is software-as-a-service (SASS), and you pay an annual fee. The specific fee you’ll pay depends on the number of users you’ll want to have access to the software. All subscriptions come with complete access to the platform, unlimited messaging, custom influencer lists, and a dedicated and on-demand account manager for guidance/assistance.
Julius’s dashboard is like a social feed, announcing new influencers to the platform, new brand/influencer affiliations, and a curated feed of industry-related news.
10. Tagger Media
Tagger began life as a music recommendation engine but discovered how its software could be adapted for influencer marketing. Tagger tracks more than 9 billion social conversations, resulting in an incomprehensible amount of data points—all indexed, analyzed, and searchable, by brands and agencies.
In terms of analytics, Tagger is a full-fledged digital marketing research tool. However, it is also a straight-ahead influencer marketplace, home to over 3.5 million influencer profiles. It also features campaign management and reporting.
However, Tagger is not software for a small business. It offers more use and data than a small company would know what to do with.
11. Lumanu
Lumanu is a standalone, purpose-built tool that complements whatever platform a brand currently uses. You won’t find any influencer discovery tools, and the software isn’t going to manage your campaigns. Instead, it acts as a dashboard for all your influencers and their content to allow you to convert your influencer content into Facebook and Instagram ads.
It acts as a frontend for deploying your ads—you can create the ads, set your budget, and push everything through your influencer accounts to Facebook and Instagram directly from within Lumanu.
Lumanu allows marketers to do more than they can with Facebook/Instagram’s Branded Content Tool. You can target influencer audiences, make edits to influencer copy, and run A/B tests between different headlines.
12. Open Influence
Open Influence was formerly called InstaBrand. The software includes influencer discovery and management, as well as campaign management and third-party analytics.
As it’s priced now, Open Influence is not a tool for small businesses. You need to pay for the $500 per month Premium plan or the custom-priced Enterprise plan to gain the most useful features. This includes image recognition, which is its standout.
Open Influence’s AI software uses image recognition to label images with descriptors, all of which become searchable. For example, the algorithm understands the difference between a person in a t-shirt and somebody practicing yoga. You see images showing you what you want to see, unlike most influencer software. Once you’ve found someone who’s just right, the software can do a look-alike search to discover other influencers just like that one. The software has indexed over 20 million recognized keywords for interests-based searches, and it only indexes for engaged users, not audiences as a whole.