4 Influencer Marketing Tools You Need to Manage Campaigns

Influencers in just about every industry are shaking up the digital world with their access to big and highly engaged audiences. More than ever, brands, marketers, and PR pros are talking to their customers through these super-influencers. The reason for this is simple: customers don’t trust brands and marketers when it comes to making purchase decisions.

According to BlogHer, 47 percent of U.S. readers consult trusted peers or influencers to find new ideas, trends, and ultimately, to make their purchasing decisions. Customers are smart enough to read through a brand’s shiny marketing message, so consulting people with real opinions only makes sense.

As influencer marketing takes off, though, the people managing these campaigns are jumping in head first without any idea of how to organize the process from start to finish. While the very premise of influencer marketing is authenticity — and you can’t automate authenticity — there are a handful of tools that can certainly help you streamline the influencer marketing process.

From finding influencers and managing outreach to finding trending content and tracking success, below are 5 influencer marketing tools for managing influencer marketing campaigns.

Streak

Once you’ve found the right influencers to reach out to, you’ll need a system for tracking all of your outreach efforts (otherwise the whole setup will go haywire). The beauty of Streak is that it integrates directly with Gmail. Unlike most CRMs, you aren’t limited to specific categories to organize your pipeline.

Through campaigns, things like the blogger’s name, email address, contact date, notes, and publishing dates are tracked. Streak is so simple, no matter what you need to track, you can do it in there. Plus, you can also associate an email thread with a contact in Streak so you can keep track of every single conversation with an influencer.

Sidekick by Hubspot

If you’re planning an influencer campaign you will likely be doing a lot of outreach until you narrow down to the perfect bloggers. With that in mind, tracking email opens is incredibly helpful. While Streak does this as well, Sidekick by Hubspot gives you live notifications when someone opens your email.

This transparency means you can see who is interacting with your emails – if at all – and how many times. It allows you to make timely follow ups in hopes of getting a response from the influencer. You can even schedule emails for later so the influencer receives a follow up at the appropriate time.

Topsy

Once you start building partnerships with influencers, you’ll need to know what content is trending in your industry. Ultimately, you’ll want influencers to create content that resonates with their readers and your target customers.

Topsy is a brilliant tool for finding top performing content in your industry and even analyzing the sentiment of the content. Simply type in a keyword and Topsy will pull up the top trending content for it – including links, tweets, photos, videos, and influencers.  You can even pull up mentions to see how customers are interacting with that content. Topsy is a great starting point for rolling out any kind of content campaign.

Mixpanel

Okay, so you’ve had some influencer articles go live and you want to see if readers are actually clicking over to your site and what exactly they’re doing once they get there. Measuring your ROI is essential, and let’s face it, Google Analytics just doesn’t cut it. Sure, you can track visits to your website, social shares, and engagement but what about tracking actions from individual visitors?

As Mixpanel says, “Actions speak louder than pageviews” and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With Mixpanel, you can see how customers move through your funnel, whether they convert, or where you might lose them along the way. You can see live updates from individual users so you can follow along as they experience your site. All of these amazing tools help you fix issues in your funnel and tweak them to improve your conversion rate.

So there you have it – five influencer marketing tools for setting up influencer marketing campaigns, keeping outreach organized, finding top performing content in your industry, and tracking the success of each campaign.

What are your favorite influencer marketing tools for managing marketing campaigns?

Image: Streak

This article, "4 Influencer Marketing Tools You Need to Manage Campaigns" was first published on Small Business Trends