The Guide to Influencer Management Platforms

Ever purchased a product after seeing it on Instagram? Chances are, so has your audience. That’s why you’re likely one of the 80% of marketers with a dedicated influencer marketing budget. 

But once you see referrals and conversions come in, how do you keep track of everything? Influencer marketing platforms help you keep tabs on revenue and performance while helping you build strong relationships with your influencer affiliates. 

We’ll walk through everything you need to know about influencer management platforms, important features to look for, and how Tapfiliate’s software organizes and scales influencer marketing campaigns to new heights. 

Sign up now to get the most out of influencer marketing potential!

What Is an Influencer Management Platform and How Does It Work?

An influencer management platform is software that helps you manage various aspects of your influencer affiliate campaigns. It usually has features to assist with influencer discovery, campaign management, data reporting, and performance tracking. 
For example, Tapfiliate’s affiliate management platform offers real-time reporting on affiliate performance and influencer-specific features like creative asset management, where you can create and share social media posts with your influencer partners.

Benefits of Using an Influencer Management Platform

Whether you work with 10 or 100 influencers, you can’t remember every detail about their social media channels, promo materials, referrals, conversions, or audience by heart. Influencer management platforms help you access and organize important information about your influencer partners so that you can better handle your campaigns. 

Here are some more specific benefits you’ll experience with a solid influencer management platform: 

• Better performance tracking: You might have 100 new website visitors or sales from your influencers in a given time period. An influencer management platform tracks all performance details to help you assess and compare performance by time period, channel, asset, influencer, campaign, and more. 

• Increased efficiency: Most influencer management platforms help you automate various marketing activities to save time in your schedule, including partner notifications and reminders, asset creation, performance bonuses, and communications. 

• Ability to scale campaigns: When you can attribute revenue and performance to different attributes within your influencer marketing campaigns, you can better strategize and improve upon those campaigns to scale them to new heights. 

• Streamlined influencer communications: Emails, DMs, and text messages become tricky to organize for each influencer partnership you have. Many management marketing tools offer in-platform communication so you can chat with your influencers in one place. 

• Heightened influencer engagement: Influencers (especially micro-influencers) don’t make hourly rates that reflect all the time that goes into their campaigns. Most work on a commission basis, which means they need your partnership to be as seamless as possible. The automation, easy communication, and performance-based compensation opportunities that come with influencer marketing tools help engage your influencers more and improve influencer relationships with your brand. 

So, how does influencer marketing software make all these benefits happen? Let’s look at some common features. 

Features You Should Look Out For

Influencer campaign management tools tend to have similar base features, with some more dynamic than others. You want a platform with a user-friendly interface that enables you to access features easily. After all, we’re all marketers here and not all of us have a coding background to handle super technical platforms. 

Here are some features to look for in your search for an influencer management tool: 

• Real-time reporting 
• Performance analytics 
• Integrations
• Fraud detection 
• Automated workflows

But what is the best indicator of a solid platform? Customization. Sure, you might have eyes on your influencer campaign performance details, but what if you could only see conversions from the last month? A more useful reporting feature would help you filter conversion data based on the influencer, asset, channel, or any other data point relevant to your business. 

PS: Tapfiliate’s powerful filtration features help you customize every reporting dashboard to give you the most strategic insights into your influencer program. 

How Do I Choose the Right Influencer Management Platform for My Business?

All set to invest in an influencer marketing solution? Great. Only problem? You don’t know where to start. After all, the influencer marketing software market is worth a whopping $15 billion, with hundreds of software options to choose from. 

The truth is, that no influencer marketing solution can accommodate every single business. Your best option depends on your business needs, as well as your goals for scaling, budget, size, and niche. 

Here’s how to select an influencer software solution that brings you the most bang for your buck:

1. Determine your business goals

Business goals should guide your selection process, so we recommend having one or two top of mind before you invest in a platform. 

Need more influencers in your affiliate program? Go for a platform that offers partner recruitment. Crave more insights into influencer performance? Ensure your influencer software has detailed analytics and performance-tracking features to fill in the blanks you currently have in your program. 

Similarly, look for alignment in the business niche. For example, if you’re an e-commerce business, your influencer marketing platform should have e-commerce integrations to streamline your reporting and strategy.

2. Assess customer reviews

Review websites like G2, Capterra, and Intercom all feature customer experiences for various influencer management platforms. Look at positive and negative comments about customer support, tracking accuracy, and overall satisfaction with influencer campaign strategy. 

3. Compare pricing structure with your budget

The devil’s in the details when it comes to influencer management pricing structures. You might notice a cheaper basic plan for under $100, but the fine print shows that you can only track up to 100 conversions for up to 5 influencer affiliates with that plan. 

See the dilemma? It’s not always about the lowest price; rather, you need to ensure the pricing structure aligns with the breadth of your influencer program and your goals for scaling. 

4. Consider influencer-specific key features

Statista shares that Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube are influencers’ top social media platforms. Naturally, you’d want your marketing platform to at the very least track revenue from these social platforms. 

Beyond that, influencers love using infographics and live stories to market their commissioned products. Look for platforms that make common influencer marketing tactics easier, such as creative asset management and detailed reporting across cross-channel tracking. 

5. Examine security features

Juniper Research reported that brands lost about $84 billion in ad spend to fraud. For affiliate marketing, that looks like cookie stuffing, fake traffic, and clicks, as well as stolen data. However, the same study above showed that brands could recover a collective $23 billion with the right fraud detection software. 

Look for anti-affiliate fraud features in your influencer marketing platforms, like: 

• Manual affiliate approval: Auto-approval is super efficient once you’re confident about your criteria, but manual approval options help you stop fake influencers in their tracks. Platforms with manual approvals help you review an influencer’s track record and online presence before they join your program. 
• Encryption and secure hosting: Look for reputable data hosts and encryption to make sure your data is safe with an influencer platform
• IP address flags: If an influencer sends you a referral from their very own IP address, your influencer platform should flag it as suspicious. 

Explore more of Tapfiliate’s security features. 

6. Look for efficiencies and automation

Brands have a ton of marketing tasks in their daily to-do lists. Ideally, your influencer management platform should streamline some of those tasks and save you time as you manage your program. 

Some platforms offer automated workflows to trigger administrative actions with predetermined criteria. For example, you might trigger a commission increase once an affiliate reaches $50 in commission value within a month’s time frame. Or, you could automate a notification to all affiliates once you launch a new product. Tapfiliate allows workflow automation like this via our integration with Zapier. 

7. Try the free trial

Most influencer platforms range between $100 to thousands of dollars per month, depending on your subscription and business needs. When you shell out that kind of cash, you want to ensure the platform works for you. If an influencer marketing software doesn’t offer a free trial, that’s a red flag. 

If you see a free 14-day trial, sign up and play around with each feature. Does everything feel intuitive for you and your marketing team? Use this opportunity to assess customer support options as well. 

Tapfiliate for Influencer Management

Tapfiliate is an affiliate management platform for e-commerce, SaaS, dropshipping, and subscription-based businesses that want strategic insights into their affiliate marketing programs. We offer in-platform communication with affiliates, real-time reporting, accessible dashboard views, and accurate revenue attribution via cookie and coupon tracking. 
Our influencer marketing features include flexible commissions to reward top-performing influencers, as well as advanced social sharing to prepare your partners with branded social media posts and banners for their websites.

Can I Manage Multiple Influencer Campaigns Simultaneously?

You might have separate campaigns for different products, promotions, or audiences. Either way, Tapfiliate can track it all for you because our software lets you manage as many influencer campaigns as you’d like. 

Track lifetime revenue and metrics across each campaign or narrow down results to specific time periods. You can also separate reporting data by campaign or go even granular with specific metadata fields like social channels, product SKUs, and top-performing influencers.

What Kind of Support and Training Does Tapfiliate Offer?

Tapfiliate’s team of experts is available to answer your questions any time of the day. We offer multiple customer support options, including email, live chat with customer service agents, as well as social media messaging. Additionally, you can access webinars and a vast library of searchable, helpful articles to give our clients the autonomy to explore and resolve issues in the platform.=

Can Tapfiliate Integrate with Other Marketing Tools and Systems?

We know influencer campaigns are just one side of your marketing strategy. That’s why Tapfiliate offers cohesion with our 30+ integrations to various marketing tools, including Mailchimp (email marketing), Salesforce (customer relationship management), Paypal (payment processing), Shopify (e-commerce), and many more.

Our direct integrations are aligned with the SaaS tools our clients tell us they use the most. However, we also offer custom integrations for brands that want to integrate our platform with other tools via Javascript or the Rest API—- check out our advanced set-up guides for more details. 

How Does Tapfiliate Report on Campaign Success?

Tapfiliate offers real-time reporting with customizable views on your most valuable metrics. You can view clicks, conversions, and affiliate signups live on our dashboard, or go deeper with filtrable reports based on time period, influencer, channel, and campaign. Our customizable views help you access the most important insights to make data-driven decisions within your influencer marketing strategy. 

How Does Tapfiliate Handle Influencer Vetting and Authentication?

Brand reputation is vital to many of our clients, which is why we give them ample opportunities to vet affiliates before accepting them into influencer programs. We offer both manual and automatic approvals to help you suss out any influencers with content that goes against your brand image. Similarly, our extensive auto-approval options let you customize application forms to meet your criteria.  

What Is the User Experience Like on Tapfiliate?

Tapfiliate’s developers prioritized a clean, easy-to-navigate user interface for our customers. While we have the background to navigate code and highly technical applications, we know our audience of marketers wants a user-friendly experience to manage influencer campaigns seamlessly. 

That’s why our platform design is highly intuitive. You can move easily from feature to feature, with accessible buttons and filters, logical architecture, and customizable dashboard views to get the most out of our platform. 

For example, one of our clients Alessia D. highlights our user experience as a top feature: 

It’s easy to use, intuitive and user friendly. When I had doubts, I could easily solve them with the support articles and, if not, the customer service has always been very fast and kind to help me.

 

Start Tracking Your Influencer Marketing With Tapfiliate

Bottom line? Influencer management software gives you more control and revenue potential over your affiliate programs. The best software offers features to recruit and engage influencers with flexible commissions and creative assets — all of which Tapfiliate has, and more. 

Ready to elevate your influencer affiliate program? Sign up for Tapfiliate today!