If your initial foray into influencer marketing has gone well, excitement about what’s possible is entirely understandable. Suddenly, a whole new marketing method has revealed itself, promising a great ROI and measurable bottom-line impacts.

The next step is simply about figuring out how exactly you can scale up your influencer marketing campaigns: more influencers, more campaigns, more sales. If you’re at this stage of your journey, influencer marketing platforms might have started to come onto your radar.

Here’s the good news: the innovative technology available in some of today’s leading influencer marketing platforms makes scaling your operations easier, faster, and more effective than ever.

But with several options available on the market, determining which platform is best for your needs can be a tricky task. In this article, we’ll show you how to find the most suitable platform for your specific influencer marketing plans.

First, frame your research

Research always has the potential to be a never-ending pursuit. You can easily get trapped in a cycle of seeking just one more piece of information. But that just delays making a decision and getting an influencer marketing platform embedded in your systems.

To help you move past the research phase, it’s important you understand exactly what you’re looking for. You need complete clarity over which features will truly support your business while remaining within your budget constraints. This helps prevent you from wasting hours looking at everything.

So, let’s focus on what’s most important: finding a platform that supports your growth and measurement of influencer marketing campaigns. To do those things, you’ll need a platform that can:

• Help you demonstrate a tangible return on investment. Your platform should be able to accurately collate and present content and campaign reporting data sourced directly from different platforms. This gives you a true and validated understanding of exactly what your efforts are achieving.
  
  

• Support your future growth plans. Influencer marketing creates an average 520% ROAS, so as time goes on you’re likely to want to run more and more campaigns involving more and more influencers. As your influencer marketing grows, the complexity can also increase. Find a platform that’s capable of running large-scale influencer marketing campaigns without breaking sweat.
  
  

• Operate within your budget constraints. It’s crucial you understand any platform’s fee structures. As you grow, and work with more and more influencers or operate more and more campaigns, do the platform’s fees increase? Or do you have an unlimited ability to create and manage campaigns for a single flat fee?

Choosing an influencer marketing platform: 7 key questions

Of course, all influencer marketing platforms will do their best to demonstrate their best features and benefits, and extol the value of integrating them into your workflows. But those features and benefits might not always align with your biggest challenges and priorities. Instead, try asking the following questions to get a true feel of what each platform can do for your business:

• How many opt-in influencers does the platform have? What you’re looking for is real relationships with influencers who have proactively opted into working with the platform. You want to understand how many relevant influencers are actively engaged with the platform and are ready to go on your next campaign.
  
  If the number you’re quoted sounds unrealistic, you’re probably right to question it. Some, for example, claim to have 15 million influencers – but most of those have never heard of the platform in question.

For reference, Sway Me Good works with approximately 15,000 influencers. Each of those influencers has taken time to manually add their details to our database and actively uses our platforms to work with brands and agencies. When a relevant campaign comes along, brands using Sway Me Good know they don’t have to introduce our platform to the influencers they want to work with.

• Can you access the right type of influencers? For best results in terms of both brand recognition and triggering social media algorithms, influencer marketing campaigns need to take a hybrid approach and involve influencers of all sizes. According to DMEXCO, 60% of agencies say budgets are increasing for campaigns with nano- (1,000 to 10,000 followers) and micro-influencers (10,000 to 50,000 followers). Does your potential platform provide access to influencers at the top, middle, and base layers of the pyramid?
  
  

• How much does it cost? Is there a minimum spend involved to get access to the platform? Is there an oversized minimum fee for each influencer? Being able to align your spending expectations with a platform and what it delivers is essential.
  
  

• How does it protect your budget? If you communicate a brief, an influencer accepts the project, and he or she is then unable or unwilling to fulfil the details of the brief, what happens next? Is there a defined approvals process? If you’re still not happy with the work, are you able to call on a third party at the platform, such as Sway Me Good’s influencer managers, to independently review the comms between both parties and make an assessment on whether your brand or agency should be refunded?
  
  

• How does the platform gather data for analytics? If your platform relies on influencer-submitted data such as analytics screenshots, you could be vulnerable to fraud that over-inflates the value of the influencers and what they deliver for your business. Sway Me Good gathers all data directly from Instagram and TikTok. We don’t rely on good faith. We use only independent, fully validated data to produce the reporting dashboards inside our platform.
  
  

• How easily can you find the influencers you need? Some platforms simply list every influencer they work with. But this doesn’t help when you’re searching for influencers of a particular size, in particular niches, or in particular locations. Look for a platform with effective filtering and rating systems. Supplementary data points, keyword analyses, and easy links to each influencer’s social media accounts are also a major plus.
  
  

• Can it help with accurately valuing influencers? Very few platforms have developed a powerful algorithm that accurately assesses the value of each individual influencer, determining their fee without the need for painful or protracted negotiations taking place. If you find a platform that does this, like Sway Me Good, you may find it to be one of the most valuable features of the entire system. By standardising the fees you’re paying, it immediately helps to generate improved ROI. At a stroke, it helps to prevent inadvertent overspending when influencers demand inflated fees and brands or agencies simply have no way of knowing the influencer’s true worth.

Take a decisive step towards influencer marketing success

Influencer marketing platforms save brands and agencies enormous amounts of money, time, and hassle.  Sway Me Good, for example, reduces the time brands and agencies need to commit to deliver an influencer marketing campaign by approximately 75%. When you consider that without an influencer marketing platform, a typical £10,000 campaign involving 10 influencers demands 48 hours of work over five weeks, you can see how those savings can quickly mount up.

Because of the potential impact of an influencer marketing campaign, it’s essential to do a deeper dive into each of your options. If your chosen influencer marketing platform can positively answer the questions outlined above, you’ve almost certainly found a unified, scalable platform that consolidates discovery, campaign management, and reporting. It’s then time to take the next step and put that platform at the centre of your influencer marketing activity.

To see the full features and capabilities of Sway Me Good, explore our platform or book a demo today.