Influencer marketing opens a broad range of opportunities for advertisers - not only that influencers help to reach all kinds of narrow audiences with very particular interests, but it also allows for creating a brand image trusted by the opinion leaders. Influencers know their audience like nobody else and often demonstrate a very creative approach to native advertising, which makes influencer marketing one of the most effective ways of building brand awareness and increasing sales.
Building your own influencer marketing platform offers an opportunity to target specific trends of the influencer marketing industry and introduce features that would suit your business goals, priorities and practices.
What Makes Influencer Marketing Apps a Global Trend
If a few years ago we spoke about continued growth of influencer marketing, today we can certainly say that 2020 was a year of boom for the industry with a 57% increase of sponsored collaboration impact. Pandemic and constant lockdowns have reshaped our media consumption habits. For example, overall screen time has increased for all categories of users who thus became more exposed to influencers. YPulse pointed out that the amount of Gen Z following online celebrities had increased from 54% to 70%. The research also demonstrated that 58% of young consumers purchased something that was recommended by an influencer during the quarantine times.
Images from ypulse.com
In light of these recent favorable trends towards influencer marketing, new platforms that connect content creators with brands and specialized agencies continue to grow and evolve.
Platforms such as TAKUMI, Heepsy focus on micro and nano influencers. In the last couple of years attention of businesses shifted from macro and celebrity influencers to micro and nano influencers for a number of reasons. The average engagement rate for a nano influencer is 8%, while for macro influencers, it varies from 2,4% to 4%. Another important factor is price - instead of spending thousands on a celebrity influencer, businesses prefer to collaborate with a few influencers with smaller audiences and much lower prices.
Nano and micro influencers quite often form a community around a niche topic and thus collaboration with a brand can inspire a genuine interest in a relevant product among the audience. Platforms such as MuseFind, Klear or Peg let brands reps search for niche influencers, working with whom allows for targeting segments which are strongly related to the brand’s industry.
Image from impfluencers.com
Even though the overall aim of influencer marketing apps is the same, they do differ greatly in their features, which also highly depends on current digital trends. To illustrate, if a business is interested in advertising a mobile app for editing photos on a phone, the influencer marketing software should include analytics of Instagram profiles rather than YouTube channels. Going further, one should take into account that a user is more likely to buy the subscription if the app is recommended by an influencer with aesthetically pleasing feed and expertise in photography.
Influencer marketing becomes more sophisticated and personalized - this tendency explains why new platforms continue to emerge and introduce new features.
Essential Features of an Influencer Marketing Platform
From the perspectives of a content creator as well as a business, it is important that both parties go through a clear and optimized workflow. Influencer marketing software allows for a step-by-step scenario, in which every new stage (submission of drafts, publication, etc.) is agreed in a timely manner, thus making campaign management much easier for both sides. The majority share some core features, yet they use different approaches, metrics and methods of process optimization. With this in our minds, let us shortlist some of the most essential features that should be incorporated during the influencer marketing app development.
1. Influencer Search Engine
The first question that arises when thinking about launching an influencer campaign is how to choose content creators whose audience will resonate with the product. Influencer marketing platforms offer a variety of search filters that enable to find influencers based on keywords, topics, location, age, performance indicators and other. Platforms constantly introduce new possibilities of search criteria, including such features as hashtag or emoji search.
2. Communication Management
Messaging influencers on your own, agreeing on creatives and contract details can get very tedious if you are using such communication channels as emails and messengers. Platforms create automated workflows that facilitate collaboration by providing the space for messaging and agreeing on the crucial stages of the campaign.
The majority of platforms have in-built CRMs that help advertisers to keep track of every stage of campaign implementation and optimize communication when working with many influencers. They can also be useful for mass-mailing and offer the possibility to add notes and reminders.
3. Audience Analysis
What brands definitely would like to avoid when working with influencers are bots and mass-followers. Now almost every platform aims at detecting quality audiences and measuring campaign KPIs based on the actual number of active followers. While some platforms only integrate API which allows for pulling actual analytics from influencer’s social media, others also use 3rd party data to cross-analyze the audience.
4. Campaign Content Management
This feature helps advertisers to manage all of the important ad post features such as creatives, hashtags, links, brand mentions and deadlines. Platforms allow marketers to receive the drafts directly from influencers, discuss changes and publication details. It is also very handy for content creators to have all of the requirements in one place and make sure that the content corresponds to the advertiser’s checkpoints.
5. Performance Analytics and Reporting
Effective influencer marketing app allows brands to measure influencer content impact using real-time analytics and data such as likes, comment, engagement rate and other KPIs. With the help of campaign measurement tools brands can calculate the return on investment (ROI), average revenue per user (ARPU) and other important metrics that can be helpful when planning future campaigns. The reporting capabilities of some platforms expand to forecasting results and optimizing for key performance benchmarks and provide in-depth post-campaign reporting.
6. Influencer Compensation
Secure and automated process of payment is another necessity that an influencer marketing software development can bring. The majority of platforms provide all the necessary documentation for accounting and tax compliance. Usually the payment from the advertiser is released as soon as the publication is successfully completed.
Influencer Marketing App Development with Fingers Media
So why and how to build an influencer marketing platform instead of renting one of the many offered on the market? Here are some of the benefits you get with Fingers Media team:
1. Personalized features - the industry of influencer marketing is extremely wide and dynamic. It is important that the platform you use can offer solutions to the pains and needs of your business and your users.
2. Avoid fees and commissions - renting a platform can become expensive with all the constant payments and fees in place. With your own platform you only pay once for your own customized platform, which becomes a great possibility to create a new revenue stream that also compensates the development costs.
3. New business opportunity - many talent and influencer marketing agencies now offer their own influencer marketing software. Use your expertise in the field to create a new revenue stream for your business.
4. Clear workflow and vast expertise. With Fingers Media you can be sure about well-established processes and updates on each stage:
⬥ Discovery: you share your dreams and ideas, doubts and fears concerning the project and our team helps to estimate costs, choose stack, consider risks and elicit requirements for project planning.
⬥ Design: this stage consists of business analysis, benchmark, UX/UI concept and writing detailed specifications which ends with your approval of the project prototype.
⬥ Development: the project development is divided into small sprints, at the end of each sprint a new working version of the product is created and evaluated.
⬥ QA & Testing: comprehensive testing according to the size of your project, bug fixing and performance improvement;
⬥ Release and Deployment: analytics setup, acceptance testing, purchasing a domain name and deployment of new software components in a real environment after what your users will finally see and start working with your product.
Our Expertise
Our collaboration with a leading influencer marketing platform GetBlogger was focused on building a mobile app for iOS and Android. Since the majority of similar platforms only have a web version, it was a challenging and exciting task of projecting the functionality of the entire platform into the mobile app. At Fingers we are passionate about empathic design, so a smooth, consistent and responsive UI was in our focus for all three categories of users – Influencers, Agencies, and Businesses.
⬥ Influencer Search Engine automatically provides data on influencer’s audience, calculates the amount of quality audience and a relevant objective ad cost.
⬥ Brand Analytics provides detailed insights on the brand's products and its social media presence.
⬥ Competitors Analysis enables users to analyze other Instagram accounts and get information on competitors advertising activity
⬥ GetBlogger+ allows businesses to collaborate with content creators through a Cost per Action (CPA) model.
Final Words
We strongly believe that businesses’ collaboration with influencers will only increase as it is a powerful tool that allows you to reach niche audiences and achieve high conversion rates.
Drop us a line if you are thinking how to build an influencer marketing platform of your own or if you are looking for the right app development company to take your platform further and develop a mobile application. Our team of dedicated professionals will gladly help you in influencer marketing app development that will make a difference!
An influencer ad campaign is not an easy task for both parties, so we focused on developing an app that offers a clear and efficient customer journey and reduces the number of clicks to the bare minimum. What we can say about our collaboration with GetBlogger, is that a well-thought-out plan for the success of the campaign is what makes every feature of the app.
