By Debbie Friez

Working with influencers is a hot topic for marketers everywhere. But how do you find the right influencers? How do you manage those relationships and how do you scale programs?

According to the 2023 B2B Influencer Marketing Report, 53% of respondents agreed identifying, qualifying and engaging with the ideal influencers was the most significant challenge in their influencer marketing program.

Tools to help you with your influencer identification are becoming more sophisticated, and are now using artificial intelligence (AI); 42% of marketers surveyed in our report are using AI for identification and selection. 

What influencer marketing tools can help you? 

The following is a collection of social media and influencer marketing tools you might find useful whether you’re a B2B or a B2C marketer. But definitely if you work in B2B.

Outside of the promotional tools you might use for the content marketing that goes along with most influencer marketing programs, there are three general areas of opportunity to scale with technology when it comes to working with influencers.

1 – Identification, qualification and recruiting

Finding the right influencers based on social data among other sources is much easier with a tool made for that purpose. Followers can be faked, so digging into more details to validate influencers is just as important. Finally, collecting enough information to initiate a relevant and personalized recruiting effort is made much easier with certain tools.

2 – Monitoring and engagement

Once you’ve identified and engaged with a group of influencers, you can use tools to monitor their social media activity and get alerts for opportunities to engage. Maintaining relationships with B2B influencers in between campaigns is key if you want to keep the brand relationship alive for long-term value.

3 – Measurement and reporting

How you measure depends on your goals but being able to track shared URLs and report their reach, engagement and contribution to conversion is essential. Measuring the influencer’s activity is important, and so is measuring the impact of the influencer on their network – as well as that network’s impact on their networks. Then you can wrap it all up in a nice report.

As far as types of influencer marketing platforms, there are many. To simplify, let’s say there are two general categories for B2B (specialty and platforms) and we’ve included a few examples for each. This is not a comprehensive list, but a collection of tools that we have used or reviewed. 

Specialty tools

It helps to start with research to get a lay of the land. Here are some social listening and social media monitoring tools that are great for researching and engaging with influencers. 

Social media listening tools:

• Meltwater – A comprehensive listening tool reviewing most of the social media platforms and news sources. AI …read more

  Source:: Top Rank Blog

        

  

  Author: Aaron