The 50 Best (in Different 7 Categories)

(This post contains affiliate links. Read my full disclosure.)

Whenever I speak on influencer marketing, I inevitably get asked: Are there any influencer marketing tools that can make my life easier? After all, the work involved in influencer identification alone could require a tremendous amount of time, especially once you understand my influencer marketing definition and its broad implications. And that is only the beginning of the activities you will need to embrace as part of your influencer program.

Just as I believe there is no one tool that does everything for a social media marketer and thus most marketers I know end up developing their own unique stack of tools for social media marketing (you can check out my social media marketing stack here), I believe the same is true for influencer marketing.

This blog post was inspired by a chapter on influencer marketing tools that I wrote for The Age of Influence. As I mentioned in that book (you can download a free preview here) I wanted to create a page on my website that future readers can always find updated information on regarding recommended influencer marketing tools. I plan to continue to update this post as I expect changes in the market to come as influencer marketing as an industry grows bigger and bigger.

That being said, instead of trying to list every available tool, I wanted to focus on only the tested and popular influencer marketing tools from my own research and client feedback so that the list becomes pre-vetted for you. I am not perfect, so if you see your favorite tool not listed here – or if you represent a tool not listed here – please feel free to comment so that I can consider its inclusion.

Without further adieu, below is the list. I have done my best to divide the influencer marketing tools into types. Some tools crossover multiple tools, and others are always adding functionality, but this list should give you some guidance, whether you are looking to invest for the first time in an influencer marketing tool or you want to do an audit on your current tool stack.

Note that I do not include social media dashboards in this list, but since you will need one to engage with and monitor your conversations with influencers, you obviously need one. I also assume if you are reading this social media blog, you are already using one, such as Agorapulse, Sendible, et. al. ;-)

The influencer marketing tools that have an * after their names are featured in one way or another in my book – you’ll have to read it to find out the details ;-)

Below is a preview of all of the tools included here for your quick reference:

Influencer marketing tools rightfully begin with social listening tools, because your customers might already be talking about you on social media. From social listening tools, we can identify popular influencers as well as customers, partners, and employees that are already talking about us or a topic that is related to our product or service. For more information on how to use a social listening tool for influencer marketing, read my guest post on the Awario blog here.

Here a few of the top social listening tools for your consideration:

1. Awario

Awario is one of the newer kids on the block, but offers a robust social media monitoring tool that includes all of the advanced features you would want in a tool such as boolean search, sentiment analysis, location-based monitoring, social listening reports, topic cloud, as well as monitoring on sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in addition to Twitter.

2. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that lets the user get real time social insights about their brand. It provides the user with features like “Influencer Score” which shows if popular media personalities have been talking about their brand. It can also perform a “Sentiment Analysis” for the user which helps them be aware about the type (positive, negative, or neutral) comments being made by the public. Another excellent feature of this tool is that it facilitates the user to detect sales opportunities and interact with the customers in real time.

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch allows its users to keep up to date with the latest market trends by making them acquainted with all the hot topics and trends going around in the market. This is another real time listening tool which helps the user interact with the customers without delay. Its best feature is that it alerts the user about opportunities and threats. If a media influencer is engaged with the product, for example, the marketing team is alerted instantly. Note that Brandwatch’s recent acquisition of former formidable competitor Crimson Hexagon only strengthens their position in the social listening tool market.

4. Keyhole

Keyhole is another tool that provides accurate and in-depth consumer trend monitoring services. It allows the user to understand their brand’s audience/clientele by observing conversations and by analyzing the sentiments in these conversations. It facilitates the user with all the required information to cater to the target audiences’ needs. It also allows the user to monitor campaigns and build reports.

5. Meltwater

With their acquisition of social listening tool Sysomos, Meltwater is clearly one of the leaders in social listening technology. With more than 30,000 clients, Meltwater’s social listening tools provide AI-driven insights decoding billions of data in real time. From quantifying your PR impact, to knowing your share of voice, Meltwater has you covered.

6. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is reportedly the first social listening tool to offer visual recognition analysis. As social media moves from text to the visual, visual recognition might be a critical way for your brand to find the right influencers on a visual social network like Instagram. Used by over 2,000 global brands, Talkwalker offers all of the advanced functionality you would expect from an enterprise-grade social listening tool.

Further Reading: The 23 Best Social Listening Tools to Monitor and Empower Your Marketing

BLOGGER OUTREACH INFLUENCER MARKETING TOOLS

Influencer marketing in its earliest days (i.e. before the popularity of Instagram) involved reaching out to bloggers, and thus the term “blogger outreach” was created.

Blogger outreach is still critical in many industries, and thus these influencer marketing tools deserve mention. Note that these tools have also evolved over time as influencer marketing has, so their functionality is not necessarily limited to just bloggers. The following are some of the top blogger outreach platforms.

7. BuzzStream 

BuzzStream helps its users in reaching influencers, managing relationships, and conducting personalized and efficient outreach programs. It is a platform which allows the user to discover social profiles and contact information of influencers. It also provides an insight into the user’s outreach campaigns and helps in keeping track of the performance through customized reports. Companies such as Shopify and Airbnb use BuzzStream as a blogger outreach tool.

8. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach provides many social media marketing solutions, such as content promotion, sponsored post outreach, resource page link building, branding and PR, and many more. Ninja Outreach claims to have a massive influencer database and the user just needs to type in keywords in order to access millions of profiles and their email addresses. This tool has a built-in CRM which can manage all influencer outreach and marketing programs.

9. PitchBox

PitchBox is a content marketing and influencer outreach platform for brands, publishers, SEO agencies, etc. It is integrated with top SEO providers to make sure that the user gets connected to the most influential bloggers. It is easy to use and provides an automated follow-up feature, which increases the ease of the user to climb up the social media influencer ladder.

10. Postaga

Postaga is the newest entry to this list and is a tool that helps you expand your content’s reach by identifying the most effective ways to get backlinks to your site, products, and posts. Postaga allows you to plug in your preferred URL to determine how to most effectively target your preferred audience by building solid backlinks and expanding the reach of your site and content. Postaga also allows you to optimize your email campaigns, by evaluating your site and emails to determine the best items to include in your email campaigns, and even helps you locate contacts that can help improve your engagement rate and move your campaigns along. 

11. Respona

Respona is the tool I am currently trying out. It was developed first as an internal tool by the folks at Visme, and due to its success, they have evolved into a commercial tool that they recently started releasing to the outside world. In their words, Respona is “the all-in-one PR and blogger outreach tool that combines personalization with productivity.”

Further Reading: 12 Subject Lines for Better Blogger Outreach Campaigns

Parallel to blogger outreach tools, there have been a number of influencer discovery tools that focus less on just bloggers and more on a holistic approach to measure influencers from social media in addition to blogging. These companies are well-established and have been around for several years helping enterprises large and small. It made sense to make a small section for them and label them as “traditional” types of influencer discovery tools, because they have been helping influencer marketers way before Instagram became the most popular platform for influencer marketing.

12. Klear*

According to Klear, people trust influencers, not ads. Klear helps in building this trust between the audience and the influencers. It searches influencers by filtering them out on the basis of the social network, their influence, and their skills. It is used by companies such as Unilever and Coca Cola.

13. Onalytica*

Onalytica aims to connect brands and influencers in order to create better content. Brands can connect with influencers, engage with them and with their help, shape the perception of people about their products.  Used by top IT companies such as Microsoft and HP, Onalytica lets its user discover relevant influencers and connect with them. It also helps in measuring the impact made by these influencers. 

14. Traackr*

Traackr is an influencer management platform. This tool has one central database of all influencers and has the ability to prioritize them based on the impact they make. It also provides analytics in order to measure the impact of the influencers on the targeted audience, maximize ROI, and keep track of competition.

Further Reading: 6 Tips To Help You Find The Right TikTok Influencers

Some of the newest innovations we have seen in influencer marketing tools are the emergence of platforms that will help ecommerce companies connect with hidden influencers that already might be in their email list, past customers, or followers on a given social channel. These tools primarily integrate with Shopify and allow you to easily create influencer lists and evolve into efficiently managing a database of influencers.

If you are an ecommerce company who runs on Shopify, I would recommend that you first start with these tools to engage with content creators regardless of your influencer marketing budget.

15. Carro

Carro is a platform that allows you to connect with the social profiles of influencers in your niche, in order to build a successful influencer marketing campaign. Carro is far more than a simple list of influencers, however, as it takes into account the social platforms of influencers and brands, in order to make sure that the influential person you are considering for your campaign is actually the best option for your business. What sets Carro apart is its perusal of the type of content you post, and its ability to find any influencers already following your brand or engaging with your posts. This makes for a seamless transition into partnership between brands/companies and influencers. 

16. Dovetale

Dovetale is a Shopify tool that connects suitable influencers with Shopify shops to create lucrative and consistent relationships with influencers and the companies that work with them. Dovetale allows you to create a landing page for your brand or site, in order to manage and maintain all necessary links and information in a single, easy-to-access place. From affiliate links to information about brand partnerships, Dovetale offers a meeting place for influencers and brands with robust management tools. All of the information you (and the influencers you partner with) need is kept on one site, making retrieving records, accessing current and future campaign information, and connecting with influencers a breeze.

Further Reading: How to Promote Your Ecommerce Store’s Promo Codes on Social Media

The remainder of the influencer discovery tools mentioned below have been developed with the growth of Instagram and can be considered more Instagram-centric in their approach. For that reason, some of these have become as or even more popular than the traditional influencer marketing platforms mentioned before, but I highly recommend you compare several of these, including traditional influencer discovery tools, before making an investment.

These are considered influencer discovery tools because they focus on the technology of allowing you to find your perfect influencer over millions of profiles rather than a limited subset of a hundred thousand or less opt-in-only influencers that are the hallmark of the influencer marketplace tools list that will follow this one.

17. AspireIQ

Formerly known as Revfluence, AspireIQ offers a streamlined search engine system to discover thousands of influencers and gives its own recommendations to find the best suit. The platform’s services automate tedious tasks by providing a one-stop-shop solution that allows clients to measure their company’s ROI and track stats of social media content across all media channels.

18. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ bills themselves as the “influencer marketing cloud for the enterprise,” so clearly they are focused on working with larger companies. Offering similar functionality to other solutions listed here, their unique differentiator is the ability to white-label their solution for your organization so that multiple business units or departments can create their own unique internal influencer marketing dashboards for their individual programs. With their “Creator Pay” functionality offering fully integrated global payments to streamline accounting and their “Creator Boost” functionality offering a unified look at organic and paid media performance to improve ROI, CreatorIQ is a must-check-out solution for large, global enterprises.

19. Grin

Grin claims to be the number one marketing software for the world’s leading companies. Its services include getting companies to find, recruit and get advertised by prominent influencers. Its services expand over a variety of multi-purpose applications such as Shopify, Gmail, WooCommerce, Office365, Slack, PayPal and Google Drive.

20. Julius

Julius is an influencer marketing software that helps influencers develop an influencer marketing strategy that works for them. Julius functions as a campaign management tool that helps connect influencer profiles and brands, measure metrics (including response rates), and ultimately deliver successful campaigns. Julius can help with relationship management and aims to connect relevant influencers with the brands and businesses that will best work for them. Part campaign management tool and part influencer marketing agency, Julius offers influencer search tools to boost the reach of both the ideal influencer for a brand or business, and the brand or business looking to flesh out their influencer marketing program. 

*Note that Julius acquired Hypr, one of the tools for influencer marketing previously included on this list, and has taken its place. 

21. Lefty

Lefty is a brand-focused platform that focuses on influencer relationship management from the perspective of a brand or business, versus an influencer. Lefty claims a massive database for brands to peruse social media profiles of relevant influencers to find the preferred influencers who can best take their social media channels and sales to the next level. Lefty is a comprehensive management tool, and offers a way to locate, communicate with, and measure influencer partnerships. The tool manages and evaluates your influencer marketing initiatives, and provides straightforward ways to adjust your campaigns should the need arise.

22. Mavrck

Mavrck provides an all-in-one influencer marketing platform to empower brands to impact their followers and create new ones across all digital media. It helps brands and companies connect to various impactful influencers to create ideas, insights and content. Like other leading platforms, Mavrck is also trusted and used by a few of the world’s largest brands.

23. Neoreach

Neoreach allows you to filter through millions of influencers’ insights and analyze the fans of influencers with comprehensive audience demographics to find your perfect match. Within the NeoReach dashboard, manage your influencer communication, contracts, deals, and reports on how your campaign is performing. Instantly unlock historical performance and pricing insights on social influencers.

24. OpenInfluence*

OpenInfluence is a global team of passionate experts that have won the Forbes 30 under 30 award, as they provide seamless influencer solutions to help platforms, brands, and industries create consistent and followed content to create greater ROIs. It works to empower the human element in advertising and works with known clients in fashion, lifestyle, travel, automotive, entertainment, technology, etc. Check out the ebook that I co-wrote with OpenInfluence: How AI is Revolutionizing Influencer Marketing.

25. Socialbakers

Socialbakers is the newcomer to this list and to the influencer marketing space as a whole. With its roots as a Facebook analytics tools, Socialbakers has grown up to be a full fledge enterprise social media marketing tool. Now they have added specific influencer marketing functionality which includes AI-driven influencer search and discovery, influencer fraudulent activity analysis, an efficient workflow system for influencer management and internal collaboration, robust reporting, and even brand ambassador identification. Note that all of this functionality is part of their entire social media marketing suite.

26. tagger

tagger’s influencer discovery tools allow brands to identify the type of influencers they are most likely to work well alongside. Part influencer search engine, and part campaign management tool, tagger is an excellent platform for anyone looking to combine all of their influencer campaign information in a single place. While many influencer search engines focus primarily on connection, tagger takes it one step further and makes a single platform from which brands are able to track campaigns, pay their influencers, and manage all of the projects currently being engaged in. If you are unfamiliar with how sites like these are structured, you can request a live demo from the company and receive plenty of professional support. 

27. trendHERO

trendHERO was created as a tool for fake followers detection, but now it has evolved into becoming an all-in-one influencer marketing tool for Instagram with more than 80 million accounts in its influencer discovery database. You can do basic influencer search by filters and also use a few advanced features to simplify the task. For example, use the “500 Similar Accounts feature” if you need a list of accounts with the same audience in 2 clicks. This data is based on who is also followed by the account followers, so you could even use the date for competitor analysis. One more advanced feature is “Overlaps.” It helps you compare influencers’ unique and common audiences for campaigns with several influencers.

28. Upfluence

Like many of the other platforms listed above, Upfluence is another data-driven AI-powered platform to help you discover influencers. Upfluence allows you to not only access over 3 million influencers but also to use 20 advanced search criteria to help you find the most effective influencer faster.

Further Reading: The Top 21 Influencer Marketing Platforms

Marketing influencer marketplaces play as big a role as social media or online platforms. These are traditional forms of outlets built to track influencers for businesses. They accommodate research facilities across their networks to help brands develop relationships with relevant influencers. In many cases the marketplaces, because they are inherently limited to opted-in influencers, also vet the applications to provide you a list of only influencers they recommend you work with.

A few of the top influencer marketplaces include:

29. Activate

Activate is an influencer marketplace that provides a unique combination of technology and human expertise. Their platform allows you to efficiently find influencers as well as track their performance, but their marketplace includes handpicked curated lists of influencers as well as a host of other services provided by their Studio in-house experts for influencer strategy, casting, and execution.

30. ExpertVoice

ExpertVoice is an influencer marketplace where worthy brands can find, educate, and interact with trusted influencers. These experts provide opinions and authentic advice as to the “where”s and “why”s to buy something. This helps new companies and startups gather input from the brightest and the most experienced minds in the outfit.

31. Influence.co

Influence.co provides services where agencies, individuals, brands and companies can create their campaigns and manage them over different social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It provides all tools to measure analytics against each post on multiple platforms and informs clients of detailed performance statistics to identify success factors across different levels of user engagement.

32. Intellifluence

Intellifluence is the world’s first open platform that enables influencers, brands, and agencies to connect to each other. Through this platform, they can share their work and interact with the community. Many brands become highlighted on the influence platform and collaborate with high-rated PR firms while building effective influencer relationships.

33. Izea

Izea conducts and manages marketing campaigns for brands to get influencers on board. It creates social media posts and ads for companies and features them over blogs, videos, and photos via trusted influencers across their vast platform. This creates a personalized message for the influencer’s audience about the brand being endorsed.

34. Linqia

Linqia creates a connection between brands and advertisers and provides a high-performance content engine that delivers the best return on ad spend across all social media. It has an outreach of over 244 million across the U.S. with over 100,000 influencers on its platform. It drives greater performance with efficient branding of all kinds of companies and strives to move towards an AI-based platform.

35. Tapinfluence*

TapInfluence is a marketing platform that caters to Business-to-Business companies. They provide over 100,000 verified influencers of various sorts on their platform. This includes fashion, lifestyle, technology, and healthcare influencers over multiple social media platforms. The platform helps clients create effective influencer strategies while providing greater analytic outreach and campaign management facilities. TapInfluence helps track performance history, estimated cost-per-engagement (CPE), and specific services for clients that have their own blog.

36. Tomoson*

A SAAS based platform in Minnesota, Tomoson integrates brands with top influencers to manage and promote their brands and projects. They help meet marketing goals with an extensive database of over 90,000 influencers. Their team includes consultants, social media experts and dedicated representatives that can help brands meet their marketing targets efficiently.

Further Reading: The Top 15 Influencer Marketplaces for Your Next Influencer Campaign

There are also many other effective tools to conduct influencer marketing campaigns, including some that specialize in subsets of the above tools. Consider these to round out your influencer marketing tools stack.

37. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a marketing platform that uses smarter algorithms to effectively put out top content to resonate with a brand’s audience. It takes up data from over the past 12 months to figure topics trending over social media and create viral campaigns through them. Through these campaigns, clients are connected to influencers on the BuzzSumo platform, which further endorses the brand and the process couples into a highly effective branding technique.

38. Captiv8

Captiv8 is a comprehensive influencer marketing suite that builds on the basics of influencer marketing management software, and takes it a step further by trying to include every aspect of influencer marketing into a single platform. Captiv8 can be used to deliver payment, manage campaigns, evaluate results, and connect to influencers best suited to meet your campaign’s needs.

39. Curalate*

Curalate is better known for their Like2Buy solution which allowed ecommerce companies the ability to build a shoppable link on their Instagram page. Although they are relative newbies to the influencer marketing space, their experience at working with most of the largest brands on Instagram-centric ecommerce speaks for the experience they bring to the influencer marketing space. Curalate not only helps you run influencer campaigns but also helps you source and publish user-generated content from influencers.

40. Dealspotr*

Dealspotr is not necessarily an influencer marketing tool per se, but smart marketers realize how they can leverage this marketplace app to engage with lifestyle influencers and drive sales through coupon-generated campaigns. Dealspotr is an online coupon-sharing network where more than 200,000 community members vet coupon codes to ensure that they work for the more than 1 million shoppers who use the site. As a brand, you can create your own page and offer exclusive discounts to the community. By engaging with community members who are micro and nano-influencers, you can establish an influencer marketing campaign that is 100% trackable right there on the platform.

41. FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is an analytics platform that provides optimized data for all social media handles and content. It enables the user to dig deeper on their follower base and their demographic while also providing services to extract the ideal customers and followers customized to the brand. Moreover, the analytics services create effective graphs and charts to organize data optimally.

42. Heepsy

Heepsy focuses on helping you find influencers and vet their authenticity. With a database of 7+ million influencers who all have at least 5,000 followers, Heepsy allows you to quickly identify potential influencers and then helps you analyze each influencer by their authenticity score, audience demographics, cost estimations, and brand collaborations.

43. HypeAuditor*

HypeAuditor is a follower-checking platform that provides an insight over fraud followers that have been paid or bought to participate in marketing and engagement activities. The platform identifies these fake marketers and helps optimize businesses over social media.

44. Influenster

Influenster is similar to Dealspotr, in that it is not an influencer marketing platform, but instead of offering coupon codes like Dealspotr to attract influencers, it offers a product discovery platforms that is chock full of more than 40+ million reviews from its 6+ million member community. As a business, you can engage with these influential shoppers through hyper-targeted product product sampling utilizing their “VoxBoxes” and then generate reviews which you can use on your own as well as retail partner websites. These UGC reviews also can also be repurposed into powerful social ads because of their inherent social proof.

45. LaunchMetrics

LaunchMetrics is another influencer marketplace, but they are unique in their focus solely on influencers in the Fashion, Luxury and Cosmetics industries. This has helped them create a premium influencer database of Fashion, Luxury and Cosmetics trendsetters that can help propel your brand if you are in one of these channels. Find and activate mega influencers and celebrities, mid-tier digital talent, and emerging micro – influencers across all online and social channels.

46. Nimble

Nimble is a contact management platform that integrates scattered information. It works over Microsoft Office and tracks complete contacting and engagement history over all social media platforms. It works as a wingman to effective business professionals and analyzes keywords and topics to identify what content would be of best interest and relevance to the brand.

47. Phlanx

Phlanx is a unique set of tools, some free, that allow you to more easily run your influencer marketing. With a beginning price point of $25 per month at the time of writing this blog post, Phlanx is a perfect entryway tool into influencer marketing. Its unique set of tools include an influencer directory, a collaborations app to allow you to partner with other brands and cross-promote each other, an influencer auditor tool, an app that allows you to offer product trials, a contract generator, and a number of engagement calculators that help you calculate estimated costs of working with influencers.

48. Pixlee

Pixlee is one of the most popular platforms to curate user-generated visual content for your organic social media. Not only can you do most things supported by influencer discovery tools, but you can also publish shoppable content from social media influencers across marketing channels.

49. Right Relevance

Right Relevance is a SaaS-based platform designed to provide information and intelligence on over 50 thousand topics that include semantic information, influencers, and marketing content. They provide services to help effective decision making as the platform has been found effective in election campaigns, product launches, news developments and disease outbreaks, etc.

50. SocialBlade

Looking to find a graph of the number of followers that any given social media user has on any given social network? SocialBlade has been the choice of marketers for some time now because of its ease of use and free analytics. A great tool to use to help vet influencers if you don’t use any of the influencer marketing tools mentioned above.

There you have it. Hopefully, this list, which I plan to keep updated, provides you enough intel to create your own unique tool stack for influencer marketing.

Which of these influencer marketing tools are your favorites? Which ones am I missing? Please chime in!

Hero Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash