5 Tools to Help Your Influencer Outreach

If you’re a digital marketer, influencer marketing is one of the things you do, so you can’t spend all of your time on it. Not only do you have to find the right influencers to work with, but you have to vet them to ensure they’re a good match for your brand. Working with the wrong influencers can do more harm than good, so you must reach out to those whose goals and mission align with your business.

Here are the best tools that you can use to make influencer outreach easier and less time-consuming.

1.  Buzzsumo

Before you can reach out to any influencers, you have to find them. Buzzsumo is known for content research, but it also makes a great option for finding influencers and learning more about them. To use Buzzsumo, you can find influencers by author bios and content shared. You can also filter results by location and type of influencer.

Once you begin the search, you can check out information about each influencer, such as their website’s domain authority, number of followers and recently shared content. Once you find an influencer you think will be a great fit, you can begin a list for outreach.

2.  Buzzstream

Buzzstream, an influencer marketing app, has research and outreach features to help you find and reach influencers. Once you start a search, you can order the influencers found by the number of shares. If you’re searching for a particular niche, Buzzstream can help you find influencers that work in that niche with followers interested in your products or services.

Once you have a list going, you can reach out to influencers. To reach out to them, you can create templates with automated follow-ups. You can also find influencers who have worked in other states or those who have responded to your emails in the past.

3.  Fourstarzz Media

Fourstarzz Media provides you with an inventory of influencers. This tool can help you filter the influencers based on location, gender, influencer type, and more. This platform also offers influencer marketing campaigns for businesses that do not have a person allocated to create one. This means they have a team that can handle all of your campaigns from beginning to end. With a dedicated manager, they’ll identify influencers, strategies, and conduct outreach. They even offer analytics so you can see how well the campaign performed.

4.  GRIN

Recruiting influencers can be a full-time job in and of itself. Not only do you have to ensure that the influencers you find are right for your campaign, but you should also dig through their posts to make sure they would never do anything that could put your brand in hot water. GRIN offers a complete solution for this problem. From influencer research, outreach, contracts and even analytics, you can run your entire campaign from one place without having to switch between tools.

5.  Social media platforms

You can, of course, do influencer outreach from the social media platforms yourself. The downside to this is that you don’t have as many tools available for research, and you never know where their followers are located.

On top of this, even if you do have success reaching out to influencers via social media profiles, you still have no way of tracking the true success of the campaign. You can ask the influencers to send over analytics at the end of the campaign, but this is an extra task that many of them might not want to do, especially if they have already been paid for their work.

Another problem you’ll find is contracts. After you do outreach and an influencer is interested in working with you, you’ll need to have them sign a contract so you can ensure the work gets done and they can have a timely payment.

Without using an influencer marketing platform, you may make mistakes on your contracts that allow the influencer more creative control than you would typically want, which can impact your brand and final results. Everything on social media reflects your brand, even an influencer talking about you can affect consumer perceptions of your company.

Final thoughts

Finding influencers might be easy when you scroll through Instagram. However, outreach is a whole other beast. You can choose to contact influencers through direct messages, email or phone. No matter how you do it, make sure you have an outreach plan. Outreach is more than just sending one message to see if someone is interested. Instead, you should follow up with the influencers you reach out to so you can work with the best of the best and ensure your campaign is a success.