Part 7) How to Choose an Influencer Marketing Platform with The Best Creator Search Solution

The success of an influencer marketing program is contingent upon finding the perfect influencers with whom to collaborate. Today, manually searching is no longer a viable option (especially when your boss or client wants to see a strategically curated list based on data-driven insights). Finding an influencer marketing platform that boasts a robust database, complete with industry-leading data science, is mission-critical for building winning campaigns; albeit, only one component of the larger influencer marketing management process.

Before jumping into how to assess platforms based on their search solution, you should know that this blog is the seventh of our 13-part series dedicated to helping you select the right influencer marketing platform. There are many things to consider as you evaluate prospective influencer technology providers.

Selecting an Enterprise Marketing Platform

13 Part Blog Series

1. The 5 Typical Stages When Evaluating an Influencer Marketing Platform
2. Thinking about Your Long-term Influencer Marketing Strategy
3. The Importance of Industry Reviews & Rankings When Selecting the Best Influencer Marketing Platform
4. How to Judge Influencer Marketing Platform Maturity Related to Customization, Security, and Advanced Admin Controls
5. Why Marketers Should Prioritize Influencer Marketing Platforms with Advanced Data Science Solutions
6. How to Make Sense of The Services That Different Influencer Marketing Platforms Provide
7. How to Choose an Influencer Marketing Platform with The Best Creator Search Solution
8. Why An Influencer Marketing Platform Should Have Solutions that Automate the Vetting of Influencers
9. How to Evaluate Influencer Marketing Platforms’ Collaboration and Approval Solutions
10. Why Advanced Campaign Management Capabilities Should Be Integral to Your Prospective Influencer Marketing Platforms’ Solution Set
11. How Influencer Marketers Can Evaluate Measurement, First-party Data, and Reporting Solutions When Considering an Influencer Marketing Platform
12. Why a Robust & Customizable CRM is a Crucial Influencer Marketing Platform Solution to Scale Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
13. When Deciding on an Influencer Marketing Platform, Evaluate its Integrations & APIs

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An influencer database with advanced machine learning capabilities can help narrow down relevant creators, no matter your brand's level of influencer marketing maturity. For marketers looking to ramp up an early-phase influencer marketing program, simple creator search capabilities with intuitive filtering are important. For more advanced influencer marketers with a large, preexisting roster of influencers, lookalike modeling capabilities that allow you to automate and scale the identification process may be most important. (Has your boss ever said, "this influencer is a perfect fit! Please find 20 more just like them"? This solves that problem in seconds).

Check out this blog on CreatorIQ’s top 5 strategies for discovering creators.

Now, when evaluating prospective platforms’ influencer search functionality, there is a lot to consider:

Pro-Tips:

• Don't trust the Sales demonstration (which is often heavily scripted) to represent what it’s like to use the platform to search for influencers.

• Prepare for a product demonstration by coming up with a list of key influencer and audience attributes that align with your target buyer personas.

Questions to Ask:

• Ask to search for influencers in real-time during the call with each platform. Use the same search criteria for each platform, so the search evaluation is apples to apples.

• Ask, "how many public social accounts does your platform pull data from?" (This is important when it comes to audience affinities; if the platform only has access to limited amounts of audience data, then the credibility of that influencer database - and "audience affinity" filters - should be called into question).

As you evaluate prospective influencer marketing platforms’ with a robust search for creators functionality, there is a lot to consider. We suggest developing a worksheet like the one below to help you assess their product offering. Need more inspiration? Check out other workbook grids to help you during your platform selection process. You can access them here.

The Takeaway

There are several things to consider when choosing an influencer marketing platform. Our next blog post will discuss how to find a solution that enables you to vet influencers properly. Get the complete Guide & Workbook for Selecting an Enterprise Influencer Marketing Platform or stay tuned for the next blog post.