Top Influencer Marketing Companies (2023) - Business of Apps

Influencer marketing companies can help establish and strengthen the bond between your brand and potential customers by leveraging the major platforms of content creators.

Innovative technology and mass digitization have changed the ecosystem of communication, and social media platforms have emerged to be the preferred method of exchanging information, making influencers a powerful marketing tool.

The rapid development has urged marketers and advertisers to adapt their strategies and tactics to more modern standards, understanding the new wave of audience that are growing to consider influencers as the new experts.

In this guide, we will present to you a list of top influencer marketing companies and platforms to reach brand awareness on a more advanced level.

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What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is growing rapidly, with a predicted $370 million spend by 2027. That is largely, but not exclusively, due to brands relying on the established trust between the influencer and their audience to sell their products.

So with marketers drifting away from traditional advertising and focusing on influencers who are becoming the new, prime connection to target users, influencer marketing is the go-to strategy if you want your business to thrive in this evolved market.

In essence, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that utilizes content creators, a.k.a influencers, to push their products and services to the public and attract their target audience to (ideally) drive profitable customer action.

Influencer marketing is so successful because of the power social media holds in the digital landscape, with influencers being the main driving force of social media platforms.

But why do content creators play such an integral role in the media, and how are they able to form such a loyal following of like-minded individuals that place a great amount of trust into these influencers?

What is an influencer?

It is probably best to first understand what an influencer is before diving into their magical abilities they seem to possess to have become a fundamental marketing strategy today.

While there are many types of influencers, this term usually points to a common definition that describes a person with a well-established online media presence. They create content within a specific niche, in the form of video, image or blogs, attracting their audience to ‘follow’ them and their talent.

These individuals become loyal ‘followers’ that follow the content and conversations of the influencer, forming a virtual bond, and trusting and believing in the topics, discussions and work that they share with their audience.

Connecting social media influencers with brands

Influencers typically narrow their content down to a niche area, focusing their conversation and engagement around particular topics. Their followers are therefore individuals who share the same interests, often looking to acquire more information about said topic by consuming content of the influencer.

With social media providing a kind of freedom to really anyone to set up an account and become a content creator, users are able to work themselves up to a certain virtual status where their following even idolizes them.

They become figures that possess the power to educate, engage and ‘influence’ a large number of people, revolutionizing and democratizing communication, and, therefore, the marketing ecosystem, allowing people of all types to take on an authoritative role in society to advertise a brand.

Top Influencer Marketing Platforms and Agencies

Why is influencer marketing important?

Influence marketing is a fast-growing marketing channel, making partnerships with brands and creators ideally profitable. With the global influencer marketing market value standing at about 13.8 billion U.S. dollars as of 2021, this concept continues to mature as a prime industry in the field.

Facilitating specific brands to sell their products and services via their endorsement on social media platforms with an extremely large follower base, 89% of marketers consider Instagram alone an important platform for their influencer marketing campaigns, followed by YouTube with 70%.

In a way, influencer marketing presents an iteration of a movie or music celebrity endorsement of products that took off back in the 40s and 50s, but on a much larger scale. And with today’s extreme proliferation of social media, we see that among hundreds of millions of users, some get to be extremely popular. This way they can influence people’s decisions on what to try, purchase or subscribe to.

These days people don’t really engage anymore with traditional brand ads as they used to. Therefore, brands needed another more creative way to reach out to their potential customers, and so the influencer marketing strategy has emerged as the prime method to adapt to this new digital marketing environment.

How does influencer marketing work?

Now that we understand how powerful and effective influencer marketing is within social media platforms, you may be curious to know how exactly this concept works in order to incorporate it into your own marketing plan.

Like any other marketing concept, successful influencer marketing is achieved through bespoke tactics and strategies as well as a detailed and methodical approach. So what are the concrete steps to influencer marketing?

We’ll walk you through the key components a successful strategy needs to have a great impact on your brand, drastically increasing the pace of profitable actions by your newly acquired customers.

Define your brand goals

It all comes down to your brand goals. You are looking to drive traffic and increase visibility to your brand – right? So, naturally you need to understand the ins and outs of your brand and its objectives to build an effective influencer marketing strategy that will serve all components of your business accurately.

Lay out all of the products and services that you offer and determine realistic goals that you would like for your brand to achieve, including any key metrics you want to reach, such as conversion rates, download or install rates.

It is also important to set measurable goals that you can track and report on throughout your influencer marketing campaign.

Know your ‘influencees’

Every marketing strategy needs extensive research around the brand’s target audience. You want to create an effective influencer marketing strategy that speaks to the right people in order to actually achieve your goals in increasing awareness, and ultimately, profit.

The best way to understand who exactly you are trying to ‘influence’ is to do some research into your competitors who are promoting a similar brand to yours on the relevant social media platforms. Then look into the users that are interacting with their ad posts.

This way you can develop audience personas to define your target audience, associating them with accurate attributes that can greatly help you tweak your strategy to match the qualities you are looking for in your influencers.

Choose the right influencers

So, what else does an influencer marketing plan need? You guessed it, the right influencer.

An online creator may be fitting to your brand, producing similar content on their platforms, but they also need to have the right stats as well.

Ask yourself the following set of questions to really determine if they are the right influencer to promote your brand:

Influencer checklist

To answer these questions sufficiently to get the most out of your tailored strategy, influencer marketing agencies will help you gain the most accurate answers and data, guiding you ultimately to successful influencer marketing.

Reach out

Now that you have compiled a list of influencers that you believe will be of value to your brand, you can start your communication by interacting with their content organically. This includes liking their posts, commenting where appropriate as well as sharing and promoting their content.

Gradually, you can send out a direct message suggesting a collaboration. If they have provided an email address in their bio, feel free to send them an email as well. However, whichever contact method you choose, make sure to make your message personal. Avoid sending out a mass email or a generic message.

Collaborate

Once you have successfully convinced creators to promote your brand, make sure your influencer marketing campaign is truly a collaboration in which you and your creator will each contribute equally to the project.

Remember that creators take great pride and ownership in their content. And they are the experts in creating content, earning them the title of an influencer. So, you want to make sure you trust in their abilities to give the best quality of their work.

Leave it to your influencer to showcase their creativity for your brand, but also feel free to provide some guidelines about what you envision for your campaign, making sure both parties are on the same page.

Track & measure the process

Once you have launched your influencer marketing campaign, you want to keep track of your progress and measure the effectiveness of your collaboration efforts. It can be easy to get lost in the vanity metrics of likes and comments, but it is crucial to prioritize ROI stats as well for more valuable insights into your results.

As you laid out the KPIs for your campaign in the initial stages, it would be helpful to track progress of these metrics as well to calculate the impact of your strategy for the success of your brand.

When tracking and measuring your results, the first thing marketers tend to first look at is if conversion rates have increased. While this is important too, when it comes to influencer marketing, there is a deeper focus on attracting users as this leads to more sustainable success in sales.

Here are the three core goals you want to keep in mind when analyzing your campaign’s performance:

3 main goals for influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a unique and creative way to gain more attraction to your brand, and its products and services. Creators are utilizing new content formats to promote brands, including reels, photography and short videos to attract their users.

Influencers’ followers are modern business’ new potential customers, so you want to switch your focus from sales and transaction rates to the creators’ followers, and their interests and demands to better nurture your campaign.

But in this newly evolved realm of social media marketing and the rise of influencers as a common marketing partner these days, it is easy to be confused about where to start to join this new trending format of advertising.

What are influencer marketing platforms?

Influencer marketing platforms are one of the places where you can kickstart your campaign. Unlike agencies, an influencer marketing platform is a digitized tool that helps brands run more efficient campaigns.

These tools are commonly used by brands as well as agencies and feature extensive functions that can optimize the process of your influencer marketing practices. For example, they may provide a large searchable database of potential and available influencers, third-party data analytics tools as well as brand-influencer relationship or campaign management.

Influencer platforms serve as a kind of support for all parties in influencer marketing, evaluating potential influencers and making sure they are most suitable to your brand. And as online creators gain more authoritative status with the rise in popularity of new media formats, influencer marketing platforms have expanded their services even more.

Here are the main offerings influencer platforms typically provide as an efficient software solution for brands and agencies:

Mass influencer databases, with valid stats
Influencer content amplification
Third-party analytics
Influencer marketplace
Campaign & relationship management

Influencer marketing tools are essential to help create a successful campaign with creators, all contributing to a well-oiled machine that will attract new target groups and drive a new wave of awareness to your unique brand. Nonetheless, influencer agencies go hand in hand with influencer marketing platforms.

So, it is a great idea to partner with one of our top influencer marketing companies to really get the most out of your campaigns and get the results you envisioned when first creating your marketing plan.

What do influencer marketing agencies & platforms do?

You want to partner with influencer marketing agencies that can help you in specific areas of your brand, providing just the support and expertise that you need to successfully run your influencer marketing campaign.

Influencer marketing platforms, moreover, offer a direct way for brands to connect and work with influencers that are listed on a particular platform. Essentially, these platforms help influencers to monetize their social media channels and brands to reach out to their potential customers or increase engagement with their current ones.

Unlike collaborating with traditional marketing agencies, influencer marketing companies provide more specialised expertise and know-how surrounding the ecosystem of social media, including what media formats are currently trending as well as experience to work with brands and creators of all sizes.

In essence, influencer marketing companies have a variety of trusted influencer they work with, and can therefore add extensive value to your business, providing expert analysis to achieve your brand goals in no time.

Typically, influencer marketing platforms focus on the following functions:

The ecosystem of influencer marketing platforms

Partner with top influencer marketing companies

The crucial role that an influencer marketing platform plays for a brand is that it helps understand the users that follow a particular influencer and what impact and value that influencer can offer said brand. Some influencer marketing platforms also offer a service layer in which they help source influencers as well as manage campaigns and develop creatives.

There are influencer marketing platforms that focus on a particular platform, such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube. However, the majority operate across a number of different social channels. Similarly, some influencer marketplaces are known for sourcing influencers in particular areas of the market or verticals whereas others have a wider positioning.

Now that we have covered the realm of influencer marketing and the impactful role influencer marketing companies play, we are ready to present to you our carefully selected list of the top influencer marketing platforms.

Partner with one of our trusted influencer agencies that make sure your marketing campaign runs smoothly and efficiently, providing expert assessments and in-depth reports upon campaign completion.