Micro-influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach and influence your target market on social media and in the blogosphere. But finding and managing a team of the right micro-influencers for your niche can be a challenge.
In a perfect world, we’d all be using the same tools that Coca-Cola and Sephora use to find micro-influencers and manage their campaigns. But we’re not all ready to break the bank for our marketing tools.
Luckily, there are plenty of low-cost (or free) options out there that can help you scale your micro-influencer campaigns. Here are 10 to check out.
1. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo’s search tool is a completely free way to find blogging or social media influencers in your niche. Just type one of your keywords in, and it will return a list of popular content on that topic. Look at the domains they’re published on. These could be popular bloggers who are already writing about topics related to your niche – you can reach out to them as potential influencers.
If you head over to the “Influencers” tab on Buzzsumo, then you can search for influencer profiles directly based on your niche keywords:
Buzzsumo returns important data like their page authority and number of Twitter followers as well, so you can make an informed decision when vetting potential influencers.
Pricing
Buzzsumo does have a lot of advanced features you could make use of, such as content backlink analysis, but their Pro plans are pricey, starting at $79/month. You can still get a lot done using their totally free search features to find influencers.
2. Buzzstream
Buzzstream is a contact management and prospecting tool – perfect if you’re manually searching for and reaching out to influencers.
With their browser tool, you can add blogs and social media profiles to your Buzzstream database while you browse the web. Come across a potential influencer, and Buzzstream will discover important information about them automatically, such as their contact details, website statistics, and social metrics.
You can then organize and segment your contacts based on key metrics that matter most in influencer marketing, such as domain authority and followers:
You can also discover which influencers have already promoted you in the past. Once you start reaching out to likely influencers, Buzzstream will track your relationship stages for you.
Pricing
Buzzstream offers a free trial, after which their starter plan costs $24/mo for up to 2 users. With it, you’ll get access to nearly all of Buzzstream’s features for your first 1,000 contacts.
3. Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a great tool to analyze the makeup of your current Twitter audience and find influencers that can help you reach a new one. Followerwonk’s search feature allows you to find Twitter profiles based on keywords in their bio/name, or their location and URL.
With the tool’s analysis features, you can also segment your current Twitter followers by location, bio, and who they follow.
Probably Followerwonk’s coolest search feature is the ability to compare Twitter accounts. For example, here’s Followerwonk’s analysis of my Twitter profile vs Crazy Egg’s VP of inbound, Sean Work:
You can use this feature to find influencers whose followers likely have similar interests to yours, but not too much overlap in audience makeup.
Followerwonk also offers some advanced features to optimize your marketing efforts based on follower growth, etc.
Pricing
You can do some basic analysis of your followers, search Twitter profiles and compare accounts all for free on Followerwonk. With a $29/month Pro account, you’ll get access to advanced analysis and optimization features as well.
4. Dealspotr
Dealspotr is a crowd-sourced database of the latest deals and coupons around the web. Anyone can post, edit, and curate deals on the site. Dealspotr’s Marketplace is where brands can connect with top bloggers and other influencers to help promote their latest deals.
To promote your deals, you can ask influencers to create a blog post or YouTube video then promote it on their social channels. Here’s an example of a recent campaign posted by Simple Contacts:
Here are a few of the ways the Dealspotr Marketplace can help you scale your micro-influencer marketing campaign:
- Finding effective influencers who are ready to share your deals.
- Keeping track of conversions from individual influencers to optimize your strategy.
- Automatically calculating influencer fees for you based on their performance.
- Automating and managing campaigns all in one place.
Pricing
Dealspotr is free to sign up for as a brand or influencer. Depending on what you’re promoting, you’ll compensate influencers with a free product sample and/or a small financial incentive. Dealspotr will calculate how much you should pay influencers by using our unique algorithm.
5. Influence.co
Influence.co is a platform where brands can discover, evaluate, and contact potential influencers. With a searchable database of profiles across social media platforms, you can find the right influencers based on location, category, and other demographic factors.
Influence.co also paints a deeper picture of influencer social reach, engagement rates, and other factors that can help you decide if they’re the right person to collaborate with. You can also use the platform to reach out and track your influencer contacts.
Pricing
The basic version of Influence.co is completely free, offering 2 influencer contacts and campaign applications per week. If you want to scale your search and outreach efforts, you’ll need the Pro version for $24.95/month.
6. Social Crawlytics
Social Crawlytics is a great tool to help you vet your blogging influencers. You can use the tool to crawl a website or blog, then see a report detailing which/how many pages are being shared on social media.
The tool can also identify authors on the site and organize them by social share count. Their simple reporting feature picks out the most popular blog posts and displays them in order of social shares.
Many marketers use Social Crawlytics for competitive analysis, but it’s also a great tool to vet your blogging influencers. Or, you can scan a popular site in your niche and identify guest contributors whose content receives a lot of social shares. These would be good influencers to target.
Pricing
Amazingly, Social Crawlytics is a completely free tool.
7. Kred
Kred is a social profile evaluation tool that influencers use to compare themselves to others, but it’s also a great place to find and evaluate potential influencers to work with your brand.
Kred measures “influence” based on a variety of Twitter metrics, including:
- Followers
- Social mentions
- Replies
- Retweets
- Etc.
The platform also hosts “Kred Communities” based on specific topics or interests. Join communities related to your niche and you’ll have access to influencer leaderboards for that group. These display the top influencers that you might want to reach out to for your influencer marketing efforts:
Pricing
Kred offers a 30-day free trial, then costs a very reasonable $19/year after that. With it, you get unlimited conversations, a customizable profile, up to 10K contacts and 100 requests per day.
8. Famebit
Famebit is a platform that connects brands with YouTube influencers. It works like this: you post a brief of your product and campaign details. Then potential influencers submit proposals to you describing what kind of creative video they can make about your product/promotion.
You pick the proposal that interests you most and then starts a collaboration.
Pricing
Famebit’s pricing is very encouraging. It costs nothing to sign up and list your brief. After you pick an influencer, agree on payment terms, create the content and publish it, Famebit takes a 10% service fee.
9. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a great tool for managing Twitter accounts, but it also has features that can help you research potential influencers.
It allows you to easily see how many followers an account has, and how many Twitter lists they’re on. This is a good indicator of an influencer’s value to their audience.
TweetDeck also has a search tool to help you find tweets based on hashtags or keywords. Of course, you can do this right on Twitter with their search feature, but TweetDeck allows you to narrow your search only to Tweets that have high retweets, likes, or replies.
That’s a real time saver to weed out relevant but low-engagement tweets from your search.
Pricing
TweetDeck is also a completely free tool!
10. TribeGroup
TRIBE calls itself a self-service marketplace for brands and micro-influencers. As a brand, you can team up with their network of Instagram, Facebook or Twitter micro-influencers (3,000+ followers) to create engaging branded content.
All you do is create a brief of your product/promotion, then invite influencers to submit a creative post about it. Pick the ones you like, the influencer will publish it, and then you pay them a small fee.
Pricing
It’s completely free to set up an account and create a campaign brief on TribeGroup. For each influencer post you approve, TRIBE simply charges a 20% fee. According to their website, small business campaign budgets normally range from £500-£3000.
Wrapping up
The great thing about micro-influencer marketing is that you can get a lot done on a small budget. Micro-influencers charge very reasonable fees to help broaden your brand reach. At the same time, there are also plenty of affordable/free tools out there that can help you scale your efforts and really maximize ROI.
You don’t need to spend a ton of money on an influencer marketing agency to scale your micro-influencer marketing campaigns. Take advantage of these tools to find the right influencers, manage your campaigns, and track results.
If you need any assistance, please feel free to contact us.
