It’s like Dorothy said: we’re not in Kansas anymore. Times have changed, and how the business world operates has changed as well. No longer can you successfully market a product or service by just buying out traditional adspace. You now need to harness the power of influencers. Each influencer has a strong, committed audience that, while small on their own, add up to a massive customer base when taken together. That’s why finding influencers for marketing is so important. To help you do exactly that, here are 20 free marketing tools that will help you find the right influencers for your business.
Buzzstream
Buzzstream is one of the biggest names in influencer marketing, and there’s a good reason for that. Their service is one of the best ways to collect and organize different influencers that you might be interested in reaching out to. While you’re searching through the web, any potential contact that you find can be quickly added to your Buzzstream database for later contact. It helps make sure that any influencers you find aren’t forgotten about later on down the road when things get busy. Their free trial is widely used, but you can pay a bit to upgrade.
Awario
The power of influencers can’t be underestimated by any modern marketing team. But simply knowing that you need influencers plugging your business isn’t enough. You need to actually know how to find them. And that’s not always as simple as it sounds. Awario helps you quickly locate influencers within your industry. It’s a search engine that lets you track multiple keywords across social media at once. If you’re selling yoga mats, you can track the term “yoga” and find the biggest yoga accounts on the net.
Upfluence
One of the most powerful free tools in the influencer arena, Upfluence has two main features that you should be excited about. The first is the search engine. The keyword search function is quite advanced, letting you look up multiple terms at once while also deciding on which term is most important to you within that group. The second feature is the web browser plugin. The AI analytics on Upfluence’s plugin will automatically break down an influencer’s profile while you’re viewing it, giving you real time stats.
TribeGroup
Some businesses want to do everything themselves, and we respect that. But others don’t want to go on lengthy searches across all the corners of the Internet to find the best influencers. They want the influencers to come to them. TribeGroup actually makes that a realistic goal. Anyone can make an account on TribeGroup, write up a description of what they’re advertising, and influencers will essentially apply for the position. It’s free to make an account, and it’s a great way to connect with influencers without much work.
GroupHigh
Okay, GroupHigh isn’t technically a piece of software specifically designed for finding influencers. It actually does a fair bit more than that. But companies looking to connect with the kings and queens of social media should pay close attention to the various lists of influencers that GroupHigh publishes. These lists aren’t comprehensive (they are limited to a few specific niches), but they can be very powerful if they happen to match up with what you’re dealing in. You can check out – and download – these lists here.
NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is a free service that catalogues, analyzes, and organizes influencers across all keywords. All you need to do is type in a subject and watch as thousands of big accounts pop up. There are lots of filters that you can apply to further narrow down your search. Each account is broken down by engagement and likes per post, and the service even breaks down the keyword that you’re searching to let you know just how active it is on the net. You can start using it here.
TweetDeck
Social media platforms go in and out of style relatively quickly. At this point, it seems like all businesses care about Tik Tok and Instagram more than any other platforms. But that’s leaving out one huge place to discover influencers: Twitter. If you want to reach as many audiences, Twitter needs to be considered, and TweetDeck is one of the best ways to parse through the platform and find the best influencers. You can search by hashtag and filter out all tweets with low engagement, and it will also show accounts that appear on the most lists.
Influence and Co
Although the free version of Influence and Co will be slightly limited compared to the paid version, it is still a very useful tool for anyone looking for social media accounts to advertise their brand. Once you make an account, you just have to enter in a bit of information about you or your company. You can then start making job listings that influencers can reply to. You’ll also be able to sort through creators and browse their profiles to see if they would be a good fit.
HypeAuditor
In terms of finding the Instagram creators with the most outreach, there are few services as successful as HypeAuditor. The name tells you pretty much exactly what this program does: it allows you to sort through Instagram influencers by how popular they really are. It takes into account more than just followers, meaning you’ll also get engagement rates and, more importantly, authentic engagement. The service also lets you break down the list of influencers by more specific niches, letting you cater the selection to your needs.
SEOquake
The value of SEO (search engine optimization) in the modern business world can’t be understated. Your online content simply won’t be found by anyone unless it comes up early – ideally in the first page – of searches. SEOquake is a browser add-on that will actually analyze the SEO of websites for you. Instead of using it to optimize your own sites, though, you can use it to see whether the sites of certain influencers are strong enough for your own campaigns. You just need to add it to your browser to start using it.
Scrunch
Scrunch is a service designed to be used throughout every step of your influencer marketing process. You can first use its wide database of creators to find the right people to work with on an advertising campaign. Once that’s the case, you can check out their analytics and reach out to them. Scrunch then allows you to track the campaign that you launch to see how it’s performing. This lets you quickly discover what does and doesn’t work. You need to pay to unlock all the features, but the free accounts are very worthwhile too.
Dovetale
A lot of online influencer discovery tools tend to cater to all businesses. This is a great thing, but it also means that most of them aren’t very honed in on a certain niche. Dovetale, however, is a service that is highly focused on Shopify businesses. Sure, companies in other realms can find Dovetale useful, but it can make a really big difference for anyone selling on Shopify. The free account option is great for small businesses that are looking to start scaling up.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is yet another marketing tool that businesses can use to locate brand ambassadors that will be perfect for them. But what sets it apart is just how great its analytics are. Powered by AI, Socialbakers breaks down each potential social media partner into a variety of interesting categories. You’ll get to view averages such as click through rates, cost per click, and content performance. There are a lot of features here, and that’s still the case even if you are using the free version.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is yet another option for a service that you can use during the entirety of setting up a marketing campaign. After creating a free account, you can begin to search through keywords to find the most respected influencers within a certain topic. Once you begin to collaborate with someone you found on the app (or anyone else), you can also use the software to track just how well you’re doing with the campaign. If you end up really loving Crowdfire, you can upgrade to a premium account for a small monthly fee.
Post for Rent
Here’s a great service for those that want to have the flexibility to go after influencers or to have content creators come to them. Companies can make accounts on Post for Rent and then create job listings that are either public (meaning influencers can directly respond to them) or private (meaning they can search for influencers and send them the job). One of the coolest parts about Post for Rent is the transparency of it: businesses and influencers both assign star ratings to each other, letting the best of both categories rise to the top.
Similar Web
Online search engines can be a great way to find content creators that would be worth collaborating with. But you’re going to need other tools to create a really good campaign. Similar Web isn’t necessarily made with influencer marketing campaigns in mind, but it can be put to great use by companies creating them. You can use it to track both mobile and web data, giving you a deep analysis of a creator or blogger that you might be thinking of working with. A paid account will give you all the features, but free accounts still work well.
Famebit
It’s important to keep a diverse pool of influencers in mind when considering a marketing campaign. This will open you up to new audiences and allow you to really send out your message to a diverse range of customers. Sure, Instagram may be what’s popping right now, but let’s not forget Youtube! Famebit lets companies post job listings that Youtubers can reply to. Marketing content and ads work very well on Youtube, so Famebit can be a really great resource. While it is free, you should keep in mind that Famebit does take a commission on any collaborations.
Alltop
We’re really happy that AI has taken off so hard in recent years. It has made search engines far more powerful, and starting influencer campaigns has become a lot easier. But what about aggregation by human beings? It’s actually sometimes (gasp!) even better than what can be achieved by robots. We love Alltop because it helps show off the best and most popular blogs on the web. Blogs are usually an area that Google has trouble finding and aggregating, so we recommend using Alltop if you want to collaborate with bloggers.
Personapp
Here’s a unique service that can really help boost a marketing attempt before it even begins. In case you’re not familiar with the term, “personas” just refers to creating a sense of the ideal person that you want to work with. Personapp won’t actually find those perfect influencers for you, but it will help you clarify who you’re looking for. That level of precision is super valuable before actually going out and looking for someone to collaborate with. It will ask you all the right questions to draw up concrete personas for influencers.
Podbay.fm
Instagram. Tik Tok. Facebook. These are the services that generally come to mind when starting an online marketing campaign. But why limit yourself to just this? There are lots of people that don’t use these social media programs at all. To really diversify your campaign, try out Podbay.fm. It’s a simple app that just ranks different podcasts by popularity and influence, but it’s great because you can sort by genre or niche. You may not think of podcasts when you think of marketing, but make no mistake: a spoken ad in a podcast is worth a lot.
