Your Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing Software for 2024

Influencer marketing is a hot tactic to connect with new audiences without as steep a price tag as traditional marketing tactics. Its market value has tripled to nearly $22.1 billion since 2019, as enterprise and startup brands leverage word-of-mouth on social media to skyrocket their sales and revenue.

However, like any digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing requires careful attention to metrics and performance to achieve consistent results. This is where influencer marketing software comes in—technology that helps you monitor your influencer campaigns and make data-driven improvements in real time.

We’ll walk through the ins and outs of influencer marketing software, common features, market trends, and how to choose the best software for your influencer marketing needs.

What is Influencer Marketing Software?

Influencer marketing software is the technology that helps brands launch, manage, track, and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns. Many also have automation features to streamline and optimize tedious marketing tasks.

Need to communicate with your influencer affiliates? Use a messaging feature within an influencer marketing software. Curious to compare performance across your entire influencer network? The right software can generate reports to show you where you get the most of your revenue (conversions) or clicks (website traffic), be it a particular affiliate, campaign, social media asset, or channel.

Bottom line? Influencer marketing software helps you optimize your influencer marketing efforts for more revenue.

How Does It Work & Which Features are Most Important?

Most influencer marketing platforms have many features that speak to different aspects of your marketing program. For example, some influencer platforms offer ways to discover and recruit new influencers to your affiliate program. Others focus more on tracking and reporting to analyze performance.

You can use these platforms to launch affiliate campaigns, track clicks and conversions, assess performance metrics, communicate with affiliates, and integrate with social media and analytics tools.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into all of these features:

1. Influencer Discovery

First-timer to influencer marketing? You might have noticed an Instagram micro-influencer you want to recruit but don’t know how to approach them. Specific influencer marketing platforms have large, diverse directories with a large pool of influencers for you to pick from.

They often have advanced search filters through which you can select partners based on location, demographics, engagement rates, and niche.

Other influencer marketing tools offer affiliate sign-up forms that you can share with influencers of your choice. For example, Tapfiliate offers manual and auto-approved affiliate sign-ups where you can set up criteria and automate approvals based on the influencers’ responses.

2. Campaign Management

You know how much goes into your marketing campaigns — infographics, images, copywriting, scheduling — it never ends. Influencer software assists with campaign management tasks like content creation and sharing, approval, calendars, and overall organization.

The best platforms offer workflow automation to simplify payment processing, contracts, and outreach. For example, Tapfiliate has a direct integration with Zapier, which helps you automate coupon tracking, manage affiliate prospects, add recurring commissions for subscription-based brands, and approve affiliates for your program.

3. Performance Analytics

How many clicks did that one affiliate bring to your website in April 2023? Did your influencer campaigns contribute to your record-breaking sales last quarter?

Performance analytics answers those questions and more with:

• Real-time analytics: Watch clicks and conversions come in live with accurate attribution to the channel, asset, campaign, and affiliate who brought them in.

• Detailed reporting: Assess key metrics like reach, conversions, and ROI with customizable reporting dashboards.
• Sentiment analysis: See how your target audience feels about influencer campaigns with social listening that captures positive and negative feedback and overall sentiment.

But you can’t have solid reporting without laser-sharp accurate tracking.

Tapfiliate’s real-time tracking offers multiple methods to track revenue and performance, including tracking cookies and our new server2server (S2S) tracking, which does not use third-party cookies and instead uses affiliate links and unique click IDs on the backend in a more secure tracking method.

All our tracking options make it easy to generate endless reports to display the metrics and insights most relevant to your influencer strategy.

4. Relationship Management​

If you weren’t in the room, what would your affiliates say about you? Ideally, you’d hear praise like “communicative,” “reachable,” and “consistent.”

If not? You might need support to manage your influencer relationships better.

Influencer software offers communication tools and systems to chat with influencers, share assets, and notify them about important updates to your campaigns. Tapfiliate has a dedicated in-platform messenger feature where you can chat with every individual influencer about whatever you want rather than rely on pre-determined templates or messaging options. Talk about seamless communication!

On the customer side, influencer software can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) tools to analyze audiences and track interactions. Pssst… Tapfiliate integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.

5. Cross-Platform Capabilities

Hubspot says Instagram is one of the top social media platforms for influencers, according to 72% of the marketers they surveyed. Meaning? Your influencer software should be able to synchronize campaigns on Instagram.

But on top of that, it should offer multi-channel management support for other social platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, and more — on a single dashboard to see performance from a bird’s eye view. This helps you ensure consistent messaging and strategic resource allocation across your influencer network.

6. Compliance and Security

Affiliate fraud might sound like something that could never happen to you. After all, you have solid relationships with influencers in your program, and they haven’t let you down. Unfortunately, the more revenue and partnerships your influencer program has, the higher the chance of someone taking advantage of you. This usually looks like affiliate fraud, where affiliates fake leads and conversions to gain commissions without actually bringing value to your program.

Outside of some poor-quality affiliates, influencer software must consider security in terms of data privacy and protection. Hackers can infiltrate software to capture personal details about your customers, affiliates, and business.

Pro tip? Look for influencer marketing software with data privacy assurances like GDPR compliance.

Another important feature is compliance. The rules for marketing and advertising might differ from country to country, so your software must help you maintain adherence to disclosure requirements and various regulations.

7. Integration Capabilities

Integrations help you maximize productivity within your influencer marketing program. Most platforms offer a variety of integrations with payment or marketing software to streamline your influencer marketing strategies. Some also provide API access to create custom integrations with tools that may not be directly supported.

Integration capabilities might also look like additional plug-ins or add-ons to extend the functionality of an influencer software’s features.

8. Payment Processing

One of the most important parts of a credible brand affiliate program is timely compensation. You must pay affiliate partners fully and punctually to protect your reputation. Remember, affiliate influencers don’t make a regular employee salary like your in-house marketing team does. They only get paid a commission when they bring results, so any compensation issues will quickly send them packing.

Here are some essential payment features to look for in influencer marketing software:

• Automated Payments: Minimize the risk of late payments by using automation that tracks when and how much to pay your influencers.
• Financial Reporting: Ensure transparency and efficient budget management with detailed financial tracking and reporting, making it easy to provide your finance department with accurate expense sheets for influencer campaigns each quarter.

9. ROI Tracking and Attribution

Where does each affiliate sale or conversion come from? How much revenue do your influencers generate? Influencer marketing software answers these questions with ROI and revenue attribution features. Attribution isn’t a simple formula, as many metrics contribute to revenue in different ways. The right software analyzes thousands of data points to understand your influencers’ impact at various marketing funnel stages.

10. Customization and Scalability

Wanna see how your campaigns performed between April 2022 to July 2022? What if you could narrow it down to affiliate sales from two specific influencers to see which one promoted your new products most effectively? These are ideal customization features within an influencer platform’s reporting dashboard — a must for any solid software.

But customization spans more influencer marketing capabilities as well, from:

• Commissions: Flexible commissions include the option to decide on flat-fee, percentage-based, recurring, and lifetime commission models to best suit your business. You should also toggle different commission types and values for different influencers, where customizable commissions really come in handy.

• Branding: If you want to create a fully cohesive brand experience, you want to be able to share branded content with your affiliates with your own logo and messaging. To take things a step further, look for software that allows you to white-label each page, including your influencer affiliate side.

• Scalability: On day one of your affiliate program, you likely had fewer clicks, conversions, and affiliates than you do now. Your influencer management software should grow with your business, handling more clicks and conversions, recruiting more affiliates, and tracking additional metrics and data over time.

How to Сhoose Influencer Marketing Software

We covered a ton of software features, but how do you assess them all using different software options? You’ll need to evaluate your options based on:

• Business niche: Are you an e-commerce business? You want to work with influencer software that integrates with platforms like Shopify or has a history of positive customer experiences from brands similar to yours. The same goes for subscription businesses, course creators, SaaS brands — all business types that Tapfiliate specializes in, by the way!
• Specific business goals: If you aim to build brand awareness, choose software that tracks impressions, engagement, website visitors, and follower growth with attribution to different campaigns and influencer partners.
• Budget: Most influencer platforms charge subscription fees ranging from $80 per month to tens of thousands. While pricier plans offer high-volume tracking and premium features, assess how much revenue these features will actually bring before investing. Pro tip: Look for add-ons to ensure desired features are included in the subscription.
• Free trial: Download a demo and see whether a platform is user-friendly and compatible with your influencer marketing needs.
• Feature comparison: List the most vital features you need and compare different platforms for those features and price points.
• Reviews: Check customer feedback on Google reviews and software review sites like G2, Intercom, and Capterra for authentic customer experiences.
• Integrations: Ensure the software integrates with your existing tech stack. For instance, if you regularly use Zapier and Teachable, but the influencer marketing software doesn’t integrate with either, it might not be the best fit for your business.

Tapfiliate fits the bill for most businesses, offering affordable pricing tiers that scale with your brand’s growth. Plus, our customizable reporting and engagement features ensure that your unique affiliate program runs smoothly and effectively.

What Trends Are Shaping the Future of Influencer Marketing Software?

So, what trends should you consider when assessing influencer marketing software?

• Diverse influencer types and complex engagement metrics: Many wrongfully assume that influencer marketing only works with celebrity influencers or others with millions of followers. However, research shows that micro-influencers generate higher average engagement rates than larger ones, which means your influencer marketing software should be able to analyze engagement as a revenue attribute and performance metric.
• Enhanced integrations: Direct integrations aren’t enough anymore. As more SaaS tools come onto the market, influencer software might not be able to keep up with integrations. That’s why it’s important to look for software that offers custom integrations to match every brand’s software stack.
• AI and machine learning: We’ve seen the benefits of AI in workflow automation for greater productivity, but machine learning tech is going further in the influencer marketing software landscape to generate even more specific insights about your campaigns and audiences.

Bottom Line

The right influencer marketing software can take your influencer campaigns from steady to exponentially exploding with affiliate sales.

The ability to review performance, recruit influencers to affiliate marketing programs, and streamline workflows all contribute to a constantly data-informed strategy that can boost your influencer marketing efforts to new heights.