How Both Shopify & Afluencer Collabs Work

Before we analyze the pros and cons of each platform, here’s a bird’s eye view of the key differences when we pit Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer.

Getting started

Shopify: Go to the Shopify App Store, find the Shopify Collabs app, and install it.

Afluencer: No app installation is required. All collaborations can be managed directly from the Afluencer website—that’s one less step than Shopify!

Creating an account

Shopify: On the Settings panel in your Shopify app, click on Apps and sales channels, and select Shopify Collabs. Click on ‘Open app’ and accept all the terms and conditions.

Afluencer: Sign up on the Afluencer website, answer a few prompts, and get started right away—no additional technicalities or reading through complex documentation.

Collaborating with influencers/ Connecting and customizations

• Shopify: Shopify Collabs streamlines the influencer collaboration process, but may not offer all the capabilities necessary for merchants who want an extensively customized collaboration environment.

• Afluencer: Influencers can create custom profiles that represent their brands on Afluencer. With custom communication channels, if a mutual match is found, Afluencer introduces the brand’s decision-maker, facilitating tailored, one-on-one conversations.

Afluencer is relatively simpler than Shopify Collabs: no intermediary salespersons, no contracts, and no fees.

Pricing: Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer

Afluencer Pricing

Afluencer offers three plans at different price points, which you can choose from depending on your influencer marketing goals.

The most popular VIP plan starts at $49 per month. Some of the noteworthy features include:

• Feature your brand: Get your brand in front of thousands of Afluencer-verified influencers. Plus, get featured in a popular newsletter.
• Connect with your ideal influencers: Choose influencers from niches like beauty, wellness, lifestyle, travel, and more. Get 2x influencer invitation credits per day. (1 credit = 1 invitation)
• Get introductions to influencers: When there’s a mutual match for your brand, Afluencer makes a personal intro to your new partner.
• Promote your partner program: Afluencer feeds your partner pipeline with quality influencers, ambassadors, and/or affiliates.
• Multiple campaigns: Create simultaneous “collabs” for different products and partner tiers. Manage extra brands too.
• Premium badge for all your brands and collabs: With this badge, your brand profile will stand out to influencers.

Access the full list of VIP plan features here.

The Concierge Plan is priced at $99 per month and is designed to give your brand maximum exposure. In addition to all VIP features, it offers the following:

• 5x influencer invitation credits per day.
• 1x feature in Afluencer’s quarterly newsletter.
• 1x custom video created about your brand’s influencer program.

The Boss Plan ($199/mo) offers the ultimate exposure and customer service from Afluencer.com. In addition to all VIP and Concierge features, its key highlight is a monthly strategy call to review and offer feedback on how to improve your Collabs further.

Shopify Collabs Pricing

Merchants on the Shopify, Advanced, or Shopify Plus plans can use Shopify Collabs for free, as the cost is factored into the monthly subscription fee. Shopify’s plans are priced at $79, $299, and $2,300 per month respectively.

Additionally, all commission payments on Collabs are subject to a 2.9% payment processing fee, payable by the merchant. Additionally, foreign currency exchange fees may apply for merchants when using Shopify Collabs for international collaborations.

Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer: The Key Differences

If you’ve been considering Shopify Collabs but aren’t sure how it ranks up against competitors, we’ve got you covered. Let’s look at how it fares against Afluencer Collabs on some of the most essential parameters.

Setting up & onboarding

Signing up for a Collabs account on Shopify seems complex, even for existing users. The process involves multiple steps that require navigating the Shopify dashboard and the Shopify App Store which might not be straightforward for all.

Specifically, you need to install the Shopify Collabs App from the Shopify App Store and then log into your Shopify store to integrate it back to the dashboard. Collabs’ lengthy sign-up process is, on the whole, quite inconvenient.

To set up an account, users need to read through extensive documentation: the scope of services being offered, costs involved, such as payment processing fees, and obligations of the store owner within the app’s ecosystem.

Conversely, Afluencer’s setup is relatively hassle-free. When you visit the website, you’ll find options to sign up or sign in. New user? Sign up on the app, answer a few prompts, and you’re ready to use the platform. Creators can explore and find potential partnerships without signing up or knowing the full benefits of the platform.

User experience

Shopify Collabs has a fairly intuitive interface. A navigation panel to the left of the screen and multiple settings keep users informed about their accounts. Businesses can discover new creators, find affiliates, shortlist their ideal candidates, and track payments. They can also check which applicants are interested in working with them.

Afluencer has a clean design and a seamless, minimalistic interface. The welcome dashboard has all the essential details about brand campaigns, such as the applications, influencers you may like, your brands, and past saved searches. You can additionally explore the influencer directory to find more influencers.

Functionality

Shopify Collabs offers several features for merchants and creators:

• Merchants have access to an extensive creators’ database.
• Creators can collaborate with millions of brands on the Shopify Collab app.
• Users can track their performance and payments using a data-driven dashboard.

However, many businesses find the curated influencer lists, collaboration tools, and analytics offered by Shopify Collabs overwhelming. The multitude of features and options can be daunting. A learning curve is associated with leveraging the app fully for influencer & affiliate marketing.

Afluencer, in contrast, is a feature-rich tool packed with the essential features that brands and creators need for collaboration. The Afluencer dashboard keeps users updated with past and ongoing campaigns. There are also separate sections to track your sales and creator performance.

Creators can also check collaboration programs directly from the homepage without signing up. Once registered, they’ll get updates about new programs to participate in, making it easier for brands to identify interested creators faster.

It’s worth mentioning that the app’s huge Influencer Directory of 24,000+ creators has powerful search filters to help you always find the most relevant niche creators for your brand. Another great feature is the ability to chat with any of the creators and maintain prompt communication on the same platform.

How Shopify Collabs and Afluencer Can Be Used for Influencer Marketing

Finding brand-fit creators has always challenged marketers and independent store owners. Browsing, vetting, and shortlisting the right creators independently is time-consuming. Getting them the right exposure and building a healthy relationship is an added struggle.

Let’s take a sharper view of how Shopify Collabs and Afluencer can amplify your influencer marketing efforts.

Afluencer Collabs

Afluencer is the digital marketplace where top influencers and brands meet. It’s designed to bring your brand’s vision to life, connecting you with the perfect influencers to amplify your success. Whether you’re trying to boost brand awareness, drive sales, or expand your reach, Afluencer’s curated network of influencers can help you unlock the potential of influencer marketing for your brand. 

Let’s look at the three key benefits brands can expect from Afluencer Collabs:

1. Connect with your ideal influencers

Afluencer has A-list influencer partners creating content in 71 different interests, from beauty to wellness, lifestyle, music and dance, and beyond.

Brands can access verified influencers, micro-influencers, nano-influencers, and creators with real followers who can cater to different market segments and campaign goals. The influencer discovery feature lets you search through influencers to find your ideal partnership. You can filter, sort, and invite influencers in your niche to join your campaign.

The best part? Influencers can come directly to you. If they find your collaboration matches their interests, they can apply to see if they are a match. Influencers can search and apply for collaborations directly from their dashboard.

Working with multiple influencers? Use Afluencer to manage invitations, relationships, and more on one platform.

2. Quick Collab application process

Afluencer offers a streamlined collaboration process. Brands can apply with just the click of a button, making initiating partnerships quick and easy. Set criteria by interests, followers, channels, and more to find the perfect partnership. Set up pay-per-post or commission-based collabs where influencers can apply to join.

Review your shortlisted influencers’ profiles and social assets, and evaluate their engagement scores and other insights. When you’re ready, negotiate a deal with them. Afluencer allows you to create and manage up to 100 Collabs across your brand portfolio.

3. Influencer relationship management

Once you pick the right influencers for your marketing needs, Afluencer lets you direct message them and explore new partner opportunities in the chatroom. Brands can keep track of their partnerships, invitations, contracts, payments, and more, right from the Afluencer dashboard.

4. Promote your brand and collab

When you choose Afluencer, your brand, and Collab get to appear on the Afluencer podcast. The podcast is published on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and the Afluencer YouTube channel, ensuring it reaches a wide, captive audience. Afluencer also features your brand in its quarterly newsletter, so you can be sure your brand is visible and top-of-mind among creators and influencers in its exclusive network.

5. Performance tracking

Afluencer provides brands with tools and analytics to measure the performance of their collaborations accurately, including reach, engagement and much more. These insights enable brands to understand their ROI, iterate their strategies, and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.

Shopify Collabs

With Shopify Collabs, brands can find creators, manage their marketing campaigns effortlessly, and stay on top of expenses. The app helps streamline the process of working with creators.

Let’s look at the three key benefits brands can expect from Shopify Collabs:

1. Discover niche creators from a marketplace

Shopify Collabs’ Creator Marketplace is a database of creators from various niches and channels, picked by the Shopify team. Any brand can set up an account and create an application form for creators interested in collaborating.

Alternatively, brands can search the database to find creators that check the boxes. Merchants can filter profiles by target audience, follower size, channel, and more.  So, you only need to shortlist the most promising profiles and start a conversation.

2. Hire and manage creator relationships

With Collabs, store owners can search from thousands of candidates, and then partner with their selected creators directly from the platform.

Collabs generates customized insights so brands can optimize their campaigns for maximum impact. Use these to frame creator guidelines and set campaign metrics. Additionally, it gives you unique links and discount codes so you can work with multiple creators simultaneously and track their output.

3. Win affiliate sales and track payments

Shopify Collabs simplifies affiliate relationships. Get a comprehensive view of your affiliates’ sales; the app automatically calculates commissions for each. Additionally, you can pay affiliates directly from the platform. It generates analytics for each affiliate’s progress so you can reward high performers.

Collabs handles the essentials, so you don’t need to hire a large affiliate marketing team.

How to Decide Which Platform: Shopify Collabs vs Afluencer

While Shopify Collabs is a worthy addition to Shopify’s product portfolio, we must remember that it’s a tag-along app to what is essentially an e-commerce platform. Afluencer, on the other hand, is a feature-packed platform solely for influencer marketing. It has been conceptualized, designed, and built to address every need in the influencer-marketing ecosystem.

Additionally, you may need to consider some of the main drawbacks of Shopify Collabs:

Compatibility Concerns

While Shopify Collabs is tailored to Shopify users, businesses using a different platform (like WooCommerce or Magento) may find integration with the platform difficult. This may require you to explore alternative collaboration platforms. Unfortunately, a disjointed collaboration experience could impact your ability to achieve your desired outcomes.

Limited Customization Options

Although Shopify Collabs simplifies collaboration, it has certain limitations in terms of customization. You may need to rely on third-party tools, such as third-party CSS or HTML tools to customize the look and feel of your collaboration portal. This poses a challenge for businesses with limited resources as it’s time-consuming and may require technical expertise.

Potential for Increased Competition

While collaborations with other businesses can unlock opportunities, it could also increase competition. By partnering with businesses in your industry, you might inadvertently give them insights into your business strategies and operations.

For example, collaborating to launch a new product means your competitor might gain insights into your customer base, pricing strategies, and marketing tactics. This would give them a competitive advantage and make it more challenging for your business to stand out in the crowded marketplace.

Why Afluencer Wins vs Shopify Collabs

Signing up for a Shopify Collabs account is complex. It involves a multi-step process with various settings and terms to navigate, and sophisticated tools to master. Some of the platform’s shortcomings also include the absence of email customization and no multi-language feature. Users on the app store report frequent glitches related to poor loading times,  integrations with social platforms, and others.

Afluencer wins on multiple attributes: quick setup and ease of use, a large database of active influencers, and a dedicated support team. Another key advantage is that where Shopify Collabs only allows you to connect with micro-influencers directly, Afluencer lets you connect with any influencer via direct messaging.

The clincher, for us, is that Afluencer is a dedicated platform for influencer marketing. It has been thoughtfully designed around the needs of influencers and brands and effortlessly facilitates interactions between both sides.

Install the Afluencer app for Shopify here.

The post Shopify Collabs vs. Afluencer Collabs  appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/ultimate-guide-shopify-influencer-apps/ Sun, 07 Aug 2022 05:54:06 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=19311 After spending thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads for your Shopify store, if you’re still not getting meaningful results, the reality is that your strategy needs to change. Enter influencer marketing. Last year, spending on influencer marketing was over $3 billion, a 33.6% rise from 2020. The total spending on influencer marketing is […]

The post The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Apps for Your Shopify Store appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> After spending thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads for your Shopify store, if you’re still not getting meaningful results, the reality is that your strategy needs to change.

Enter influencer marketing.

Last year, spending on influencer marketing was over $3 billion, a 33.6% rise from 2020. The total spending on influencer marketing is projected to reach over $4.6 billion in 2023 in the US alone. This spending continues to rise, showing rising confidence in influencer marketing.

Beyond the proven ROI of influencer marketing, it also often offers higher engagement rates, warmer leads, and improved brand loyalty.

The question is: How do you get started with it? And how do you do it at scale?

Over 60% of Instagram accounts have more than 10,000 followers. If you’re thinking of sorting through the sea of influencers out there, it can take up a lot of your time. Reaching out to them, getting them on board, and planning the campaigns will also take time.

Instead of manually building an influencer marketing campaign from scratch, it makes sense to leverage Shopify influencer apps. These are designed to help you find influencers and create a campaign, so you can focus on the creative and the business side of things instead of spending hours on a spreadsheet.

What are Shopify influencer marketing apps?

Influencer marketing apps for Shopify stores are software that helps build influencer marketing campaigns from scratch by streamlining your workflow. This includes tools that help simplify communication with influencers, find potential influencers, and track campaigns, as well.

Some influencer marketing apps work by matching you with the best-fit influencers and helping you kickstart conversations. For example, these tools can have multiple filters (such as demographics, follower count, and industry) to help you find ideal influencer partners quickly.

Other influencer marketing apps help you turn your existing customers into influencers with the power of affiliate marketing, referral marketing, and more.

The difference between influencer marketing agencies and influencer marketing apps

Influencer marketing apps are entirely different from influencer marketing agencies. Influencer marketing agencies have creatives working behind the scenes to find suitable influencers for you to design campaigns and track sales—based on their deliverables.

With influencer marketing apps, you can choose the influencers you want to work with, create campaigns and brainstorm content ideas (like for the holidays or Valentine’s Day), track ROI, and more.

So why should you choose an influencer marketing app over an agency?

While it completely depends on your bandwidth and budget, remember that more than 68% of influencers prefer to work directly with brands instead of agencies. Some agencies take a cut from influencers, delay the payments of influencers, and can also delay the project.

For your brand, it can be cheaper to work with influencers directly via an influencer marketing app, as the agency will likely charge a hefty fee or take a percentage of your sales. With influencer marketing apps, you also have more creative control and can form stronger relationships with influencers (which matters in the long run).

Benefits of Shopify influencer marketing apps

If you’re still on the fence about using influencer marketing apps for your Shopify brand, here are four benefits that make them a no-brainer to use.

1. Using data to identify ideal partners

Think of your influencers as your brand representatives. The audience will associate your brand with the influencers you choose to onboard. This is why the most challenging part of influencer marketing is finding the right influencers: someone with the target audience you’re after, that’s aligned with your brand values, and who can represent your brand properly.

While the right influencer can increase brand loyalty, engagement, and revenue, the wrong one can confuse your audience and damage your brand image.

To find the right influencer, you need to check the posts they’ve been sharing, their past sponsorships, how they talk with their audience, and so much more. If you’re doing this at scale, it can take a lot of your time to review the profiles of hundreds of influencers.

With influencer marketing apps, you get matched with the right influencers almost instantly. From there, you can filter through interests, followers, and more. With an influencer marketing app like Afluencer, you’ll get to cherry-pick the perfect person for your campaigns.

INSIGHTFUL READ: Content Creator vs Influencer: How to Pick the Right One

2. Communicate directly

When building an influencer marketing campaign manually, you’ll have to reach out to influencers (after shortlisting them) individually. Even if it’s a template message, keeping track of ongoing communications in your inbox can be a pain.

However, most influencer marketing apps let you communicate through their platform, which makes keeping records much easier. You’ll save time and get definitive data on your outreach efforts without ever losing track of a conversation.

3. Let influencers approach you

Some influencer marketing platforms feature brands so influencers and creators can approach them directly if they align with their values.

For example, Afluencer features brands in its newsletter that goes out to thousands of influencers. Not only that, but brands can also showcase their needs to a growing influencer pool of more than 13,000 active influencers.

This works because influencers, like your brand, are on the lookout for a good brand to partner with. As much as you need influencers who align with your brand image, influencers and content creators want to associate with brands that represent their values, too. Influencers have spent years building and nurturing their audience, and therefore most influencers don’t want to sabotage their image with the wrong partnership.

4. Protect your brand from fake followings

With the ease of buying followers in today’s world, you can never be sure who real influencers are based on their number of followers.

Influencer marketing apps like Afluencer help you find influencers not only based on their number of followers, but also on how their past sponsorships have performed, engagement rates, and more. This helps ensure you don’t waste your money on influencers with large followings that turn out to be fake.

READ MORE: How to Recognize Fake Instagram Accounts

Top 6 Shopify influencer apps

Here are six influencer apps for your Shopify store with different features.

1. Afluencer

Whether your store has pet products or lifestyle items, you can place your Shopify brand in front of more than 13,000 influencers. With Afluencer, you’re guaranteed to find ideal influencers and creators with the same target audience as yours.

To make your search even more specific, you can place demographic filters to find the perfect influencer for your brand. For example, suppose you want to create awareness for an upcoming fashion event you’re organizing in Washington. You can set Washington as the location filter and find influencers in that area that can bring more people to your event. This becomes handier if your store currently serves a specific region as you can target local customers.

Plus, you can find influencers for your campaigns on all the social platforms—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This ensures you don’t have to switch marketing platforms if you’re running campaigns on multiple social media platforms.

The next step in the process of influencer marketing—contacting the influencers—doesn’t need you to log in to your social media accounts either. You can quickly exchange messages with them in the chatroom of Afluencer and strike deals easily.

If, on the other hand, you want influencers to reach out to you directly, all you need to do is post your project requirements in a collab showcasing your interests, channels, products, and values. You’ll be able to get a feature in the exclusive newsletter, putting you in front of thousands of influencers. This saves time for you in the long run as you don’t need to be on the lookout for the best-fit influencers—those who align with your values and products will reach out to you independently.

Afluencer is your all-in-one influencer tool that can not only find the right influencers for your Shopify brand and facilitate conversations but also get your brand noticed.

The best part? You get these features at only $49/month with a 30-day free trial.

2. UpPromote

Existing customers can be the best brand advocates if they like your product or service. UpPromote helps you turn your customers into influencers for your brand with the help of affiliate marketing. You can not only reach a wider audience through these affiliates, but you can also drive repeat sales to your Shopify store with referral rewards.

With this tool, you can easily create affiliate links, customize campaigns, and communicate with affiliates through email or chat. If you’re worried about generating coupon codes and offers manually, the tool does that too. The tool has several automatic functions you can enable like auto-tier commission, auto-discount, and auto-generate coupon.

The tool also takes care of the analytics and reporting part for you. Whether you want to check which customers have brought in the most referrals or the most popular products that were being referred in the last marketing campaign, you can know it all.

While this tool takes care of everything from start to finish when turning customers into brand advocates, it is not a full-fledged influencer tool that will help you find the top influencers in your niche.

3. ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy, as the name suggests, is yet another tool that helps you grow your Shopify store sales by turning customers into brand advocates.

Every time a customer purchases something, you can send automated invites asking them to join your referral program. Once they join your program and make successful referrals, you can send multiple reward options in the form of store discounts, cash rewards, and custom gifts.

It does not stop here. You even get access to insights and key metrics such as referred traffic to your website, revenue from referrals, number of customers who joined your referral program so that you can gauge the success of your referral program.

One unique aspect of this tool is that you can even identify and ban suspicious transactions — such as referral codes that are leaked on coupon sites, a high volume of referrals in a short period, and so on.

4. Linkr

Linkr helps you reach out to influencers and creators in your niche. While they don’t have a large pool of influencers you can choose from, they provide you with filters and key metrics to narrow down the pool of influencers.

You can then reach out to these influencers through their chat system and discuss the details of your campaign. This makes sure you don’t have to go through the back-and-forth email communication that takes days on end.

Other than that, you can choose from various compensation options such as sales commission, barter deals, bidding, or performance-based rewards.

All in all, Linkr is a great tool, albeit with a lesser pool of influencers to pick from.

5. Refersion

Refersion helps you create influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish. You can plan an entire campaign with a series of posts and see which ones are bringing the most conversions. You can even test different ideas and post formats with Refersion.

For example, you can create a series of reels, posts, and stories with a beauty influencer on the subject of “How to choose the best skin products according to your skin?”

You can even track these campaigns with Refersion. If you’re collaborating with 50 or 100 influencers at a time, the tool’s tracking and reporting features come in handy. Based on these analytics, you can pinpoint campaigns you need to expand and those you should cut back on.

Along with these features, the tool makes it easy to approve conversions and pay your influencers.

6. Gatsby

Gatsby helps you turn your community into ambassadors for your Shopify brand. They have unique features such as each time a customer with more than 1,000 followers publishes UGC, the customers are given a discount code.

This not only turns your community into loyal fans but also encourages repeat purchases.

You can even automate certain processes of influencer marketing by making use of automation features in Klaviyo. Other than that, they also have integrations with LoyaltyLion, Attentive, Stamped, and more.

For your affiliate marketing campaigns, you can collect Instagram and TikTok handles from these ambassadors and you have in-store various social insights on your target audience.

Gatsby is thus the perfect platform for your brand if you’re looking to run a referral marketing campaign.

How to select the best Shopify influencer marketing app for your brand

We have listed the best influencer marketing apps for your Shopify store above. But how do you select the right one for your brand?

The priority can always be budget if you’re on a strict marketing budget. But most of the listed platforms will fall within your budget with the pricing being less than $100 per month. Once you have the budget out of the way, ask yourself the following questions to find the best platform for your brand specifically:

1. Define your goals with influencer marketing

Different influencer platforms are available for different needs. Before you start your search for the platform, make sure you have your marketing needs laid out:

• The platforms you’ll be targeting
• Expected KPIs
• Measurement of ROI
• Type of influencers needed

If your target goal is to increase sales for a newly launched product, an app with a built-in link tracker might be suitable. If your goal is to form long-lasting relationships with influencers who align with you, an app with a wide range of influencers and creators can be the right fit.

2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Lay down the resources you already have, the team members you have, and what their responsibilities are. Based on what you’re missing, the choice can be easier.

Once you have identified what you need and don’t you’ll be able to understand the features better.

3. Vet the platform based on your target influencer type

Some influencer marketing platforms might cater to a particular platform or a niche type. If you’re a wellness brand, you don’t want to subscribe to a platform specializing in the beverages niche. Or if you want to target YouTube creators, you want to check if the platform hosts such creators.

Next, check the quality of influencers the platform hosts and the relationship between the platform and the influencers. You need to associate with real influencers with a proven track record of sponsorships, and if you have a pool of unverified influencers, you risk ending up with a failed campaign.

4. Check the relationship management tools

While the quality of influencers on the platform matters a lot, you also need to check the quality of the platform itself. Does it provide the features you need?

As the listed platforms above show, every platform is different with its unique set of features. Here are some features you can check:

• Communication tools: A huge part of influencer marketing is communication with influencers. A platform with in-app communication features will keep your communication records in one place and be easy to fetch.
• Back-end tools: Some platforms help you create contracts, pay the influencers, and track the results. This can be helpful if you want to automate the entire process. Else, you can manage these aspects with your finance team, if you have one.

5. Ease of use

The influencer marketing platform will add to your existing tech stack that you use frequently. From finding influencers to designing campaigns and tracking results, the platform will be your go-to.

For this reason, you need to ensure that the platform is fairly easy to use by all your team members and doesn’t take hours to learn. Otherwise, you might end up spending a lot of your (and your team’s time) on getting used to the platform.

Make sure it’s intuitive and doesn’t need a lot of technical understanding to use. If you have any questions, take a demo or the free trial before investing.

Increase your ROI with Shopify influencer marketing apps

The ROI of social media and Google ads continues to fall. On the other hand, the investment in influencer marketing and the returns generated by them is still on the rise.

If you’re worried about the time commitment, with influencer marketing apps like Afluencer, one of the biggest hurdles of finding and contacting influencers is also taken care of. It’s high time to reach a wider audience, increase your brand awareness, and boost revenue with influencer marketing.

Install the Afluencer app for Shopify here and avail a free 30-day trial to get started.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Apps for Your Shopify Store appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/influencer-marketing-tools/ Thu, 28 Oct 2021 12:06:59 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=13615 Influencer marketing is a huge industry that requires the help of some of the best third-party tools out there. If you search the web, you will find dozens of top tools (both free and paid) designed to make influencer marketing easier; however, they’re not made equal. You don’t, however, have to worry about losing hair […]

The post Influencer Marketing Tools Afluencers Love appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> Influencer marketing is a huge industry that requires the help of some of the best third-party tools out there. If you search the web, you will find dozens of top tools (both free and paid) designed to make influencer marketing easier; however, they’re not made equal.

You don’t, however, have to worry about losing hair over deciding which influencer marketing tool works best for you. We have already lost hair on your behalf 🙂

Our concierge team got in touch with some top influencers on our Afluencer platform to hear about their preferred tools. We have shortlisted some of the best marketing tools for new and experienced influencers to take advantage of.

Let’s have a look:

Canva

Recommended by names like Emmani Nadirah, Mary Xu, and Hope Perkins, Canva is a top influencer marketing tool designed to help influencers come up with kickass graphics.

There is a lot to like about this platform. With more than 30 million users, it’s the most popular online graphic design tool that lets you design everything from invoices to infographics.

It can be a great pick for people looking for ready-to-use templates that too for free. Influencers can use it to create brochures and marketing materials to promote products and services.

While there is a learning curve, most influencers agree that Canva is worth learning as it offers multiple features and removes the need to use more expensive options like Photoshop. Plus, since you can use it online, it doesn’t have to be downloaded and installed. You can start for free or choose a paid plan starting as low as $9.95 per month billed yearly.

Some of our influencers believe that Canva can even be used to improve selfies as it comes with great photo effects. You can adjust contrast, tint, blur, saturation, etc. Plus, it gives users access to more than 75 million videos and photos.

There are dozens of fonts and styles to choose from. Plus, you can even animate images to make them look more attractive.

Canva allows users to export in high quality or directly upload to social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Slack, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Give this one a try if you are serious about coming up with incredible graphics.

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Plann

Robin Who loves Plann and we understand why. She believes it helps save time and makes things easier.

Plann is essentially an Instagram scheduler that also supports a bunch of other social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

It can be a great pick for users interested in making a mark on Instagram. With this app, you will be able to schedule when to post on Instagram and the software will send a notification reminding you to post.

With drag-and-drop functionality, Plann makes it easier to customize your feed and make it look authentic. It can handle multiple posts at a time with the option to store hashtags as sets for stories, campaigns, themes, and posts. This means you will be able to copy and paste hashtags when needed, without having to look for relevant hashtags again and again.

While Plann makes scheduling easier, it isn’t the only option that influencers appear to love this marketing software. One of its biggest assets is its ability to let users know what works and what doesn’t.

You can use it to access data including follower growth, conversion, and engagement rate. This information can be used to create the right strategy.

Plann supports teamwork and can be shared across multiple devices with the option to invite other users. You can start for free or choose a paid plan starting as low as $7 per month.

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TalkWalker

Hashtags don’t need an introduction. We know that social media users value hashtags when it comes to searching the web. The right hashtag can improve your reach and help you gain more followers. However, selecting top hashtags can be difficult.

It isn’t only about choosing popular hashtags, you must also ensure competition isn’t stiff and that your hashtags are relevant. Manually searching for hashtags can be very taxing and time-consuming. TalkWalker makes the job easier by allowing users to search for relevant hashtags by searching for hashtags, companies, or brand names.

Technically speaking, TalkWalker is made for brands to help companies track their online presence and global reputation. However, an influencer can also use this top marketing tool to understand what others think of them, who’s talking about them, and what kind of hashtags they need to use to gather more followers.

It offers a comprehensive suite of actionable data visualization and social monitoring tools; however, it might not be suitable for everyone since it comes with a hefty price tag of $800 per month for the cheapest plan.

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Lightroom

Available on iOS and Android, Adobe Lightroom is a photo-editing tool that starts as low as $9.99 per month.

Some of our top Afluencers like Robin Who, Francine Kalande, Madison Bergen, Inshia Slatewala, and Raymin Reyes swear by the app and its many benefits. It can be a great pick for new users due to the ease it offers. Influencers appear to love Lightroom’s ability to sync photos to cloud storage and provide powerful filters and raw profiles.

Those with thousands of photos will love this app as it offers face recognition and keyword tagging; however, it has limited sharing options and doesn’t let you choose which photos to sync. Plus, there’s no plug-in support or local printing.

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Trello

We know you didn’t expect to see Trello here since it’s more commonly used by managers; however, one of our top influencers Robin Who, believes that Trello is a great pick for brainstorming and organizing.

Influencers often work with a number of brands at the same time, which makes it hard to organize timelines. Tumblr makes it easier by letting you set up different gigs and set deadlines accordingly.

It sends regular reminders when a project is due and ensures you don’t miss out on anything. Known for being easy to use, Trello is an intuitive app that works on all major devices and is very easy to use.

“Influencers can use it to communicate with team members and even assign tasks, making it a reliable project management tool for big influencers who have assistants.” This can be good for big influencers who have assistants. You can even use it for time-tracking and billing. While the basic version is free to use, you will have to get your hands on a paid plan starting as low as $12.50 per person to get access to all features.

The good thing is that the basic (free) version of this marketing tool will be enough for most users.

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Buffer

Very few people think of Buffer when they list down top influencer marketing tools. However, our influencers brought our attention to Buffer, which has proven to be a powerful influencer marketing tool.

It empowers influencers through social listening, data-driven influencer marketing, creator discovery, reporting, and workflow management. Made for small businesses, Buffer can be used by well-established influencers with a decent following.

You can use it to simplify and automate your campaigns for every part of your creator workflow. Try Buffer for scheduling and planning your content, engaging with your followers, and analyzing results.

You can use Buffer for free or choose a paid plan – starting as low as $15.00 per feature, per month. It has a downloadable web browser extension that lets you instantly save an image or webpage to the platform to send later or right away.

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Hootsuite

Hootsuite is undoubtedly the most popular social media tool. It’s used by both businesses and influencers and comes with a variety of features.

It stands out as a comprehensive and ever-evolving social media management tool with impressive analytics capabilities. We must, however, mention that it extends beyond posting to collaboration, scheduling, and analytics.

The platform supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Instagram, and YouTube. It offers excellent integrations and supports a number of known names like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Influencers like how easy it is to use. Most of you are busy and don’t want to spend a lot of time going through multiple pages. Hootsuite makes it easy to comprehend data thanks to graphical charts.

It starts at $29 per month with some paid add-ons, which makes Hootsuite an expensive option. It’s recommended for big influencers who can afford to spend money on top influencer marketing tools.

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Facetune

Want to look good? Get your hands on Facetune, a mobile app loved by Afluencers like Francine Kalande and Debby Barrientos.

This is a controversial app as some people argue that it changes how you look; however, influencers here believe that it is totally in your hands. You don’t have to go all out with filters or editing.

Many influencers have worked with Facetune and advocated the app due to its unique features that aren’t available elsewhere. There are different versions of the app including a Facetune Video version that supports videos.

This app can make you look younger, prettier, sharper, and more attractive. If you use it right, it can make you the next big thing on the web. However, know where to draw the line as adding too many effects can ruin your photos and make you look plastic.

You can start with a free trial; however, the trial is currently only for iOS users and runs for 7 days. You will have to pay $3.99 to unlock all features.

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Google Ads

This one came as a surprise to us, after all, Google Ads is made for businesses that wish to market on the web. Influencers don’t usually advertise, they get paid to advertise, yet Google Ads can prove to be one of the best influencer marketing tools if you know how to use it.

It’s a free-to-use tool that can help you identify suitable keywords for your content. Unlike most apps on this platform, Google Ads is more suitable for bloggers or people who wish to utilize SEO marketing and rank well for relevant keywords.

Adword’s Keyword Planner supports international users and can help you plan your content. If you regularly write content such as blogs and articles then you should consider getting your hands on this one.

“It will tell you the average monthly searches and the amount of competition for that keyword”, says Midwestern Moms while talking about the benefits of Google Ads.

You can use this information to understand how relevant and popular a keyword is. If you can’t think of the right keyword then let Google Keyword Planner do the job on your behalf. It can generate ideas based on your content and provide data to compare two or more keywords.

“Once I have made my decision on a keyword, I plan my title, URL, and description of the post to contain that keyword,” she continues. “While writing, I know what keyword to include in the post to achieve the best SEO for that post”.

You only need a Gmail account to access Google Ads. Plus, you don’t have to run ads to use most of its features so give it a try today.

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Mailchimp

The last influencer marketing tool on our list is Mailchimp, an email marketing tool that lets you enjoy high returns. Again, we didn’t expect to make it to this list but a few influencers we talked to believe that it can prove to be very beneficial.

Like our previous pick, Mailchimp can be a good option for influencers with a blog or an email list. It lets you build contact lists, schedule releases, analyze audience engagement, and design layouts.

You can use the tool for free or choose a paid plan. Influencers with an e-commerce store can also use this platform. It can help you sell more merchandise, win long-term clients, and win more followers.

Mailchimp can automate emails and let you track campaigns in seconds. If you’re looking for easy-to-use marketing tools for influencers then do give it a try.

Influencer Marketing Tools: Conclusion

These were some of the most popular marketing tools for influencers that our users love. Get your hands on these tools and watch your reach grow. The key lies in posting the right content at the right time and these tools can help you do that.

For brands, we have also covered some of the best tools brands can use in our earlier post, 8 Tools You Can Use to Find Influencers to Promote Products or Content.

The post Influencer Marketing Tools Afluencers Love appeared first on AFLUENCER.

]]> https://afluencer.com/influencer-engagement-rate/ Wed, 23 Jun 2021 01:14:07 +0000 https://afluencer.com/?p=12481 If you’ve been around the block a few times, you’ll have already heard or know of influencer engagement rates. But for those of you who are new to the neighborhood, here’s what it is: What Is Influencer Engagement Rate? Influencer engagement rate is a measurement that provides a representation of the activity levels between content […]

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8 Tools to Find Influencers to Promote Products

Let’s have a look:

1. Afluencer – Free Tool to Find Influencers to Promote Products

Price: FREE! Plus premium plans available, too.

Afluencer is not only one of the best social media tools for business, it’s a complete social media tool for marketing. It can help you find influencers in your niche or area on a number of platforms including Facebook and Instagram.

Our platform is designed for all kinds of businesses and is very easy to use. Whether you’re looking for micro-influencers or social media influencers with millions of followers, you’ll find it all.

All our influencers are real and verified. Our aim is to help marketers find influencers to promote products within their budget. You can directly communicate with influencers on our platform and reach a deal. It’s that simple.

2. HypeAuditor – Tool to Find Influencers on YouTube

Price: Free and paid options start as low as $299 per month

Consider this tool if you want to know how to find influencers in your area on YouTube and Instagram. It is one of the few social media management tools for YouTube and can help you find influencers to promote products and content via video.

It can help you find YouTube influencers in your niche or area by giving you the option to search through various profiles based on niche, location, age, engagement, and gender.

3. Klear – Top Social Media Tool

Price: Free and some customized paid packages

There’s a lot to like about Klear. It’s one of the few social media tools for marketing with customized packages. It can help you find influencers in your area and niche.

This free social media tool helps marketers analyze influencers based on their psychographics and demographics. You will find about 60,000 categories on the platform.

While it’s marketed as a free social media tool, there are also paid packages for users who want more.

4. Upfluence – Best Tool to Identify Fake Followers

Paid: Starts as low as $795 per month

Upfluence is a paid platform with a database that consists of about three million influencers to help you find influencers to promote products. It provides information on each influencer including location, demographics, engagement, reach, and niche.

The platform also reveals their typical posting habits. However, what sets it apart and makes it one of the social media tools for Instagram is its ability to distinguish between fake and real influencers.

The platform shows some very important details including costs for posting on Instagram and YouTube. On the negative side, you may not always have the option to negotiate.

5. Awario – Best Multipurpose Social Media Tool

Price: Free trial and paid packages start as low as $29 per month.

If there’s a platform that can do it all then it’s Awario. It’s a listening tool that monitors a number of websites including Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Moreover, it also scans news sites, forums, and blogs for content related to specific topics.

Brands can use this social media tool to find brand advocates and influencers. The app lets you find influencers in your niche by searching for users who have talked about your product or service.

While it’s effective, some users find it a little difficult to use.

6. Heepsy – Best Social Media to Tool to Find Instagram Influencers

Price: Starts as low as $49 per month

Heepsy can be a great free social media tool for users looking for micro-influencers or wanting to know how to find influencers on Instagram. It houses more than seven million users, each with at least 5,000 followers.

The platform is known to filter out fake accounts and provides information on growth rates and posting frequencies.

This social media tool for marketing makes it easy to find influencers on Instagram by giving the option to search through the database by using filters like the number of followers, location, and niche.

It provides cost estimates but they’re not always correct. Moreover, the platform lets users export data.

7. Group High – Best Tool to Find Influencers to Promote Content

Price: 7-day free trial, paid plans start as low as $179 per month.

This can be a great tool for users who want to know how to find influencers on Facebook. It’s among the most popular social media tools for business due to its ability to scan through the profiles of different bloggers.

Unlike other social media tools on this list, this one concentrates on bloggers and provides contact details and links to their social media profiles. However, it now also offers an option to directly find influencers on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media apps.

8. BuzzSumo – Best Free Social Media Tool for Business

Price: Starts as low as $99 per month

BuzzSumo is one of the most popular influencer marketing tools for businesses. Give it a try if you want to find influencers to promote products.

Made as a complete social media marketing tool, it can be used for content discovery and to find influencers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

It can analyze several factors including engagement and performance. Many companies use it to automate posting and keep an eye on numbers.

Conclusion

These were some of the best tools you can use to find influencers to promote products. Consider joining our platform to get access to thousands of verified and real influencers. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to verify the information found on Afluencer and start your online marketing journey.

The post 8 Tools to Find Influencers to Promote Products appeared first on AFLUENCER.

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