We have noticed an increasing proliferation of influencer marketplaces and platforms over nearly a decade. Indeed, as we saw in our State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2022, there are now 18,900 influencer marketing-related agencies, platforms, and services. They exist for just one reason: to make life easier for companies engaging in influencer marketing. In this post, we look at 16 of the best influencer marketplaces and platforms to help make your influencer marketing as stress-free as possible.
Best Influencer Marketplaces:
Things to Consider When Choosing an Influencer Marketplace
With so many influencer marketplaces to choose from, it can be tricky to decide which one is the best fit for your brand. Here are some factors to consider: Grin doesn’t actually consider itself an influencer marketplace. Instead, it describes itself as an all-in-one creator management platform that helps eCommerce companies. However, you can use GRIN to select from more than 33 million potential influencers and then build out winning influencer campaigns. GRIN helps you create briefs, send proposals with branded landing pages, track produced content, and organize everything within your campaign workroom. Grin’s philosophy is that influencer marketing is marketing to the influencer, and you first need to build trusting relationships with potential influencers. It includes a detailed influencer CRM, which keeps your entire history with each influencer. With eCommerce integration, you can automate the creation of unique sales tracking links for each influencer that participates. The reporting function has a real-time counter of sales you make due to your influencer campaign. Key Features: Content Amplification, Search/Discovery, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube Upfluence is an enterprise-grade influencer marketing platform that provides access to the best influencers across the following social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and Twitch. Thanks to its artificial intelligence technology in place, brands and agencies can find the best influencers by using as many keywords or search criteria as necessary. This allows you to narrow down your search to the most precise niche of your business. Upfluence also provides influencer marketing software that helps you manage all your influencer relationships, content, and campaigns in one place. The software includes features such as contact management, performance tracking, and contract management. Moreover, it also allows you to collaborate with your team on influencer projects, so everyone is always on the same page. Key Features: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Reporting, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Channels: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs Creator.co launched as an Influencer Marketplace called Shop and Shout in 2016, targeting small businesses and micro-influencers. Its rebranding emphasizes how vital it considers the role of creators. Its focus is as much on creating content as it is on distributing that content. Depending on the level of involvement you want with your influencer campaigns, you can select from two plans: Full Access (where you can access Creator.co’s community and organize influencer campaigns) or Automated (which does most of the work for you). In addition, they now also offer an Affiliate Programs plan which walks you through connecting your Shopify or WooCommerce store and building an affiliate program, partnering with Creator.co’s influencers and publishers. Creator.co’s main point of difference is that it’s an influencer marketplace targeting the SME sector, with affordable subscription prices, but offering deep data analysis of the influencers you find. Key Features: Content Amplification, Search/Discovery, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Exportable reports, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok With a creator pool hailing from more than 100 countries, LTK Connect is among the top marketplaces for brands and agencies for boosting their creator marketing programs. LTK Connect provides a creator-guided influencer marketing platform and the top source for branded content sales across social media platforms. LTK Connect enables creator marketing with the LTK Brand Platform. Trusted by brands like Urban Outfitters, L’Oreal, Urban Outfitters, and Walmart, the LTK Brand Platform enables businesses to scale their creator marketing campaigns and increase ROI by almost double the initial value. The LTK Brand Platform is a self-serve solution where partners of all sizes and industries can collaborate with premium content creators. Its proprietary Advanced Audience Reporting™ tool provides clients with 11 years’ worth of valuable insights on marketing trends, business practices, and customer behavior. Of course, creator marketing doesn’t stop with hiring a creator. LTK Connect partners can explore various marketing tactics like affiliate marketing. Creators can commission content creators to promote their products and keep track of the generated sales. In addition, the LTK Brand Platform provides accessible content creation and distribution. Clients can use, license, and share content from the internal asset library to boost audience engagement and speed up content publishing. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Payment Processing, Channels: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Blogs, LTK App Tribe Dynamics describes itself as the “Google Analytics” of influencer marketing strategies. They aim to take a holistic approach to analyzing and measuring the influence landscape. They claim to be the first to use the metric of Earned Media Value for social media. Although Tribe Dynamics provides tools for most stages of the influencer marketing journey, its main emphasis is on analytics. It automatically tracks and measures influencer brand mentions—even on Instagram Stories and TikTok. You can use intuitive community segmentation and filtering capabilities to analyze the composition and impact of your influencer community and surface the right influencers for your upcoming initiatives. Once your campaigns are underway, you can keep a real-time pulse on campaign performance and benchmark data against past activations to quickly pivot your strategy. Key Features: Influencer Relationship Management, Content Library, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok BuzzGuru focuses on gaming and mobile brands, so it has a database of more than 20 million influencers who have made their name on YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch. However, if you are after Instagram influencers and pretty pictures, you’ll do better to look at one of the other influencer marketplaces or tools in this article. As BuzzGuru began life as an agency, there’s human experience backing their database. Its primary focus is on business and marketing intelligence, although it does include a Discovery module. You can filter your search results by game genre and individual games – obvious for brands in the gaming niche but not commonly available in influencer tools. For instance, if you only want Minecraft influencers, you can easily find them here. BuzzGuru isn’t a full influencer marketplace, however, so you will have to use another tool to manage influencer relations and the everyday operations of your campaigns. Key Features: Influencer Marketplace, Search/Discovery, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Competitor Research, Humanz aims to remind brands that influencers and their audiences are people – not just numbers in AI-generated algorithms. Becoming too data-obsessed and focused on numbers can come at the detriment of your campaigns. Ironically, Humanz uses AI to crawl the social web and perform an in-depth analysis of all public profiles (with >1k followers). As a result, they can generate influencer profiles to tell you about the person behind each account. In addition to all the data captured by Humanz’s AI, more than 50,000 influencers have registered on the platform. For these people, Humanz has centralized and streamlined things like communications, content approval, and scheduling. In addition, they have a mobile app for influencers who can even swipe through each other to find like-minded creators with whom to collaborate. Creating campaigns is an in-depth process. You can select whether you want the campaign to accept bids from interested influencers or just move forward with your own influencers and use Humanz as a campaign management tool. Key Features: Influencer Marketplace, Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Competitor Research, Exportable reports, As you can see from the pricing level, Intellifluence targets small businesses. They currently have 12,000 brands running campaigns, working with their database of 100,000+ signed-up influencers. Campaigns can be public or private. In public campaigns, you publish briefs to the Intellifluence Marketplace, targeting influencers who match the criteria you set. Alternatively, you can pitch directly to influencers you find using the discovery tool. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Campaign Management, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, TikTok,Reddit Tagger began life as a music recommendation engine, tracking social conversations and analyzing fan preferences. In time, though, the company pivoted to influencer marketing. Tagger now tracks more than 9 billion social conversations resulting in an incomprehensible amount of points—all indexed, analyzed, and searchable, by brands and agencies alike. Its data is so detailed that you can call Tagger a fully-fledged digital marketing research tool. Yet it’s also a straight-ahead influencer marketplace, home to over 6 million influencer profiles. You’ll find campaign management and reporting, in addition to discovery and activation. The platform relies heavily on social listening to give its customers a deeper understanding. For example, it can show whether audiences merely passively follow influencers or whether they are actively communicating. Are they having conversations about an influencer’s niche? Tagger streamlines communication. You can have a single interface for handling all incoming requests and include pre-qualifying questions in application forms to save everyone a lot of time. In addition, you can create customizable templates that make sending individual and bulk messages quick to deploy yet appear like a personal message. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Marketplace, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok Brybe targets small businesses wanting to partner with nano and micro-influencers. They drew inspiration from the website “Fiverr,” allowing influencers to create custom “packages.” These packages are a bundle of services for a flat fee, with all the terms, deliverables, and prices detailed on an influencer’s profile page. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brybe offers its platform to small businesses wanting to hire freelancers as well as influencers for their projects. Freelancers are creators, but not necessarily with influence. The freelancers are strictly there for content creation: photos, videos, words, illustrations, etc. However, it also provides all the CRM and campaign management tools you’d expect from a more traditional influencer marketplace. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Marketplace, Content Review, Payment Processing, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Bloggers Aspire uses a dual process to build its database of influencers. It has found many influencers using its underlying algorithm, crawling the web gathering massive amounts of social data. However, influencers need to have an account on the platform to participate in campaigns. The influencer discovery module gives customers various ways to find the right influencers. As well as a standard search process, you can use the “Quickmatch” feature, which suggests influencers based on your preferences. If you’re interested, you can invite them to collaborate or make an offer right there for an existing campaign. Otherwise, you click “Skip” to view another influencer. You can also use Aspire’s social listening abilities to track mentions of your brand. You can even search for influencers by matching their content to an image you provide. Their campaign marketplace allows talented creators to raise their hand as a true brand fan. Aspire claims to have created the world’s largest creator marketplace. Aspire has features covering every aspect of campaign management from the beginning to the end of any campaign. These include campaign creation, campaign lifecycle management, digital term sheets, product tracking, content collaboration, trackable sales links, a creator performance spreadsheet, campaign analytics, and payments. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Visual Discovery, Influencer Content Amplification, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs Klear has a massive database of 900 million influencers. Using sophisticated algorithms and AI, Klear divides these influencers into over 60,000 topic categories. Klear offers an end-to-end experience, although it has real strengths in data and analytics. They have harvested data from social networks and built a huge database of influencers. You will find deep analytics about their audiences’ demo- and psychographics. Yet as complex as their data is, Klear presents it to you in easy-to-read graphs that visualize the data. You can break it down to as much detail as you need. You can manage your campaign and keep your whole team synchronized with Klear’s integrated CRM. Monitor and manage campaign assets from start to finish. Communicate with your influencers using Klear Connect, their integrated messaging feature that acts as a hub for all influencer communication and collaboration. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs Influence.co describes itself as a professional network designed for influencers and creators. They invite influencers to create a profile to make money, learn from one another, and meet people through communities. So, you could think of Influence.co as being like LinkedIn for influencer marketing. Although Influence.co can do everything you’d expect of an influencer marketplace, it has one unique feature. It also functions as a kind of social media platform, making it easy for brands to foster and sustain the sorts of authentic and long-term relationships that are at the heart of influencer marketing. It is now a social network and marketplace with over 300,000 members: a mix of influencers, businesses, and about 30,000 others who are neither influencers nor brands but have purchased the Personal plan. Unlike most influencer marketplaces, influencers here have greater control over their profile and can write their own bio and create a portfolio of their past collaborations. In addition, brands/agencies with Pro accounts can look at more advanced demographics. Brands and agencies also create profiles, which work like a company page on LinkedIn, and their employees create profiles and become team members for the brand. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, As its name indicates, Post for Rent is a marketplace platform that emphasizes the transactional basics of influencer marketing. Yet, Post for Rent is much more than that. It makes all the tedious stuff involved in the process almost effortless, thanks to an interface that’s straightforward and fun to use. Post for Rent looks like a marketplace, yet it acts like an enterprise software suite. As a result, it’s particularly great for small to mid-sized companies whose marketing aspirations are bigger than their departments and budgets. Like many of these tools, you can either use the software yourself or use their managed services. Find influencers and check their credibility, engagement rate, audience interests, brand affinity, demographics, and much more using Post for Rent’s influencer search and profile analytics. Once you’re ready to begin a collaboration, you will find all the tools you or your team need to manage each step of a campaign in real-time. Post for Rent considers both sides to an influencer transaction, however. They have an influencer app where influencers can manage all their brand collaborations in one place. Post for Rent has recently built their NEXT Business Manager, which targets a different clientele – larger brands and agencies. NEXT takes the impressive tech from Post for Rent and ad agency-level features. These include multiple user accounts, team collaboration, client management, and the ability to make more data-driven decisions on your shortlist of influencers. Key Features: Influencer Marketplace, Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Product/Gifting Tools, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Blogs, Snapchat Cohley is a platform dedicated to content first. They recognize that not every talented content creator will have influence, and not every influencer makes great content. Therefore, Cohley connects brands with professional photographers and videographers, up-and-coming creators (“Nemos”), and full-on influencers. Brands retain licensed rights to the use of any content created as part of these partnerships. Analytics tell brands which content is performing well. Brands can then reuse the most successful content across their marketing channels. For example, every time you reuse a photo or video, you effectively lower the cost of curating content for your campaigns. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Marketplace, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Influencer Content Amplification, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Websites, and more (see below) #paid prefers the term “creators” over “influencers.” They operate, what they call, an all-in-one creator marketing platform. They recognize that influencers were creators first. Their influence directly results from being so good at creating content, and they created an audience, too. Influencers (creators) should be creating exciting content and should be a good fit for a brand. In many ways, #paid appears to function like any other influencer marketplace: you create campaign briefs to describe the goal of your campaign, the scope of the content you’re looking for, and a little about who the ideal creator might be. But #paid has a few differences, however. One is Whitelisted Ads, where you select certain creators and content for paid Facebook and Instagram ads. #paid connects with Facebook Ads Manager and allows these ads to be pushed into timelines and feeds under the creator’s handle. When setting up your campaigns, you specify the percentage of your budget allocated to organic posts and whitelisted ads. Also, #paid has Handraise, where creators can signal interest in your campaign, waiting for you to call upon them. Creators have to write a message that describes why they believe they’re a good fit for your campaign. #paid vets each creator submitting a pitch before the brand sees them and only shows pitches from relevant creators. Key Features: Content Amplification, Influencer Marketplace, Content Library, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok
Your campaign’s KPIs
Having a defined set of KPIs and metrics in place for your marketing campaign is always a good idea. This way, you can measure whether or not your campaign was successful in achieving its goals. When looking at different influencer marketplaces, take note of the analytics and reporting features and functionalities each one offers. This will ensure that you are able to track your progress and determine whether or not the marketplace is helping you achieve the desired results of your marketing strategy.
Which social media platforms do you want to focus on?
Being active on all social media platforms is ideal for a wider reach. However, this is not always possible, especially for small businesses with limited resources. When looking at influencer marketplaces, take note of the social media platforms they focus on. This way, you can ensure that you are able to find influencers who are active on the platforms that matter most to your brand.
The size of your budget in relation to ROI
Your marketing efforts will only be as good as your budget allows. When looking at influencer marketplaces, take note of the pricing model each one uses. Some platforms charge a flat fee, while others take a commission from the influencers they connect you with. As you vet the influential people you want to work with, keep in mind how much you are willing to spend on each one. This will help narrow down your options and avoid overspending. Remember, you want to make sure that you are getting a good return on investment for your marketing spend.
Do they have the tools and resources you need?
The best influencer marketing platform will have all the features and resources you need to successfully launch and manage your influencer marketing campaign. When looking at different marketplaces, take note of the tools they offer and the workflow they have in place, such as reporting and analytics, influencer data and statistics, and contract management. These can save you time and effort in managing your influencers and tracking your campaign’s progress.
How the marketplace understands SEO
Obviously, you want to partner with an influencer marketing marketplace that knows a thing or two about search engine optimization. This will ensure that your influencer marketing campaign can reach the right people and generate the desired results. When looking at different marketplaces, take note of how they connect you with influencers and the strategies they use to help you reach your target audience. Also, SEO is an ever-changing landscape, so you want to make sure that the marketplace you choose can keep up with the latest trends and changes.
What type of influencers do they have in their network?
The quality of the influencers in a marketplace’s network can make or break your marketing campaign. When looking at different marketplaces, take note of the type of influencers they have in their network. Ideally, you want to find a platform with a wide range of influencers, from top-tier celebrities to micro-influencers. This way, you can choose the right influencer for your campaign based on your budget and marketing goals.
Final Thoughts
Finding the right influencer for your brand is essential to the success of any influencer marketing campaign. But, finding the best one can be a challenge. You would have to wade through thousands of profiles on different platforms before you find the perfect match. The 16 influencer marketplaces listed in this article are some of the best ones in the business and should make it easier for you to find the right brand influencers by curating a selection of top-tier talent and making them readily available in one place. Each marketplace has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it is important to choose the right marketplace for your needs. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to find an influencer you can build a long-term relationship with and who will be a positive force for your brand.