I Assessed 6 Influencer Marketing Tools. Here Are the Best Ones For Outdoor Companies

Influencer marketing is a  hot topic for marketing professionals in 2018—including those in hunting, fishing, and shooting sports. In fact, 80% of businesses said they’ll engage in influencer marketing this year.

What is influencer marketing? According to AdWeek, influencer marketing “presents a glaring opportunity for brands to leverage the power of word-of-mouth at scale through personalities that consumers already follow and admire.”

Given this untapped, burgeoning market and business practice, the outdoor industry is taking notice and implementing such practices into their online marketing efforts. The rise of brand champions, pro staffers, and product testers are widely seen across platforms like Instagram. This gives rise to great influencers and yes, even the frauds. How should companies go about fostering relationships with influencers? How can they negotiate rates for compensation without breaking their budget? How can they find the best-fit influencer and not just fish for likes with a model? How can they monitor ROI and analytics of an influencer they partner with? With this burgeoning market, it’s important for industry-related companies to utilize these platforms to keep better tabs of their influencers and establish relationships with the RIGHT ones. In my capacity as a media strategist, I hope to work with more companies to ID influencers, keep track of them, and use programs like these on their behalves to ensure this element of business conduct is successfully executed.

Here are some interesting facts about influencer marketing you should note of:

• Obivous.ly found that it takes brands 71 hours to work with 15 influencers.
• Social Media Today says 94% of marketers find  influencer marketing to be an effective practice
• 67.6% of companies say it’s challenging to find relevant influencers
• Businesses make $6.50 for every $1.00 spent on an influencer
• Engagement is more important than reach for influencers
• There are three types of influencers: Celebrity, Macro, and Micro influencers

While influencer branding has taken off in the outdoor industry, there are a few drawbacks to it:

• Companies often partner with the wrong influencers
• Companies don’t do their due diligence to find influencers with authentic followings
• Companies don’t know how to measure KPIs (key performance indicators)
• Companies haven’t plotted their SMART (Specific | Measurable | Attainable |Realistic| Timely ) goals

Going off of this blog post from Josh Claflin of Garrison Everest, I decided to test several influencer marketing platforms to see which are the best ones for hunting, fishing, and/or shooting sports companies to use to keep better tabs on their influencers.

Here’s my assessment of

Upfluence

The gist: Upfluence is an influencer marketing software boasting a Influencer Search Engine, Campaign Manager, and Influence Analytics. I found it to be an all-inclusive, start-of-the-art software after doing a demo. It’s easy to search for influencers in the outdoor industry according to category, activity, location, and other metrics.

Here’s a carousel of what you can expect from the platform:

1. Custom stream:

 

1. 
2. It’s very easy to search for influencers

3) Get results on influencers automatically: 

 

3) Manage how you pay your influencers

My assessment: I’m going to go on a whim and say this: this is my favorite influencer marketing platform I demo’d. The program is VERY responsive and the staff are super helpful and eager to answer any questions. When I booked a demo to learn more about Upfluence, Tom from sales immediately reached out after I selected the time and date for the demo. When showing me how Upfluence is set up, Tom pointed out that there are some outdoor influencers —including Field & Stream and Courtney Smith (@SportswomanCourtney)—who already use the platform or have been manually placed there. That piqued my interest a lot. Below is pricing—which, Tom says, fluctuates according to business size:

I’ll give it a 9.5/10. Though the pricing can be a tad much for smaller companies, I was reassured pricing can be tailor-made to fit budgets better.

Mavrck

The gist: Mavrck bills itself as the following: “We empower premier brands to rise above the noise through content consumers trust.”

My assessment: I first came across Mavrck on Instagram since the algorithm believed I would like ads about the program. So I clicked on the link and signed up for some materials. When time came to request a demo, I immediately did so, and alas, after several days, still no email to confirm a demo of the program. Hmmmm. That’s rather uncharacteristic, no? But they have sent me a barrage of emails so that’s great. (Not.) In lieu of a demo, I perused through their website and found this information. The are keen on providing a lot of marketing research on influencers and their prowess, so that seemed redeeming. They’ve also worked with Godiva and American Eagle Outfitters, so they are great at leveraging results on this front for larger brands. Would this work for micro- and macro-brands in the outdoor space? Perhaps for the latter. They appear results-oriented despite not having a responsive demo response rate. I’ll give it a 6.5/10.

Revfluence

The gist: Revfluence is limited to Instagram and YouTube influencers, which could be very limiting if you’re working with influencers with larger followings on Facebook and Twitter. However, with Instagram being an emerging platform with over 1 billion daily active users, this platform may work to your advantage. They boast three plan levels, which are available upon request. (I gather they are quite expensive.)

My assessment: Revfluence seems to appeal to larger influencers and won’t be useful to micro influencers. There preferences aren’t out-of-the-ordinary, but they likely won’t want your business if you don’t have an average of 500 likes her post. Ultimately,  it limits creators and influencers who don’t meet certain qualifications. I’ll give it a 6/10.

Famebit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6N27uyiSto

The gist: Famebit is the influencer marketing platform that was bought by Google, YouTube’s parent company, in 2016. It’s specifically geared towards YouTube creators. Below is information about pricing:

My assessment: With this being catered to YouTube influencers, those with a limited presence—especially the micro influencers there— will have a hard time being discovered by outdoor companies. Most notably, you cannot narrow your search for likeminded influencers in fishing, hunting, or shooting sports. And with YouTube cracking down on firearms, hunting, or shooting sports content, this management tool may not serve your interests or those of your influencers at all. I’ll give this a 4/10.

Influence.Co

The gist: Influence.co calls itself the world’s “first open platform where influencers, brands and agencies connect.” It adds it’s “free to use and we plan to keep it that way. We don’t run campaigns and we don’t represent talent. We simply let everyone show off their best work and find each other.”

My assessment: If you’re on a limited budget and want a basic influencer marketing program, you can use this for free under the Basic plan.

While this may limit your abilities, it’s still nonetheless good to see what influencers you should be targeted. You can easily search for influencers without immediately subscribing, like terms such as “fishing” & “firearms” but alas, there’s no term for “hunting.” The search is available but very limited in our industry. However, the other features regarding searches, contacts, and lists it not bad—especially for a free plan. But “free” may not always produce the best product. I’ll give this a 7/10. 

Klear

The gist: Klear is ” big data Influencer Marketing software platform. We help brands build, scale and measure influencer programs. With the most comprehensive database of over 1 billion influencers, we enable you to find influencers in any category worldwide, manage the relationships with them, and measure the results.” You can use it for free on your Desktop and it’s a very easy platform to familiarize yourself with.

My assessment: Klear is a good way to see how much actual reach influencers, particularly those on Instagram, have. Simply type the handle you wish to examine and voila — you’ll see the number of people they reach.For comparison, check out the genuine reach these following accounts have: NRA . I’ll use my account as an example to highlight the effectiveness of this application:

Here’s a great demo of the product:

There are free and paid plan options. And with the free options, you can enjoy the following. I’ll give it an 8/10:

 

These findings are solely based on my personal assessment of these platforms, so please feel free to disagree with the findings if you do. Nevertheless, I think I know which ones I’ll be recommending to clients in the outdoor industry going forward…

 

###

What did you think of this piece? Am I on-target or off-mark?

As always, I recommend you follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to stay in the loop with my musings. Subscribe to my newsletter–now LIVE. Chime in below with your comments!