In this post, I’ll review and talk about the top 22 Instagram influencer marketing platforms that you can consider for growing your brand awareness and reaching new audiences (this is our 2022 update).
Influencer marketing platforms, especially those targeting the 1 BILLION monthly active Instagram users and other social media platforms, have boomed over the last few years. It’s been a race by startups to see who can build the largest database of brands and influencers, have the best features for facilitating collaborations between the two parties, and optimizing the best business model for growth.
New age online businesses such as TriviaNerd went viral with their trivia content on TikTok leveraged influencer marketing campaigns to increase the organic reach of their marketing campaigns to great success.
These platforms have taken off on the back of ‘the rise of the individual brand’. Millions of people across social networks have built audiences numbering in the thousands to the millions – and brands want access. People are spending more time-consuming Instagram stories and posts published by their favourite influencers and less time in front of the TV. This has created an opportunity for savvy entrepreneurs to build marketplaces and platforms that enable a brand to tap into influencers with very specific audiences and a high engagement rate.
Without further ado, here are the right tools I’ve found that help you reach influencers with highly engaged and relevant Instagram followers.
No time to read it all? If you’re a small business owner or agency then I’d use Heepsy which has a great free plan. If you’re looking after a consumer big brand then I’d go with Aspire (formerly Revfluence).
If you’re looking for a dedicated tool to automatically schedule & post your content to Instagram then I recommend using the Instagram scheduler Sked Social, it’s what I use for my clients. Alternatively, I’ve written up a comparative list of the different Instagram scheduling tools here.
1. Aspire (formerly Revfluence)
Website: Aspire.io
Aspire is a software solution for brands looking to build influencer relationships and content at a significant scale. They specialize in working with large consumer brands that are doing Instagram influencer marketing at scale. They’ve worked with the likes Calvin Klein, HelloFresh, GrubHub, GlossyBox, and hundreds more.
The platform has four components:
1) a database of hundreds of thousands of influencers with high engagement and audience size
2) CRM software to coordinate with hundreds of influencers
3) an analytics dashboard to track performance per influencer/content by things like sales, followers driven and engagement
4) a content library where you can export assets and track results of pictures & videos in other places like Facebook and Instagram ads.
Unlike many other solutions, they don’t take a percentage of any payments, and relationships are direct with each person. They offer a free demo for brands that want to see how their platform works.
Click here to check out Aspire
2. Heepsy
Website: Heepsy.com
Heepsy is a fantastic software tool for quickly finding the ideal influencers for your Instagram marketing campaign. It is particularly good because you can try it out for free unlike a lot of other tools, making it the ideal option for individuals, small businesses & agencies.
Heepsy comes with some fantastic advanced targeting features including;
- Demographic targeting – clients are able to filter the Instagram profiles by their audience’s age range, location, interest, language and gender.
- Location targeting – find influencers in just one city or country.
- Keyword targeting – look for influencers that have relevant keywords in their bio, for example; Vegan
- Metric targeting – Only show micro-influencers with a minimum of 2000 follower count and a maximum of 10,000 followers? Easy.
- Contact information – Only show influencers who have included their contact email in their bio.
Here’s a snapshot on their searching dashboard, you can see how easy it is to use. Click the photo to try it out.
All of these advanced targeting features means I can run a search on Heepsy that shows me the top 100 vegan food bloggers in Melbourne with a max of 10,000 followers and their email address. Pretty damn good!
It’s then all pulled into a convenient list so you can store all your target influencers in one place and review their Instagram posts.
Personal note: Their paid plans are super affordable (starts at just $49) which makes Heepsy the no-brainer choice on the list. I expect to see Heepsy dominate the Instagram influencer marketing space in the coming years.
Click here to check out Heepsy
3. Influencity
Website: Influencity.com
Influencity targets both agencies and brands with an all-in-one influencer marketing platform used by esteemed companies such as Samsung, Kellogg’s and OMG.
Their platform allows you to analyse over 55 million potential influencers for your campaign and brings detailed reporting to measure the success of these campaigns.
Features:
- Find influencers
- Analyse influencers
- Organize influencers
- Forecast results
- Manage campaigns
- Measure your results
Pricing starts at just $24 per month with larger plans depending on the depth of your campaign needs. All their plans come with a free trial and don’t require a credit card.
Personal note: Influencity is a relatively new influencer marketing platform but it’s been in the making since 2014. They have built a strong technical offering for influencer marketing brand managers, especially on Instagram & Tik Tok.
Click here to check out Influencity
4. Instabrand
Website: Instabrand.com
Instabrand brings more of the agency approach to the influencer marketing mission. Their campaign managers help craft the right message and engage the influencers on your brand’s behalf. Going by their Rolodex of impressive past customer logos, the concierge strategy is working for them. However, this might be out of budget for the smaller business. Also, whilst their company’s name references Instagram, it seems they also put a big focus on Snapchat as a platform.
Personal note: I think it’s incredibly exciting to see Instabrand put such a highlight on Snapchat. With 100M daily active users, Snapchat is fast becoming a platform of choice for marketing to millennials.
5. Hypetap
Website: Hypetap.com
Hypetap is pitching itself as “Curated Influencer Marketing – a marketplace for brands, agencies, influencers & talent managers”. Their platform has 1240 influencers who reach over 136 million followers. What differentiates Hypetap is how they have built a great technology enabled funnel to help both parties do campaigns on the platform. They’ve also curated the quality of their influencers very very well – so brands can expect high levels of engagement (which is what matters on Instagram). Their platform costs around $50 per month to use, but it’s free to post campaigns and see what they have.
Personal note: I’ve used Hypetap personally in the past and I really enjoyed the user experience of their platform. The founders went through a great Sydney based tech accelerator program called MAP. If you are targeting young women in Australia – then Hypetap should be one of your first visits as I know their platform has a high proportion of that demographic.
6. T R I B E
Website: Tribegroup.co
Tribe launched in Australia in late 2015 with great success. They have focused on building out their platform with an app for influencers first. They have made the whole influencer marketing process very simple for both brands and influencers – and they ensure happy sides on both parties. Tribe requires businesses to create campaign briefs and influencers can then pitch a social media post for that brief which businesses can then accept or reject. The platform was launched by TV celebrity Jules Lund and raised $750,000 in seed funding to get off the ground. There is no indication of how many brands or influencers are on the platform at the moment. However one of their recent marketing emails stated that over 100 brands are currently using the platform to find and pay influencers for published collaborative content. Influencers on their platform must have at least 5000 followers to connect.
Personal note: I’m putting my money on Tribe to win in the Australian Instagram influencer marketing platform race. They’re backed by big-name investors and celebrities. I’ve watched them execute and iterate rapidly on their ‘mobile first’ offering from the day they launched – and I’m very impressed. This is the platform that I’d use if I was a new Australian business wanting to reach new customers using Instagram using influencer marketing. I believe they are based in Melbourne and share an office with the Just Melbourne crew which is a Melbourne focused media brand delivering reviews on the best courses and suppliers.
7. Exposely
Website: Exposely.com
Exposely claims to be the first ‘self serve social advertising platform’. According to their website, they’ve engaged over 350 million people across the different social platforms so far. According to the brand’s page of their website, they seem to have a focus on Twitter but some of their imagery includes Instagram, so might be worth checking out still. It doesn’t appear like they raised any significant funding rounds.
Personal note: It doesn’t look like they’ve tweeted anything since January 2015 or blogged anything since 2014. I think they might be defunct as a business. Please correct me if I’m wrong! And personally, I think Twitter is dead, so I’d focus my influencer marketing efforts elsewhere.
8. WeConnect
Website: Weconnectsocial.com
Weconnect has a very impressive slideshow of different consumer brands on their website. It looks like they have a global audience of influencers across a range of channels and target audiences as well – claiming to reach 2.7+ billion followers with 40,000 verified and vetted influencers.
Personal note: I’ve met the owner of the Australian Weconnect license, Myles – nice guy.
9. TapInfluence
Website: Tapinfluence.com
Tapinfluence seems to be the platform that a brand with a budget of at least $50,000 to spend on influencer marketing would go to. They’re sitting at the enterprise end of the market with some analytical software that looks like it can scour the entire web to find the very best quality influencers. They also seem more focused on traditional influencer marketing in the form of blogging rather than the more trendy social media influencer marketing.
Personal note: According to the latest press releases on the matter, Tapinfluence has raised over $8.3M to date so they are definitely a platform to consider. Their cheapest plan starts at $24k/year though, so only the top brands can probably use the product.
10. Neoreach
Website: Neoreach.com
Neoreach pitches itself as the end to end influencer marketing platform for Fortune 1000 brands and their agencies, probably competing quite heavily with Tapinfluence. In mid-2014 they raised 1.5 million in seed funding, adding to a new total of 2.5 million raised to date. There is no pricing information on their website, so I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that they are very expensive to use.
Personal note: Whilst I haven’t used this platform, I really like the look of their UI/UX. If I had a huge budget – I’d look at it more closely.
11. Speakr
Website: Speakr.com
Speakr has a high-quality network of over 20,000 ‘Speakrs’ and in 2015 they powered nearly 40% of top 100 most impactful influencer campaigns. Speakr has been operating since 2010 so they probably are pretty damn good by now at running influencer marketing campaigns for big brands. Probably not suitable for the small guys.
Personal note: I like how they focus a lot on channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Vine even though they’ve been around for 6 years.
12. Influicity
Website: Influicity.com
Influicity claims to have more than a million social influencers on the platform, which is the most that I’ve ever seen on any single platform. That said, with that many influencers, I’d be surprised if they are all high-quality ones.
Personal note: Accessing their products requires signing up for a demo – so it’s hard to say anything about them.
13. ReadyPulse
Website: Readypulse.com
Readypulse has raised over $7 million in funding to date in its effort to be the #1 influencer marketing platform. It doesn’t look like they have many influencers on the platform already but it looks like they’ve built out a great software set for brands that are doing influencer marketing. Judging by the case studies and brands on their homepage it looks like they’ve had some success so far in delivering on their value proposition.
Personal note: Once again, not a cheap solution by the look of it because you have requested a demo before you can use their platform.
14. Snapfluence
Website: Snapfluence.com
Snapfluence is an agency based in Ohio that has a tight-knit community of Instagrammers. Unlike a lot of other platforms, it looks like they focus quite heavily on Instagram which is nice.
Personal note: I like the community feel of what they are trying to do here, but at the end of the day – they are an agency and not a platform or marketplace.
15. Famebit
Website: Famebit.com
Famebit boasts 33,992 content creators reaching 1.9 billion people across various social networks. When they launched they were focused on just Youtube but like many platforms have expanded their offering to Instagram and other social networks too. To date, they have been used by over 7,003 brands to do influencer marketing. In mid-2014 the startup raised $1.4M in funding to build their platform.
Personal note: I really love their website and brand that they’ve built. I think they understand the importance of being on trend and that this, in turn, would attract some of the best influencers to work with them. Whilst not all of their influencers use Instagram but youtube instead, that makes it especially good as a platform for distributing free products that youtubers can do unboxings for.
16. Shoutcart
Website: Shoutcart.com
Shoutcart reaches over 200M followers across thousands of influencers. They started with Instagram at first, but recently expanded into Twitter as well. What is different about Shoutcart is that it is basically a self-serve platform similar to Adwords, and you can get started in just a few minutes and $50. They offer great tools to vet influencers as well as able to provide statistics on specific campaigns you are running. Another cool feature from Shoutcart is that you can browse influencers that would sell you a link spot in their bio, very handy for affiliate offers and direct product promotions.
Personal note: I’d say shoutcart is ideal for people that have very small budgets and are just starting out with influencer marketing. Whilst there are plenty of instagram influencers on the platform with a large following, I don’t think most of the accounts listed have very good engagement. But, I’d still try it out because it’s really quite cheap. Click here to check out ShoutCart.
17. Strawberry Socials
Website: StrawberrySocials.com
Strawberry Socials automates your manual Instagram searching to let you find 100x the creators. This powered-up way to search Instagram uses proprietary search algorithms to find more of the influencers you already love by using them as examples in your search. You can use similar profiles, keywords, hashtags and more to source lists of useful, high-quality influencers quickly. It works especially well at targeting cities and countries all around the world, and specific, hard to define niches.
Their product comes with a free trial which you can check out here.
18. Ifluenz
Website: Ifluenz.com
Ifluenz is the first Instagram-focused influencer marketing platform. With over 7,000 registered Instagram influencers reaching a total audience of over 500M followers, you are sure to find the perfect influencers to promote your brand or product.
Ifluenz has developed powerful algorithms to review, sort and classify influencers using various criteria including (number of followers, engagement rate, an area of interests, location, gender, age, etc.). The algorithms select and match the best influencers with corresponding campaigns created by brands. This allows starting an Instagram influencer marketing campaign in 5 minutes.
All influencers registered on Ifluenz have to undergo a process where the engagement rate of their Instagram followers is verified to ensure high results.
Another great thing about this platform is that the pricing is based on the average market price for a given audience. You can start a campaign for as low as $15, on-demand (no subscription fee). Previewing the best matching influencers is totally free.
19. Moonio
Website: Moonio.io
Moonio is a 360 platform for brands and agencies who want to launch influencer marketing campaigns.
Create your campaign, find influencers, manage your relationships, and measure your results all in the same place.
Moonio also lets influencers register, browse campaigns, and send proposals to those that interest them, meaning brands can receive collaboration requests simply for posting their campaign.
Best of all, you can start for free as they have a freemium plan and upgrade as you scale your influencer marketing strategy.
20. Trend
Website: Trend.io
Conclusion
Influencer marketing on Instagram as an industry is here to stay. To get more insight on establishing an influencer marketing strategy I asked the owner of a local boutique marketing agency his thoughts on using these platforms to run your campaigns.
“In the early days of our business, we used influencer marketing a lot to reach our target audience. It’s a highly cost-effective channel for B2C brands.”
It will be interesting over time to see which of these platforms build up the critical mass required to survive and which ones die (it looks like some are already dead). It’s also interesting to observe how a lot of these platforms start off by focusing on one channel or type of influencer and then end up expanding their offering to every channel and type of influencer around the world.
If you’ve found other Instagram influencer marketing platforms that I’ve missed then please leave a comment below. In a future post, we will look at some successful Instagram influencer marketing campaigns.