Essential influencer outreach tools

Use these tools to speed up your influencer outreach

These tools are especially useful for content marketers who are regularly producing content and need a structured and scalable way of managing their outreach efforts. They help to identify the types of site and key people within your niche that may link to or share your content in order to help amplify your message. Tools such as Kred, Klout and Followerwonk (Twitter specific tool) focus on assigning scores to online users, surfacing those who are likely to be most influential for your given content, search or topic.

Why are these tools important to digital marketers?

They help digital marketers to identify, analyse and contact relevant PR, blogger and other key influencer contacts, usually with the aim of creating backlinks or sharing content.

Download Expert Member resource – Influencer outreach guide

Engage influencers to expand your reach with our influencer marketing guide.This practical guide shows you how to use tools to find and interact with influencers on the best social media platforms for outreach, that’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Unlike other categories, there is a mix of functionality and whilst there is some overlap, the tool(s) you likely choose will depend on how advanced your influencer outreach program is.
All outreach tools are only as good as the process that’s powering them. Ensuring the assignee field, adding notes and systematic tagging can help prompt key details about previous outreach attempts and/or follow up information gathered over the phone (for example).
Just because these tools enable large list building and make outreach easy, question whether this will yield the right results. A small, hyper targeted list is often more successful. Whilst some of these tools enable distribution of your content and the use of email templates, successful outreach requires the personal touch.

Followerwonk

This tool helps you to explore and understand your Twitter following for growth through research and analysis tools. Connect with influencers and prospects, search and compare users. Free basic subscriptions are available, with premium plans available for additional functionality and users.

Followerwonk is a great addition to understanding your Twitter following in more detail but is limited to only Twitter, so should be used in combination with other social media monitoring tools to supplement overall insight. As part of the MOZ suite of apps, this tool comes with good credibility.

What makes it stand out?

The ability to search for Twitter users by relevance to a keyword and compare them based on various, identify authoritative users to promote content, monitor most engaging tweets, and then search, sort, and download the results. The application also enables the user to follow other profiles – highlighting any that may already be following.

Key features:

Search Twitter bios
Compare users to show audience overlaps
Analyse users based on authority, following size etc.
Track follows or unfollows
Sort users depending on priority

Buzzstream

Buzzstream is a relationship and outreach CRM tool that allows you to manage and grow a large volume of outreach campaigns across website of relevance. This is a very handy tool to help identify, collate and share potential influencers in the execution of outreach programmes. It can help you speed up process of identifying and making contact with potential site for link building, and as it is done in an editorial manner, any links obtained will not face Google penalty.

What makes it stand out?

It allows you to quickly bookmark websites that may have contributors who are relevant to your content. It gleans all of the necessary contact information to contact them as part of an outreach programme, and shares this information as a centralised database for a team to use. Users can also use saved templated communications as a time saver for outreach.

Key features

Collate contact details for influencers as you browse websites
In-app sending of personalised, relationship-based messaging
Manage relationships and share notes with a project team

Traackr

Tracker is an influencer marketing platform to search cross-platform and websites to reach people who are influential in relation to your content.

This is a very comprehensive tool that allows you to find, monitor and plan influencer resonance. It is similar to Twitterwonk, but where that tool is only limited to Twitter, Traackr is across all platforms online. This tool is high end and therefore may be best suited to larger businesses.

What makes it stand out?

Similar to Followerwonk, this tool allows users to search for and identify influencers by relevance to a keyword and build up a profile – highlighting the most relevant metrics to help prioritise prospects.

Key features:

Identify top influencers in any niche conversation
Build up profiles around key metrics important for prioritising
Monitor influencers to allow relevant engagement
Create plans using the tool data
Monitor the relationships - generate targeted & actionable reports

Onalytica

This is an outreach marketing platform, designed to help seed content to potential influencers.

This tool attempts to automate the process of identifying potential influencers. Similar to high-end tools like Traackr, this presents an interesting tool that may be useful for larger businesses to seed content and create buzz.

What makes it stand out?

This platform allows publishers to upload content and using an algorithm to match the proportional usage of nouns used against an aggregate of what an influencer has posted on Twitter over the past 12 months. This then returns the most relevant influencers to outreach to.

Key features:

Monitor influencer feed
Devise influencer profiles
Content seeding
Network maps
Gain real-time alerts
Reporting

Klout

Kout helps to identify and target groups of influencers, and assist with outreach programmes, content creation and social campaign reporting.

It tool allows a brand to look more deeply at whom it should target and build relationships with as part of an influencer marketing strategy. Using the metrics, brands can prioritise accounts based on their interests but also those of their audience to get a more holistic view of relevancy to their content. It is a complex tool, crunching millions of social media accounts, so it pricing is a little hidden as it can be customised to a business’ needs.

What makes it stand out?

Within 1 platform, users are assigned a Klout Score, which is a high-level measurement of cross-social network influence so that brands can segment a group of trusted influencers to offer exclusive content to in order to generate earned media around a product launch or event.

Key features:

Easily identify and target groups of top influencers for outreach marketing
Offer influencers exclusive rewards and exclusive content
Trusted influencers share their excitement and generate earned media for the brand
In-built campaign reporting