If you work in the influencer marketing industry, as either a brand or a content creator, you can appreciate the importance data holds in the influencer marketing decision making process. Understanding the data behind influencer marketing campaigns is the first step towards making better decisions and creating campaigns that speak directly to your audience. However, many people still debate whether you need an influencer marketing data platform to get the most out of your data.

We’re taking a look at the top reasons brands use influencer marketing data platforms to build campaigns, to help you evaluate their worth to your business or upcoming project.

Why do brands use influencer marketing platforms?

Brands use influencer marketing data platforms to ensure every stage of the campaign is properly and efficiently managed. From planning to reporting, a data platform’s campaign management is broken down below:

Planning

Clearer data: As a brand, it may be simple enough to get your hands on the data you need to inform decisions, but how easy is it for you to digest that data? By using an influencer marketing data platform, the data is broken down for you to make it easily understandable, ensuring that your campaigns are based on a data-based strategy.

Unique insights: Influencer marketing data platforms offer unique insights, which are based on historical data from creator partnerships built up over hundreds or even thousands of campaigns. Instead of having to ask a creator to get the data you need, an influencer marketing data platform pulls the data for you - the dream, right?

The ability to compare creators: When trying to collate your own data, it can be hard to compare creators. Not only do you have to go through and get data from each creator and then compare each metric against one another, sometimes the metrics you’re comparing aren’t all that valuable. An influencer marketing data platform picks out the key information that relates to your campaign, so that you can compare relevant information and select the most effective and appropriate creators for your campaign.

Audience insights: Understanding a creator's audience is essential to getting the most from your campaign, however when brands collate their own data, often they can struggle to get the audience insights that they truly need. With an influencer marketing data platform you have all of the audience data available at your fingertips; you can pick your creators based on the audience, rather than waste time approaching content creators who you think might align with your audience. Simply put, influencer marketing data platforms take out the guesswork.

Execution

Time-efficient: One of the main reasons many brands opt for an influencer marketing data platform is that they save time. Rather than have someone going through comparing all of the data and trying to make decisions off the back of it, you can cut out the research element and have data presented to you in an easy-to-understand format.

Pivoting capability: The real-time data insights that you get with an influencer marketing data platform mean that you can pivot and change course if another route looks more appealing; many brands have run whole campaigns before realising that the results aren’t as they expected, whereas with an influencer marketing data platform you’re able to assess the results as they’re happening.

Reporting

ROI: Having a clearer understanding of ROI and how well a campaign performed can be really tricky, however with data pulled from an influencer marketing data platform can make performance reporting quick and easy.

Understanding specific audience actions: Understanding how your campaign performed is one thing, but understanding how it evoked certain actions from your audience is another. Influencer marketing data platforms help you understand what pieces of content created certain outcomes, so that you can understand your audience better.

How important is data to influencer marketing?

If you’re only running small campaigns with little or no budget, then you will find that influencer data is probably not on the top of your agenda. However, if you’re running larger influencer marketing campaigns with budget behind them, then it makes sense to use data to inform your spending decisions.

Although data is crucial to success, it is not the be all and end all. Brands shouldn’t feel that they need to allow data to dictate campaigns in a way that compromises on creativity. We believe that great influencer marketing campaigns happen at the intersection of both data and creativity, when creators feel empowered to create.

Our strategy and partnership director, Nik Speller, recently wrote an article on this exact topic. So, head over to our insights page to learn more about how data should be used in influencer marketing.