5 Affordable Marketing Tech Platforms That Let SMBs Get in On the Influencer Marketing Game

For SMBs, influencer marketing is seriously outperforming digital advertising, with a return as high as $18 for every dollar spent for companies with a strong understanding of influencer marketing.  In spite of this, many small and medium businesses remain uncertain about investing in influencer marketing as a channel.

Until recently, SMBs were also priced out of the influencer game, with most platforms and solutions costing thousands of dollars a month. Trying to do it on their own just led to frustration and wasted time and money.

Good news for SMBs is that the price of an effective influencer marketing solution is coming down, and they are becoming easier to use, so there has never been a better time for businesses to give this powerful marketing strategy a try. We’ve rounded up 5 of the most affordable influencer marketing platforms on the market today that make it simple and easy to benefit from using influencers.

1. RockitBoost

RockitBoost is a brilliant influencer marketing platform designed especially for ecommerce sellers and crowdfunders in that it integrates with any ecommerce or crowdfunding site. It is one of the easiest-to-use and the least expensive platforms we’ve seen at just $19/month. It is also unique in that it is the only platform where the influencers come to the brands. Usually, the biggest challenge for brands is finding and negotiating with influencers; this platform eliminates that entirely.

U.S.-based RockitBoost is also unique in that businesses only pay for influencer performance: sales or traffic to their site, and they only pay after the results have been verified. So if your budget is particularly tight, this is a great platform for you because there is no money paid upfront other than the small monthly fee.  RockitBoost displays your campaign results in an easy-to-understand Dashboard, and they handle all payments to your influencers. They offer customized email broadcasts to promote your products to a particular group of influencers, and your products can be posted on any social platform.

The tool is free for influencers and marketing agencies, and there are two types of paid plans: $19 per month per product with the price dropping to $16 per month for 5+ products plus commissions to the influencers.

2. Crewfire

Crewfire bills itself as a brand-ambassador tool, where you connect your social media accounts, blog, and e-commerce site to their platform and when you upload new content, the “ambassadors” you’ve invited will be mobilized to like, comment, or share that content. You can also create your own campaigns for ambassadors to participate in including instructions and brand assets for them to use. One of the most interesting features of this tool is that you can create hashtag campaigns (2 for the Starter level up to 10 for the Business level) where you create a specific hashtag and track it. You can track the usage of that hashtag by your brand ambassadors and reward them for it.

Ambassadors get points for “actions” they complete on the site, which they can exchange for rewards. One unique feature is that Crewfire makes it a competition among the ambassadors, showing their ranking among their peers to encourage activity.

Crewfire has three tiered-pricing levels including Starter, Growth and Business with the most basic starting at $69 per month.

3. BrandChamp

BrandChamp lets you build a community of brand ambassadors and create simple challenges and tasks for them to do. They get rewards once tasks are completed and compete with other ambassadors on the platform. You can also provide them with unique coupons and discounts that they can use to drive more conversions.

You can also track all ambassador activities and monitor the performance of each individual as well as the whole program. The rewards and incentives are automatically delivered as monthly statements to each ambassador.

A nice feature is being able to easily collect and store user-generated content and seeing what ambassador’s social media posts look like on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter complete with social metrics. You can also create a reward catalog with your products for different tiers or segments of your ambassador program.

They have three tiers of pricing and while the two upper tiers are probably too pricey for SMBs ($450 per month and $850 per month respectively), the Starter Plan at $195 per month is within reach for most medium businesses.

4 . Influencity

Influencity’s strength is their robust database of influencers and their search abilities. Boasting over 55 million influencers in their database, there are over 100,000 ways to combine filters in order to find the most relevant results for your business. They also have lookalike searches if you find a particular influencer that matches your parameters.  Influencers are able to post about your products on Instagram for the two lower price tiers and YouTube and TikTok at the higher price tiers. You’re able to run reports on campaigns, although it’s limited to one report for 10 posts for the Basic level.

Campaign management starts at the higher two levels (5 and 25 campaigns respectively at the Pro and Business levels) and has a unique feature of being able to gather price data on your past collabs so you can negotiate better for future collabs. You can also identify influencers’ most-used hashtags on your social networks to be able to spot trends.

There are four pricing tiers with the Starter and Basic Tiers coming in at $48 and $98 per month respectively. Those tiers only offer Instagram and no campaign management. But the two top tiers, Professional and Business, offer more features at $298 and $698 per month respectively.

5. Referral Rock

Referral Rock helps you set up a referral program and keep it on autopilot. You can customize the design, copy, creative, and messaging for your program to match your brand. You find the advocates and encourage them to join via email, social sign-ons, a referral widget, and more. They can share with their followers via email, social, SMS, unique links, and codes.

A dedicated portal lets you track your campaign results, and you can share pre-drafted messages with your advocates easily.  There are several types of programs you can run with Referral Rock including refer a friend, influencer, and partner programs. One nice feature is the number of programs Referral Rock integrates with, making it easy to connect your customer touchpoints.

Referral Rock has three tiers of pricing, from $200-$800 per month, depending on number of advocates and programs, rewards and integrations.

While these are just five of the many influencer marketing tools a SMB can use, they fall in the lower range of pricing so they are a great way to dip your toe in the influencer waters. Influencer marketing is here to stay because it’s effective and measurable, and for small and medium businesses where every dollar counts, it’s important to squeeze all you can out of your marketing investment. Give one of these tools a try and start boosting your sales and traffic today with a proven ROI!