Read time: 5 mins
When influencers and brands set out to find partnerships that will provide value, the process can be daunting. On the one hand, brands do not always know where to find the perfect partnerships or assess the quality and professionalism of influencers they may find. On the other hand, influencers want to reach out to brands who understand partnerships and create successful influencer campaigns.
Searching the internet manually — even through a search engine — is tedious. And, once you have a list of potential partners, it does not tell you much of anything about them.
Enter the marketplace.
What are the basics you need to know about marketplaces?
Followers use platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to connect with their favorite influencers, journalists, thinkers, athletes, actors, chefs, celebrities, or even makeup artists. If it is a good platform, followers can use it to gain direct access to influencers, and it supports the relationship in valuable ways.
The same kinds of platforms exist for influencers and brands to find each other — they are called marketplaces. Like with platforms, the good ones facilitate relationships that otherwise would be very difficult to create and maintain. Imagine if you had to find a vegan chef influencer with suggestions about where to eat in Kyoto without a platform. Where would you even begin?
Without a marketplace, brands and influencers are limited to searching endlessly on the internet and social media platforms, unsure if they’re finding all the right potential partners or missing the good ones. Then, because there is no data, brands and influencers are left to guess if the match would be a good, productive, supportive relationship or not.
For brands that run their influencer campaigns in-house, finding the right influencers is their biggest challenge, and potentially, their most rewarding. The same goes for influencers who want to ensure that the right brands find them. They increasingly want to be treated with the respect they deserve as the professionals they are.
Marketplaces provide a space that makes partnerships easy so that brands and influencers can flourish.
Marketplace benefits for influencers and brands
Tools like Activate by impact.com have a marketplace to help brands and influencers find each other. For brands, the marketplace automates and simplifies the process of discovering, evaluating, and recruiting new partners.
In a great marketplace, the influencer community also has access to a wide variety of brands across different verticals interested in partnerships. If they weren’t, they would not be there. Influencers want to be both partners and professionals. Influencers need to know they’re reaching out to brands interested in creating or managing partnerships.
What to look for in a marketplace
Influencers in the marketplace are vetted. There is great value to experts curating a list of influencers, especially if you can create searches specific to your needs.
Data, data, and more data. There should be a lot of data for the influencers inside the marketplace so the brands can make better decisions based on numbers, not guesses.
Easy ways to connect to influencers. The marketplace makes it easier to start and maintain authentic and long-term relationships with partners.
That first point bears repeating. Good marketplaces do not get between the brand and its prospective partners in any way. Most of all, they do not create a barrier so that brands and partners need them as a mediator. Marketplaces may have great messaging or contracting functions, but they do not obfuscate the process, so the partners are separated and cannot connect themselves.
Great marketplaces also provide the ability to find the perfect influencers out in the wild. Brands can find and connect with influencers who are not part of the marketplace and invite them to join their influencer campaign or program alongside their marketplace-recruited influencers. The marketplace is there to enhance the experience, not limit it.
Making creative content connections that matter
A supportive marketplace will also manage the technical aspects, allowing the partners to build a relationship and get creative without worrying about spreadsheets and manual tracking.
A great marketplace allows partners to:
Create the right relationships through goal setting and contracting
Maintain close, productive, creative relationships through simple communication channels
Reward actions that make the most difference
Track successes as content rolls out
Pay efficiently and easily
Data is good; workflow automation is even better
Tracking and data are crucial to partnership success. Tracking and data allow both partners to assess how the campaign is going and pay for the exact actions that create value. With good data and not, say, tracking with a spreadsheet that a person has to update manually, there is also more time for the partners to work on what matters — creative content that supports followers in what they value. No one who has to track every influencer relationship on a spreadsheet can scale those partnerships or develop them to their full potential.
Influencers know what it’s like to work with brand partners who don’t track the right actions, who don’t communicate clearly or regularly, or who don’t pay on time. When those processes are automated, a platform such as Activate becomes the gateway to a professional and supportive relationship.
For more about working with influencers, check out this ebook.
How to find the right marketplace
Yes, there are better and worse marketplaces for influencers and brands to connect. Here’s what you will find in an top marketplace:
Depth and breadth of coverage — a lot of influencers in a lot of categories
Constantly updated — new influencers flowing into it all the time
Crafted curation — so that you know you’re getting the best offering
Powerful filters and search — to hone and precisely find who you want
Enhanced data on influencer profiles and their audiences — so you can make good decisions
Provides you with all the views you need to get a good idea of the influencer you're looking at — including data, sample posts, etc.
Hand raising — allows brands to find influencers authentically interested in their brands and products.
Activate — the marketplace that is more than a marketplace
The Activate Marketplace is unique: it not only has its marketplace but an entire influencer management solution that gives you flexibility in influencer discovery and lets you manage all your influencer marketing workflows from start to finish.
Brands can connect to influencers inside and outside the marketplace. There is no intermediary where brands can’t just email the influencer and strike up a conversation.
Activate solves more than one problem. With Activate, the workflow across the entire relationship is automated, not just influencer discovery and recruitment. Full-on performance and insights reporting are available. Payment is simplified.
Activate provides solutions and not limitations. There are no hidden fees, limits on connections, or limits on who can be your partner.
Activate supports automatic payment flow. Influencers get paid by brands they love on time and accurately, and brands get to find influencers who will create new customers, building trust and ease for both parties.
Activate provides you with knowledge you need to succeed. Excellent platforms are not just places to track data but are filled with relevant content and learning tools so that influencers and brands can adapt, learn, and grow.
This criteria makes it easier for brands and influencers to find the right partners through the right marketplace. Marketplaces like Activate are the next generation in influencer marketing. Marketplaces enable influencer partnerships where brands and influencers can have direct connections, creating long-term authentic relationships built on trust and more creative content.
Use Activate to boost partner discovery, campaign execution, and your partnerships’ measurable impact. Find out more and schedule a demo.