There’s whitespace for influencer marketing platforms. I’ve been in this space for several years and the lack of innovation surprises me.

Sadly, I don’t see much differentiation between influencer reporting software like Julius, CreatorIQ, Mavrck, Tagger, Klear & others. They all identify & manage influencer programs, all of them are “built for scale”, have 1,000s of filters, 3rd party integration, workflow automation, audience analytics & reporting.

Some have better features. Others are easier to use. And a few have better workflows. But it’d be hard to convince me that one platform can find a more influential “beauty influencer” than the other.

Quick example below, and I am certainly not picking on Klear. But, if I didn’t tell you that this was a screenshot from their home page, you probably wouldn’t know which platform it was. And that’s my point. Other than small, nuanced features, they all do just about the same thing.

Sadly, on the B2B side, there’s a complete lack of innovation and this frustrates me, especially since there’s a huge market for the taking. No one is paying attention to this side of the business. Media publications like Adweek and Digiday only write about influencer programs from Nike, Sony, Pepsi and other consumer brands. And, every case study I read involves a celebrity or athlete. Not ideal for B2B.

Only a few platforms are really paying attention and innovating in the B2B space––Traackr, Onalytica & Audiense.

Traackr has been around the longest and I have been a power user for about 5 years. I love their capability of combining bio and content searches. This method allows me to segment groups of influencers based on job title and topic of interest, for example:

• AI Developers talking about machine learning and quantum computing
• Data Scientists talking about regression analysis, IoT and machine learning
• Developers/engineers talking about endpoint security, malware and threat intelligence
• Journalist talking/writing about all of the above

My only real issue is that you can’t use Boolean when building queries.

Onalytica is very similar to Traackr, in that you can also search between bio and content; but Onalytica allows for Boolean when searching bios and content, for example:

• CONTENT: (kubernetes OR hadoop OR python OR devops OR devsecops OR Docker OR virtualization OR containerization OR github OR stackoverflow)
• BIO: (devops OR developer OR software OR engineer OR programmer OR devsecops) AND NOT (editor OR reporter OR journalist OR columnist OR #socialmedia OR “social media” OR analyst OR journalist OR writer OR marketing OR digital OR influencer OR gaming OR gamer OR advocate OR CEO OR founder OR relations)

Both Traackr and Onalytica have excellent reporting capabilities, although I prefer exporting the influencers, uploading them into Crimson Hexagon and completing my analysis there.

Pay attention to Audiense. While they do offer influencer identification functionality, their audience intelligence platform is second to none.

According to several reports, influencer marketing will reach $5B to $10B in 2022 so I am curious when we’ll we see more innovation in this space

There’s a great discussion over on LinkedIn on this topic.