With 93% of marketers using influencer marketing at some point in their work, and influencers that in 2022 count between 3M and 38M across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, it’s impossible to launch an influencer campaign without a solid influencer marketing platform.
While, as you know, Upfluence is a reliable influencer marketing platform, due to the rise of influencers, many similar alternatives were developed in the past few years.
Some offer a similar feature set at a more affordable price, and some went further into improving only a few features. Luckily, marketers now have an extensive pool of Upfluence alternatives to choose from for their upcoming influencer campaigns.
To help you narrow down your options and make the best choice for your business strategy, we’ve listed 5 tried and tested alternatives to Upfluence.
Upfluence vs. Alternatives
3 Upfluence downsides
1. Long contract
The minimum contract duration for all Upfluence plans is 12 months. This is a too long of a commitment for businesses, especially because Upfluence doesn’t offer a free trial and you can’t have a clear image of whether this platform can meet your expectations or not.
2. High price
The exact price of their plans is not available publicly because all of their plans are customizable. Still, according to the reviews of its users, Upfluence is known to be 24% more expensive than other influencer marketing platforms.
So, if you’re looking for a more cost-efficient solution – Upfluence might not be your first choice.
3. Limited discovery
Upfluence has a database of 4M influencers. Compared to other influencer marketing alternatives, their database is significantly smaller. That’s because Upfluence relies on influencers to apply to be part of their database.
Searching influencers from a database with only 4M can be a real challenge because when you narrow down the list with specific requirements, you can end up with a really small choice.
The 2 Most Crucial Features a Good Upfluence Alternative Should Have
1. Multiple social media platform capabilities
Each platform has a different audience. So, launching campaigns on more than one social media channel means exposing your business to a wider audience. But not all influencer marketing platforms have data on users from all social media platforms.
So, you need to find what social media channel your target audience uses. Next, find which of the influencer platforms has features to help you discover influencers on those channels.
2. Influencer Outreach
The biggest challenge in influencer marketing is not influencer discovery, but influencer outreach. You can have the most targeted list of influencers that are a great fit for your brand, and yet if you don’t know how to set an influencer outreach strategy, you won’t be able to get influencers to agree to work with you.
Many influencer marketing platforms have built-in tools to directly connect with influencers. But it seems like cold outreach is the only option left to reach influencers, and those who tried sending cold emails to influencers know that is not a piece of cake.
Fortunately, there are companies that offer creator outreach as a service, which is a huge advantage for businesses setting up influencer marketing campaigns besides giving you a list of influencers.
5 Upfluence Alternatives to consider for Your Influencer Campaigns
1. Influencers Club
Best for: Influencer outreach services & getting data at scale.
Used by: Creator Economy Companies, Marketing Agencies, B2B, eCommerce businesses.
Price: From 0.15€ to 0.25€ per email
Knowing what the biggest challenges are, we at Influencers Club offer both influencer data at scale and outreach services.
Influencer data at scale
- Our database has more than 70M creators, plus we can deliver data per request, from every niche from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms.
- We filter our data with 30+ unique different data points, which enables us to meet our clients’ requirements with 98% accuracy (including demographics, follower counts, data rates, and much more).
- With our pricing model, you only pay for the data you need. Unlike Upfluence, we don’t have a subscription plan or monthly fee, but we charge only per email. This way you can get more data for less money.
Creator outreach service
People in the creator economy lately reveal that the biggest challenge they face is not influencer discovery, but influencer outreach. With so many influencer marketing platforms, you can now easily find influencers that will match your criteria. But, that means nothing if you can’t get them to answer your emails and partner with your brand.
As a solution, we offer a partnership outreach service that includes:
- A dedicated Ops and CS account manager will take care of your influencer outreach strategy.
- Outreach to 1000+ creators per month.
- One-on-one meetings every week for custom reporting and analytics.
- Two influencer outreach options: ABM approach and Outreach at scale.
ABM approach – This approach is best for businesses that want to target bigger creators. We have a creator sales team of 30 people that are responsible for personalizing, sending, and replying to emails. According to Snowflake’s stats, using this approach you can increase the number of people that would normally click on an email by 5 times.
Outreach at scale – We can use our data to send semi-personalized emails. Using this approach, for some clients, we sent up to 3M emails with a 60% open rate and 20% reply rate.
You can learn more here.
2. Aspire
Best for: SMEs, Agencies, and Enterprises
Price: On request
Aspire is an influencer marketing platform that allows brands to search and connect with influencers, industry experts, brand fans, etc. This Upfluence alternative also offers campaign management, product seeding, and affiliate program tools.
To discover influencers brands can use their influencer search engine to look for the world’s top influencers and creators that match their criteria. Moreover, Aspire can be used for influencer discovery across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Youtube, and Facebook.
The platform offers multiple approaches for discovering influencers, together with image recognition AI. One of the things Aspire users complain about is their influencer algorithm that is often recommending unrelated and erratically selected influencers.
3. #paid
Best for: B2C companies, Marketing Agencies
Price: Starting at $499 per month
#paid is a creator marketing platform that is also one of the best Upfluence alternatives nowadays. The one thing they are most proud of is Whitelist Ads, which is a feature that enables brands to reach their target audience more authentically, by whitelisting influencers and content they want to use for paid Facebook and Instagram ads.
On this influencer marketing platform, influencers who are interested to collaborate with your brand have an option to “raise” their hands. This way you can easily spot influencers who believe they are a good fit for your brand.
#paid has a team who looks at each submission for background, audience, past content, and so on, before it ever reaches you. In other words, handpicked influencers just for your brand. But it comes with some limitations, mainly that you’ll be missing out on a huge database of untapped talent.
However, if you need a wider choice of influencers, this might not be the best platform for you since it has a database of around 20k influencers. Also, even though it’s more affordable than Upfluence and it doesn’t tie you up to use them for at least 12 months, compared to other Upfluence alternatives it’s still coming at a higher price.
4. influence.co
Best for: Small and Medium Brands
Price: Free basic plan, and Pro plan for $600 per month
Influence.co is an influencer marketplace that helps brands and influencers to connect and collaborate. One of the biggest advantages it offers is the social component of the platform that gives brands a more personalized insight into influencers.
The whole platform is community-focused and it drives and supports authenticity. When searching for influencers, brands can easily narrow down the criteria and find the people that fit perfectly.
Unfortunately, if one of your requirements for an influencer marketing platform is good campaign reporting features, this is probably not the best choice you can make because many users complained that their reporting features are extremely basic.
Also, unlike some influencer marketing platforms that rely on verified data, on this influencer marketplace, influencers author their own profiles.
5. Game influencer
Best for: Gaming publishers. One of the top Twitch influencer marketing platforms.
Price: On request
This influencer marketing platform has the goal to connect game publishers and brands with relevant influencers. Focused on the gaming industry, Game influencer is a full-service agency that has a personalized approach for every client, instead of having a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy.
They can find influencers based on the social media platform, language, influencer type (gaming, fashion, lifestyle, tech, cooking, etc.), and gaming platform. Using this platform it’s easy to track and measure campaign results, and brands can launch campaigns in multiple languages.
They have more than 3.1M influencers in their database, which is not a small number if you consider the fact that in their database influencers are narrowed down to only those who are suitable for the gaming industry. Lastly, just like Upfluence, Game influencer has a hybrid agency/platform model.
Key takeaways
Currently, there are tons of opportunities, tools, and platforms that help businesses to set up influencer marketing campaigns. Every Upfluence alternative is putting so much effort into developing the best solution that will simplify the process of launching influencer campaigns.
However, not every platform is suitable for each business model. So, before you commit to one of the platforms above, analyze what your business needs, and whether the platform can help you with those specific aspects or not.
