Influsoft, the latest platform designed to make marketers’ lives that much easier suffers from no such impediment. That’s because the product is an offering that comes directly from an influencer marketing agency. But not just any agency. Influsoft was developed by what is arguably one of the top influencer marketing agencies in the world: Viral Nation. Since 2014, Viral Nation has been offering a full suite of digital marketing services. As a talent agency, they represent and place social media’s biggest and best-performing influencers. As a marketing agency, they’ll conceive, execute, and manage campaigns for their clients. As a creative & media agency, they’ve created all kinds of social marketing content. And as all of these things, Viral Nation created in-house software tailored to their very specific needs—a collaboration tool that can manage each discrete segment of a marketing agency or department, individually or all together. Many developers say they’re offering end-to-end software, and they’re not necessarily wrong about that. Influsoft just defines those ends differently. This is a result of ViralNation’s background as an IM agency. More specifically, it’s a result of VN having been an influencer marketing agency since 2014 (aka: the very beginning of influencer marketing). They’ve grown with the industry. They saw the rise of influencer discovery engines, and then the marketplaces, the relationship managers, and the analytics platforms. They were around when people first questioned how much influencers were worth, and when fraud helped propel several personalities’ careers. ViralNation has been an agency through every step forward and every step back the industry has taken, and through that experience have learned to adapt. So InfluSoft isn’t the result of some marketing people deciding one day they could develop and sell a platform. It’s the result of all the pivots and adaptations its creators had to make in order to maintain their success. Today, InfluSoft is its own distinct company. Viral Nation is a customer, of course, but so are other brands and agencies. Activision Blizzard, Tencent Games, Canon, Facebook Oculus and Elite Model World are all happy customers. And for good reason: this is enterprise software at its finest. Read on to The Details, where we’ll cover only a fraction of the details.
Summary:
Pricing
Influsoft pricing is customised based on a variety of factors having to do with a brand’s size and marketing needs. But one thing is consistent across them, and that’s that there are no plans within the budget for small companies. And that’s great: too many platforms try to be all things to all companies, stepping up their features and removing restrictions as the price goes up. While that might broaden the appeal, it will often dilute the overall offering. Influsoft doesn’t suffer from this, as the platform was developed to be an enterprise solution. Prices span from $3k to $10k per month.
The Details
To get an idea of how advanced Influsoft is, it’s best to start by talking about its Discovery module. What’s most notable about it isn’t what it’s capable of—you can search through millions of influencers, refine and filter your searches based on more granular criteria, get a boat-load of data about each person, and then create and organize lists of influencers that you would like to work with. The Discovery’s as good as any other company’s attempt at it, and better than a lot. So, if that’s not the most notable thing about it, what is? It’s that the team at Influsoft isn’t really excited about it, and during a demo I received they likened their module to a convenience feature on a new car. Is it nice to have bluetooth capabilities in your vehicle? Yes. Is that what makes it a good car? No. It’s the same with Discovery. Influsoft works with third party providers to populate their database of influencers, and the number of profiles and all the attendant data comes from their analytics partners. But because it’s third party data, it’s not 100% accurate, just like every other platform that’s built a database of influencers who haven’t opted in to the system. And Influsoft has no problem saying that, because they view the discovery engine as more of means to and end than the end itself.
The other reason they’re good with minimising the importance of this aspect of their software is the first-party data you get when you start working with influencers. When they work with the companies via Influsoft, they’re authorising the software to ingest all the data that each social channel’s API allows. So on YouTube, for example, you’ll get deep insights into how audiences interacted with your video—average watch time, as well as a second-by-second view of where people were dropping off. That same video on Facebook will include data points specific to the platform, like the breakdown of those who watched with the sound on vs. off, and whether the audience was paid or organic. It wouldn’t make interesting reading to go over every data point on every channel that Influsoft gives you; it’s enough to say that the only limitations on what data you’ll get about influencers you’re working with are based on what the social channel itself shares. In any case, the Discovery module is a great way to point you in the right direction of influencers to add to your roster, and you can organize them into as many lists as make sense for your purposes. Lists are how you can make sense of all the creators you’re working with or want to work with. You can categorize them by campaign, by social channel, whether or not they’ve signed onto the platform, etc. And this sets you up nicely to use the meat of the software. Influsoft’s major functions are divided into three categories: Plan, Measure, and Listen.
The Plan module is—you’ve probably guessed—where all the upfront tasks around campaigns are undertaken. It is, essentially, a top-notch Project Management tool. This is where tasks are assigned, budgeting is monitored, deliverables are approved or rejected, and contracts are stored. This is where you begin to understand that you’re dealing with true enterprise software: collaboration and accountability across a single or multiple teams is handled at every level. Agencies can share lists and deliverables with clients for approval and input (or you can share it with just viewing permissions). WIth lists, internal notes can be created for each influencer for all to see. Tasks are assigned and the history is tracked, and calendar entries with alerts are created to remind assignees of their impending deadlines. Influencers submit their deliverables here, and your team can view and discuss them before approval. Communication and collaboration abilities are all over Influsoft.
Once your campaign has been created and content starts going live, the Measure module does exactly what it sounds like it does. A nice touch here is that when you first click into this section of the platform, you’re presented with a little something more than just baseline performance metrics. Sure, you’ll see high level stats like video views, impressions, and engagements, but these will also be shown on a graph comparing performance to the goals you set for the campaign at the beginning. You can then dig in further to each platform, and see how those are performing individually. From there you can go further into each post and see how they performed on an individual basis. This is where you can see those highly specific first-party data points mentioned above. Depending on the channel, this can get very deep. For YouTube videos, for example, you’ll see things like the breakdown of playback devices, or whether people arrived at your video by clicking on a link, just browsing, or a search. If the video was shared, you’ll see what service was used (like Facebook, or Whatsapp, or even a text message. Everything’s presented in an easy to read format, with charts and graphs that don’t just give you numbers, but also show trends. And it’s all presented side-by-side with the actual content—images, videos, stories—that goes with those statistics. Finally, there’s the Listen section. There’s more analysis of your campaign that happens here. Whereas most platforms combine performance metrics and audience analysis all in one place, Influsoft separates them out between the Measure and Plan sections. This makes a lot of sense from a workflow perspective. Performance data is all about looking at the past to see how the campaign did. Did we get what we paid for? Audience analysis is really about the future. You want to understand who engaged with your content so you know who to target in the future (especially if you wanted to repurpose content for a paid campaign). You’ll also get sentiment analysis that goes deeper than most. You’ll see the standard Positive/Neutral/Negative breakdown of sentiments, but then you’ll also see the range of specific emotions expressed through engagements.
This seems to be Influsoft’s thing: taking features that you’ve seen elsewhere and taking them further. They do this, too, with word clouds. You’ve probably seen them, a visual representation of the most used words by the audience, with the size of each word showing its relative frequency. So, Influsoft gives you a word cloud, but then its AI also analyzes these words to understand common themes.
These same analytics can be applied to your brand as a whole: it’s an excellent way to understand the landscape and impact of your social media presence. It’s worth noting that this section is not called “Your Brand Analysis.” It’s just called “Brand Analysis”—you can learn as much about competitors as you can about your own company.
Conclusion
Influsoft is designed and made for the enterprise, which traditionally means a large organisation. But the phrase “enterprise software” also carries some connotations as to what users can expect from an application. First and foremost, it needs to solve a problem that the enterprise is having. It needs to be easily collaborative, with attention to the kinds of details that can easily get lost in lesser attempts. The features ought to be robust, not only solving the core problem at hand, but introducing new functions that users never knew they needed. Influsoft satisfies these criteria on all levels. And of course it does: it was created by a company trying to solve its own problems. And as they grew they learned more and more of these little details that they wanted to be handled by software. Influsoft’s creators, Viral Nation, are recognised as one of the leading influencer marketing agencies in North America. The software they developed isn’t the reason they’re good at what they do. But it does help them do it better. And now they can help your organisation do the same.
