Creating an Influencer Marketing Platform: Steps, Features, and Costs Involved

Influencer marketing platforms aka influencer marketing marketplace are the nerve centre for brands. This platform helps brands, explore influencers worldwide by collaborating, hiring, and paying them and enables influencers to seek brand collaboration.

These platforms are the greatest asset for brands looking to govern numerous influencers working on a single project. It automates the process of managing influencers from measuring results to monitoring campaign performance.

Overall, an influencer marketing platform saves the brand’s time and effort. There are hundreds of influencer marketing platforms available in the market, fused with distinctive features to engage. However, no influencer marketing platform is flawless, there is still space for growth and a need for improvement.

In this blog, we’ll explore the most demanding features to cater to current consumers’ sentiments. Eventually, we’ll help you create a powerful influencer marketing platform that covers the pressing needs of the marketplace.

Market Statistics of Influencer Marketing Platform

Recently, a report published by Market Research, titled “Influencer Marketing Platform Market” gives an in-depth analysis of market research.

The global market of influencer marketing platforms witnessed a CAGR of 34% from 2022-2030. This is estimated from $10 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $143 billion by 2030.

These numbers demonstrate the ongoing shift of the market towards influencer marketing. It is the right time to be a part of this evolving market and leverage the market profit.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Simply, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing. Here brands & businesses collaborate with influencers who have a rich following on social media for increased brand exposure. Brands seek influencers with huge target audience followings to post their content that promotes the brand’s products or services.

Influencer marketing is an end-to-end solution that is framed to help in brand popularity. Therefore, brands go for influencer marketing as it works for them and can boost their brand’s churn rate.

Step-By-Step Guide to Developing an Influencer Marketing Platform

Here are 10 essential steps to help you create a successful influencer marketing platform.

1. Understand your project scope

The foremost step before beginning to develop an influencer marketing platform is gathering a focused social media app development team. This team should include a project manager, a developer, and a couple of business analysts. Together, they’ll collaborate closely with your business stakeholders to outline a clear project scope.

2. Selecting the precise development methodology

Once the project scope is finalized, analyze the appropriate market and select the right development methodology. You can begin with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development for your project to cut down the cost of development.

You can launch the MVP in the market and generate customer feedback. After this, turn to a full-grown mobile app with more in-built features.

Overall, this step helps in analyzing the imperfection in the influencer marketing platform. It also analyses the related risks, refines your platform, and completely finalizes the project plan making it more user-friendly.

3. Establish a development approach

If you want to build an influencer marketing platform for a web app, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform is a good option. Whereas for a mobile device, Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) is recommended.

Now that your development approach is finalized, decide between the iOS or Android platform for the app launch. To reduce the overall cost of influencer marketing platform development, instead of choosing native apps choose cross-platform mobile development.

4. Choose an apt cloud service platform

Now that you’re done with the aforementioned steps, shift to the next, choose a cloud service platform for your project. Use AWS, as it offers PaaS and MBaaS platforms while efficiently managing your cloud infrastructure, middleware, networking, and security.

5. Sign up for an influencer marketing API solution

You can use a prime 3^rd party API solution to incorporate the influencer marketing features. Upfluence API is a good option as it enables you to access customer demographics in its database.

6. Use a UI/UX design procedure

In this step, a thorough business analysis, understanding of industry trends & learning to build an intuitive UX design occurs. To ensure a user-centric approach, writing full specifications for the project prototype, and developing good UI/UX concepts are important.

This step will draw closer to prototype approval with all the needs and requirements satisfied and a great UX design.

7. Finish the coding process

When the design prototype is finalized with all testing, begin with writing the code to create an influencer marketing platform. This involves app development (front-end, back-end) using various programming languages and technologies.

8. Test to ensure quality

Before the launch of the app on the Play Store or App Store, it’s vital to test the quality. A thorough quality assurance process ensures the smooth functioning of the platform without any bugs.

9. Launch & Market

Once you are done with quality and bug testing, launch the app on the required platforms. This stable version of your platform is now ready to skyrocket in the market. You can use various methods to promote and market your platform to potential users through content marketing and social media.

10. Support & maintenance

After the app’s availability in the market among users, make sure to conduct proper maintenance. This will ensure the smooth functioning on all platforms. Updates should be done to maintain the latest trends in the market to ensure success in the competitive world.

Some Must-Have Features

Features are the most important part designed to serve specific motives for customers. They are custom-made to fulfil the needs and requirements of customers. Have a look at these core features of an influencer marketing platform development:

• Instant Login

Users should be able to easily register themselves to create an account or log in through social media accounts. The registration procedure must be quick and effortless.

• Profile Creation

The influencers can highlight their capabilities, potential, and strength while creating a profile. This feature simplifies the task of marketers to find the influencer who is the right fit for their campaign.

• Discover Influencers

An important feature to include while developing an influencer marketing platform is a discover or search box. Users can search and contact influencers as per their specifications like location, affordability, and expertise.

• Collaboration Management

A good influencer marketing platform should be able to perform various tasks like messaging, payment, contract signing, negotiations, etc. It should also enable marketers to monitor and manage the collaboration process accordingly.

• Audience demographic

This feature provides access to audience data, just to ensure that the campaign is reaching to target audience. Therefore, choose the right influencer whose followers match your target audience.

• Advanced Filters

A key feature that increases the chances of success in less time, by locating the most appropriate influencers for the campaign. Users with this advanced filter can narrow down their search for influencers.

• Campaign Management

By enabling you to manage multiple ad campaigns, the influencer marketing platform acts as a powerful campaign management tool. You should be able to view all their campaigns, sort them in groups, and filter them by region, activity, or country. You can store and organize your past and current projects seamlessly.

• AI Chatbot

To enhance user experience, an Artificial Intelligence chatbot is a great tool. These are automated tools to help communicate with users by responding to their queries correctly with proper solutions.

• Reporting & Analytics

The analytical tool allows brands to monitor the success of their influencer marketing software. This tool helps to know how influencer marketing is performed such as engagement rate, conversion, and audience reach. Brands can calculate the effectiveness of their efforts and suggest plans to get improved results through this tool.

Building Cost of Influencer Marketing Platform

Well, the development cost of an influencer marketing platform may vary depending on numerous factors that are mentioned below:

• Complexity of Design

A well-defined UI/UX strategy is very important for the success of your influencer marketing platform. An intuitive software design enhances user engagement and retention. This process requires various testing to fulfil clients’ demands, and the cost of development is affected.

• Chosen Platform

Depending on the platform you choose to develop influencer marketing software, your cost might vary. For iOS, Android, cross-platform, and native apps your cost may change. To manage your budget, beginning with a single platform and then switching to a cross-platform app is advisable.

• Technology Stack Used

To achieve success in the market, you should fuse a robust tech stack into your influencer marketing platform. Integrating smart and latest technologies in the app is vital to stand out in the competition. Your development cost may vary based on the technology used.

• Size of the development team

The size of the development team affects the budget of influencer marketing platform development. Therefore, it’s pivotal to select the right team size for your project development and confront the deal between cost & quality.

• Developers Location

The location of the company or agency that you hired to develop your influencer marketing software impacts your budget extensively. The development cost on an hourly basis is less in Asia than in the USA & UK.

• Maintenance

To ensure the proper working and performance of your project on all main platforms, actions must be taken for maintenance. The cost of maintenance includes charges for bug-free systems, software upgrade charges, or charges for implementing new technology.

Few models to help you stream constant revenue for your influencer marketing platform

1. Advertisement Model

Advertisements are the most popular and common method of funding influencer marketing apps. In this model, brands make money by running advertisements on the app through sponsored posts, banner ads, video advertising, etc.

The number of views and clicks received determines the profit made by the app. This model is easy to set up and needs less attention over time.

2. VIP Subscription Model

Another profit-making strategy from influencer marketing apps is the prime membership subscription model. In this model, companies to their users provide extra services such as ad-free browsing, premium assistance, or exclusive content. Users can cancel their monthly or annual basis subscription plan anytime.

Brands and businesses show interest in this model as it generates consistent revenue. Consumers are more willing to pay for the premium plan as they like to enjoy extra services.

3. In-App Purchase Model

This is another monetizing model, companies through this model provide customers an option to purchase extra and advanced features such as virtual items, premium content, etc. The in-app purchase pricing may vary on the services offered.

Rounding Up!

Remark that the market for influencer marketing platforms is highly competitive thereby, your project should dazzle out from the crowd. Influencer marketing is an interesting and evolving form of marketing tool for brands to promote their product using influencers.

Many brands and companies regardless of their size are implementing influencer marketing strategies to gain popularity and attract customers. However, influencer marketing software development is very complex, but we’ve tried to provide everything in this guide to help you.

How Can Codiant Help You Attain Success in Influencer Marketing?

Codiant is a committed app development company that has more than a decade of experience and expertise in app development. We’ve got a team of excellent developers for creating the best possible influencer marketing software solutions for our clients.

Our apps are incorporated with advanced and pioneering technologies to cater to all the app stakeholders’ needs. Get in touch with our team of experts and consult your business needs.