Influencer outreach tools are like dinner utensils. You can eat your mashed potatoes with a spoon, but can you eat soup with a fork?
The moral is an outreach software can make or break your entire campaign.
So when you choose outreach tools, analyze them through the lens of your needs.
That’s what this guide is here for.
We’re not just blindingly reviewing the top influencer tools in 2024. We’re discussing all their features and capabilities from a practical standpoint: your marketing goals.
Let’s begin:
TL;DR - Top Influencer Outreach Tools
inBeat: Offers a massive influencer database, high-quality profiles, effective filters, and various free and paid tools.
Showcase: Ideal for direct UGC creator outreach and collaboration.
BuzzStream: Ideal for outreach CRM, email management, and contact qualification.
Hunter.io: A professional email finder with an intuitive interface and 25 free searches per month.
Affable: An AI-powered platform with a vast influencer database, intuitive sourcing, campaign management, and analytics.
Pitchbox: An outreach and prospecting tool with personalized email creation and task management.
Keyhole: Best for social media analytics, insights, and tracking, but not for building entire campaigns.
Clearout: An email finder and verifier with accuracy prediction and search filters.
HubSpot: A perfect email outreach tool for quick and easy personalized campaigns
Consider your specific goals and budget when choosing the right tool for your influencer marketing needs.
What Are Influencer Outreach Tools?
Influencer outreach tools are platforms that help you connect with social media influencers. This type of software saves you hours of work in influencer marketing campaigns because:
You can find relevant influencers for your brand gauging their engagement rates on social platforms and checking their fake followers.
You can connect with your target audience – aka content creators – seamlessly.
Some outreach platforms include tools to grow your relationships with influencers.
But not all such tools are created equal. We'll compare some of the best influencer search platforms that help your outreach efforts below:
inBeat is one of the best influencer marketing platforms – and not just because it's ours. Advantages include:
inBeat has a massive database of social influencers: You can access hundreds of influencers' social media profiles in different parts of the globe. Local influencer outreach services help you get onto local markets more effectively and affordably than traditional media.
You retrieve the best influencer profiles since inBeat partners with the top 2% of creators: That means high-quality potential partners for content creation.
inBeat's influencers have high engagement rates: These creators are likelier to interact with and persuade your target audience. Here’s one example:
The array of filters and keywords is impressive: And not just impressive – it's effective in narrowing down a list of highly engaged potential influencers that fit your brand/campaign. That's not just a massive advantage for busy people; it saves hours of work you can otherwise invest in improving your marketing efforts.
inBeat integrates with your VOIP and CRM software: After getting your influencers' email addresses, you can easily retrieve these as a CSV file and upload them into your CRM to streamline your outreach process.
inBeat offers multiple free and paid tools: Use tools like the engagement rate calculator, fake follower checker, and mockup ad generators to aid your influencer marketing efforts.
@angwitacho has high engagement levels, but let’s see how this profile stacks up against our fake follower checker:
inBeat has a massive library of resources and articles: From influencer outreach templates to in-depth how-to guides, you can start setting up your influencer campaign today. Alternatively, you can contact the inBeat agency to create your influencer outreach strategy and assist your campaign.
PROS:
Free version
Affordable price plans
Intuitive
A large array of filters and keywords
CRM integrations available
Massive influencer database with top creators across the world
Multiple other tools for influencer outreach and entire campaigns
Easy scale-up by contacting the inBeat agency
CONS:
It’s best for campaigns with nano and micro - influencers
Price plans:
Growth (best for small campaigns): $35/month
Brand (best for larger campaigns): $80/month
Agency (best for agencies): $200/month
Business (best for ambassador programs): $400/month
Showcase is a UGC marketplace that serves as an innovative outreach tool for brands focusing on user-generated content campaigns.
This marketplace specifically targets niche UGC creators that work with different social media platforms.
It allows direct access to a network of vetted content creators, making it easy to find and collaborate with influencers and UGC specialists.
The platform provides transparent pricing and direct communication channels, ensuring efficient and effective collaboration for social campaigns.
However, it's important to note that Showcase is specialized in UGC and might not cover broader digital outreach needs outside of social media content creation.
PROS:
Direct access to vetted UGC creators
Efficient collaboration and communication tools
Transparent pricing structure highlighted by each content creator individually
Specialized in social media content creation
CONS:
Limited to UGC creators; not a general professional contact finder
May not cover all aspects of digital outreach beyond UGC content creation
Pricing plans: Customized based on creator requirements, client needs and campaign scope.
BuzzStream is an awesome outreach platform that works fast and promises to increase your links & coverage.
BuzzStream has a broader scope than influencer outreach: This software helps you discover contact information & social media profiles for influencers as well as link-building partners to build up your digital PR.
BuzzStream streamlines your inbox: Contact influencers & other prospects from the platform and keep track of your emails.
BuzzStream helps you qualify outreach prospects: This platform has nice filters and metrics to build qualified lists of influencers or link-building partners.
You can communicate better with your team: BuzzStream is one of those influencer outreach tools that double as communication software. Basically, the platform allows you to leave notes to other team members, upload outreach email templates, or set reminders.
The tool gets you good reports: You can follow a slew of metrics to optimize your outreach efforts and, as a result, your entire campaign.
On the other hand, BuzzStream doesn’t have the slew of tools that inBeat sports for influencer campaign management and vetting creators.
PROS:
Intuitive tool for prospecting and finding contacts
Good team management features
Streamlines the outreach process to get more blog post opportunities
Good metrics and reports
CONS:
No free version
Better for influencer outreach rather than vetting
Hunter is another great outreach tool for busy marketers who want to get in touch with influencers or other potential business partners.
Hunter.io is intuitive: All you have to do is paste a website in the search box, and their domain search will retrieve a list of employees working in that company. You’ll get names and email addresses from the web in just a few minutes.
You get access to a comprehensive database of contacts: Hunter indexes over 100 million email addresses. Besides, the platform has on-point search filters and works fast.
You get 25 free searches per month: If you have a small campaign, that number can be enough for your outreach process. But if you’re developing a broader outreach campaign, you’ll need at least 100 searches per day.
Let’s say you want to contact someone working at Amazon. Simply type amazon.com in Hunter’s search bar, and you’ll get these results:
As you can see, Hunter asks you to create an account to actually uncover those addresses and start your outreach process.
The downside is that you can’t get ahold of influencers by using their social media profile links. You can only find content creators who have websites. And even so, you can’t vet their engagement rates or check their profile score like you can with inBeat.
PROS:
Intuitive
Retrieves the desired email addresses fast
Immense database of contacts
25 free searches per month
CONS:
You cannot find social media influencers unless they have websites
If you’re a DIY marketer, Affable is an AI-powered platform that helps you create and manage your entire influencer campaign.
The platform includes influencer outreach tools but isn’t limited to that. Here’s why we say it’s best for product seeding:
Access to a wide database of influencers: Affable features 6 million influencers worldwide. These creators work with five social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
Intuitive influencer sourcing: You can find relevant creators to power up your influencer strategy because Affable has 20+ filters, including brand affinity, audience analytics, and competitor-based creators.
You can manage your entire campaign from one place: Affable allows you to distribute links and codes for influencer affiliate marketing, keeping track of all that from one database. Besides, Affable has an in-built CRM system for intuitive influencer relationship management. And it integrates with Shopify.
Good metrics: You can keep track of your influencers’ results thanks to in-depth analytics, such as website visits, sales, and more.
Analysis tools: Affable offers market, competitor, and audience analysis tools to discover the right insights that direct your entire campaign.
On the other hand, Affable’s influencer-finding capabilities are limited to five platforms. If you need Twitch influencers for mobile gaming advertising, inBeat is a safer bet.
Besides, Affable has fewer tools for your influencer campaign. inBeat's toolkit boasts numerous ad mockup generators, budget and ROAS calculators, and more.
And inBeat is free, whereas Affable only has a free trial.
PROS:
Immense database of influencers
Great filters
Good campaign management features
Shopify integration
Affiliate links assigning & monitoring
Solid analysis and measurement tools
CONS:
Limited influencer platforms
Limited toolkit
No free version
Price plans: All three plans (SME, Pro, and Enterprise) feature custom prices after contacting the company.
Pitchbox is a good influencer outreach tool: Use it to find influencers and bloggers and pitch your prospects with personalized emails that increase response rates. You can also build follow-up emails from the platform.
Prospecting with Pitchbox is intuitive: You have several categories of prospects to choose from according to your goals. Use filters and keywords to find the most relevant ones for your marketing goals (e.g., guest blogging for an exposure campaign).
You can create templates: Use these email templates to streamline your outreach efforts.
Pitchbox helps you manage your influencer outreach: You can easily see your tasks, project overview, and unmatched emails from one place. Having this bird’s eye view of your campaign means you can work faster and more efficiently.
You have multiple SEO metrics: Pitchbox integrates with numerous SEO metrics providers to pick the best link-building opportunities for your campaign.
On the other hand, Pitchbox doesn’t help you create the entire influencer marketing campaign like other influencer outreach tools in this review.
And it’s also more expensive than other outreach software in this review – probably because you can also use it for SEO.
To make your outreach process more effective, you have to contact the right prospects. And that means having the best insights into your market, competitors, and potential customers.
Keyhole helps you get those insights because it’s a top-performing social media analytics tool:
Keyhole enables you to analyze trends and popular topics: All you need to do is insert that topic or hashtag into their fast search engine to get started. Here’s what that looks like for the #PhotoOfTheDay:
Use Keyhole for social listening: You have to sign in for a free trial, but after that, you can see your brand mentions, industry topics, and hashtag campaigns. You can also analyze your competitors for more insights from their influencer marketing approaches.
Find the right influencers: After you have built a strategy based on the insights above, you can identify the best influencers for your campaign. Keyhole helps you do that. Select the right keywords according to your campaign goals and compare influencers’ profiles to shortlist your potential creators.
Track your campaign in real-time: Keyhole measures your social media campaigns, following a slew of metrics such as influencer engagement level, total reach, and ROI. Keyhole also offers personalized optimization based on these results.
On the other hand, Keyhole is not best for building your entire influencer marketing campaign. For example, you can’t use this platform to create or split-test ads with influencer-generated content.
And Keyhole is not that affordable if you compare it with some influencer outreach tools above – like inBeat.
PROS:
Good social listening tools
Free trial
Solid influencer outreach and tracking
Campaign optimization features
CONS:
No free version
Not best for building your influencer marketing campaign from A to Z
Clearout is an email finder tool that helps businesses generate B2B leads quickly and accurately.
Clearout is a must-have tool for any marketer or entrepreneur looking to simplify their lead generation process because:
It can provide highly precise results, even with low-quality data.It offers fast, bulk email extraction and API integration with minimal information, such as a person's name and company/domain name.
Clearout also functions as an email address verifier, ensuring that your contact list is free of invalid email addresses.
Use the various search filters to locate ideal prospects quickly.
And here is what that looks like:
Insider tip: One of the key features of Clearout is its confidence score, which provides an accuracy prediction for the email addresses it finds.
PROS:
Accurate email addresses, even with low-quality data
Bulk email extraction
API integration
Email address verifier to prevent bounces
Confidence score to predict the accuracy of email addresses
Multiple search filters to quickly locate ideal prospects
100 free credits on initial sign-up
CONS:
Limited features compared to other influencer outreach tools
Lack of additional tools for influencer campaign management or vetting creators
Price plans: ay-as-you-go option
Monthly or yearly subscriptions start at $21 for 3,000 credits
For higher volume needs, paid plans range up to $5500 for 50,000,000 search credits.
9. Snov.io: Best all-in-one platform for cold outreach
Snov.io is a multifunctional platform for cold outreach which helps B2B businesses to generate email leads, reach out to them with automated email campaigns powered with AI, prepare email accounts for bulk outreach through the warm-up, and manage deals in a pipeline view under the roof of a CRM.
Snov.io is one of the best services for finding and reaching out to influencers since:
It helps to find influencers all over the web, including a giant professional network LinkedIn;
It personalizes your email outreach and provides AI functionality to help you build emails on autopilot;
It keeps all your prospect information and communication in one place;
It makes your cold outreach transparent to your team.
The best thing about Snov.io is that all its features are included into a set, so while paying for one tool you get it all, which keeps you from jumping from tool to tool, from tab to tab.
PROS:
Helps you build entire influencer campaigns
Provides a forever free Trial plan
Has a big database of influencers
Integrates with 5.000 platforms and tools
Finds influencers from LinkedIn in minutes
Contains an AI email assistant for streamlining your email outreach
Offers a free CRM
CONS:
The tool focuses only on email outreach so far Price plans: Snov.io offers a forever free plan. Paid plans start at $39/month.
10. Hubspot: Best for Personalized Email Campaigns
HubSpot offers a broad set of email marketing tools perfect for deploying personalized email campaigns at scale. You can use HubSpot’s email tools for free or get access to more advanced features in the platform’s Marketing Hub.
HubSpot makes personalization easy: You can connect the platform’s email tools with HubSpot’s and Salesforce’s CRM solutions. This allows you to personalize emails directly from your CRM database.
Smart rules: Take personalization up a notch with smart rules to send out different emails based on your contact’s lifecycle stage.
Drag-and-drop email builder: Build email templates with CTA buttons, images, videos, and social links through a straightforward drag-and-drop interface.
HubSpot saves you time: You can use the platform’s email templates and AI writing assistant to spare yourself from the gruntwork of writing email copy and jump straight into the polishing process.
Solid A/B tests and analytics: Hubspot lets you A/B test multiple email variations to spot which subject lines and body copy bring in better open rates and engagement. See exactly what percentage of your emails were read-through, skimmed, or just glanced over.
PROS:
Access to extra features through HubSpot’s Marketing Hub
Great A/B testing and analytics capabilities
Free version available
Easy to use
CONS:
Steep pricing differences between paid packages make the platform tricky to scale
Price plans:
Free email tools are available
Marketing Hub Starter: $15/month/seat
Marketing Hub Professional: $800/month
Marketing Hub Enterprise: $3,600/month
Which Influencer Outreach Tool Will You Choose?
As you can see, there’s no scarcity of influencer outreach tools. To choose the right one, consider your goals, preferred approach, and marketing budget.
For example, inBeat is an excellent all-around option whether you like to be hands-on or prefer more guidance.
This platform helps you build an entire influencer advertising campaign or just find some creators’ emails – it’s up to you how much you use it.
Other tools like BuzzStream and Pitchbox are best if you want to partner with influencers & authoritative websites for link-building campaigns.
However, these websites lack inBeat’s generous toolkit that helps you build and optimize your campaign.
So remember: consider your goals before making a choice. And take our free platform for a spin now to see how it can work for you.
