Influencer Marketing App Development: Businesses are minting money by utilizing influencer power. However, there are times when managing influencers can be a mess. Moreover, with a vast influencer market, it can be difficult for a brand to find apt influencers who can help it gain traction.
On the other end, aspiring influencers looking to collaborate with brands can find it challenging to connect with relevant brands that offer lucrative opportunities without a platform. How about bridging this gap by developing influencer marketing apps?
You can either use your in-house expertise to develop an influencer marketing app or seek influencer marketing app development services.
In this blog, we’ll take you through the ins and the outs of influencer marketing app development. We’ll navigate through the basics and dive into some of the key features and the approximate cost of this venture.
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Before we discuss the various aspects of influencer marketing app development, we need to understand the basics first. To begin with, let’s understand what an influencer marketing platform is.
An influencer marketing platform is a mobile app or software that helps businesses find relevant creators, create targeted campaigns to help them achieve goals, and track their campaign performance, among other things. The brands can browse influencer profiles, analyze their followers, see their exact demographics, check engagement rate, past campaigns, etc.
One key advantage of an influencer marketing platform is that it eliminates manual processes and transactional emails, allowing marketers to focus on nurturing relationships with influencers.
Here are certain things an influencer marketing app can help you achieve –
Influencer marketing app development services don’t just cater to brands’ needs. An influencer marketing app can be as useful for influencers as it is for the brands they are looking to partner with.
The influencer marketing app can help influencers find potential partnerships. Again, just like brands, they can manage their campaigns and track payments (this particular feature can help influencers get their due payments on time).
The platform can also be the place where influencers can demonstrate their portfolio, receive more projects appropriate to their niche, and even set the collaboration terms.
The numbers speak for themselves. To understand the impact of influencer marketing apps, their revenue generation potential and why as a business you should venture into influencer marketing app development, let’s have a look at some statistics.
Features ensure that the final app aligns with your business goals. When approaching an influencer marketing mobile app development company to get your app developed, you should have an idea of the features that you want in the app. This will help the company better align its efforts in the direction you want your app to go.
Let’s look at some essential features that can enhance your app’s success –
The app’s registration process should be simple. Once registered, the user, whether a business brand, influencer, or admin, should be able to log in easily. Furthermore, they should be able to log in using various social media platforms like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Whether you are developing an app for influencers or brands managing influencers, advanced filters are one feature you should expect. In either case, users can narrow their search based on criteria like number of followers, engagement rates, relevant brands/ influencers, demographics, outreach, market campaign history, etc.
When developing an influencer marketing app, tools related to campaign management should be included. Such tools help brands and influencers manage their marketing campaigns. They can even track various performance parameters and gauge whether their campaign is headed in the right direction.
Social media integration can help influencers and brands track their content’s performance across various social media platforms. You can include a functionality where an influencer can simultaneously upload content on different social media platforms. As for brands, they can track influencer engagement across various social media platforms and ascertain ROI effectively.
A secure payment gateway helps process payments and other transactions between brands and influencers. This feature allows for the clear setting of payment terms. For instance, payments can be released as influencers complete different stages of the campaign. Escrow services can be included to hold funds until both parties fulfill commitments.
Lastly, invoices can be generated via this feature in industry-standard formats, making financial tracking and management easier.
Communication between either party—brands or influencers—is crucial for a campaign to perform well. While developing an influencer marketing app, integrating communication tools like in-app messaging and chat can help brands and influencers communicate campaign proceedings such as content approvals, deadlines, performance expectations, payment details, and real-time updates.
The app’s integrated feedback system allows influencers and brands to rate and review each other based on their performance, efforts, and accountability. This way, brands can collaborate with high-performing, reliable influencers, and influencers can collaborate with brands that pay fairly and offer great opportunities.
How about having a feature that lets influencers and brands predict what their efforts would lead to? With predictive analytics, brands or influencers can analyze historical data to anticipate potential reach, engagement, campaign success and anything that can indicate that the campaign is headed rightly.
AI algorithms can be used to match appropriate brands with appropriate influencers and vice versa based on factors such as audience demographics, content style, engagement, history, etc.
The cost of developing an influencer marketing app may vary based on various factors discussed here.
A basic app with core functionalities such as campaign management, influencer search, etc, can cost around $5000 to $10000. An influencer marketing app with advanced features like AI-powered campaign management, a dashboard featuring predictive analytics, etc, can reach up to $50000.
It is important to note that these price ranges may still differ depending on project requirements and any specialized feature that you may add to the app.
Other Factors That May Impact The Cost of Developing an Influencer Marketing App –
Developing influencer marketing apps comes with numerous benefits. Here are some advantages –
As an entrepreneur, you can create a scalable business model by developing influencer marketing apps. Your app can act as a marketplace that connects thousands of brands with influencers. You may be wondering how this platform would reap benefits for you. Let’s quickly touch upon some revenue generation models of an influencer marketing app –
Revenue Generation Models In Influencer Marketing App Development –
With an influencer marketing app, you can perform targeted marketing. As a brand, you can search for influencers by filtering specific demographics and audience niches—this way, you can find relevant consumers who are more likely to engage with your brand.
Influencer marketing app development can accommodate brands of all sizes. This means that even if you are a small brand, you can still connect with influencers and generate a great return on investment.
With influencer marketing app development, you can create a platform that facilitates authentic content creation. This means that via your platform, influencers will be able to create genuine content that resonates with their target audience.
They can promote products and services more organically and reach a wider and more genuine audience base.
By creating an influencer marketing platform, you can help brands spread brand awareness. Brands can collaborate with social media personalities, famous influencers, celebrities, and other influential individuals in their niche. With the right influencers, they can promote their products and services better and attract traffic, engagement, and sales.
By developing your own influencer marketing app, you can customize features and tailor them to your unique business goals and needs. This is indeed a differentiator between already existing influencer marketing apps and on-demand apps.
With the latter, you can have tools and filters based on your needs. You can even control branding with a custom influencer marketing app for your brand.
To bring this vision to life, you must hire mobile app developers who know the influencer marketing landscape like the back of their hand. Unsure about how to employ seasoned mobile developers?
Here is a comprehensive resource that will be of great help.
Developing influencer marketing apps is a great proposition. But, is it without challenges? No! Here are some challenges that you may encounter in your endeavor to make user-friendly, robust, and strategic influencer marketing apps that meet industry standards –
Considering the scope of an influencer marketing app, you may end up creating a cluttered app. Your aim should be to keep the app as simple and easy to navigate as possible.
To do that, you can note all the features that your end users expect and create a proof of concept before developing the app. Once you have a clear idea of everything you wish to include, you can begin the development phase.
Integrating multiple social media platforms in your app can lead to inconsistencies since influencers operate across various platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Each platform has a different API, content format, and data structure. Any change in platform policies or API restrictions can disrupt app functionality. Developers should use flexible API integration frameworks to overcome this challenge and conduct regular API monitoring and updates.
Building intelligent matching algorithms that connect brands with ideal influencers can be challenging since poor matches result in weak campaigns, hampering ROI. Advanced AI and ML algorithms can analyze data points such as engagement rates, audience demographics, campaign history, and content styles.
Facilitating timely and fair payments is important because this builds trust between influencers and brands. The challenge regarding payments in an influencer marketing app comes from handling multiple payments and text regulations, especially if influencers and brands reside in different regions.
A way to tackle this challenge is to integrate automated and secure payment systems that offer additional features, such as escrow services or the handling of multiple payment methods.
Once your app becomes successful and grows a user base, scalability is a challenge you might have to face. This means your app might face lags or crashes in an effort to handle increased data and traffic. To meet this challenge, you can use load-balancing techniques and cloud services. Additionally, you can implement microservices.
Creating a well-defined influencer marketing app requires a strategic approach. Here are the steps involved in developing influencer marketing apps –
To develop an influencer marketing platform, assemble a dedicated social media team consisting of a business analyst, project manager, and software developer. The team will work closely with stakeholders to create a project plan and outline how the development will take place.
Once the project scope is finalized, the next step is to create a minimal viable product (MVP) that will help choose the development methodology and optimize costs. After the MVP is launched, gather feedback, note it, and then start developing a full-fledged app with all the features.
Decide which mobile OS users your app will cater to – do you wish to create an influencer marketing app for individual OS users (Android only or iOS only), or do you wish to develop an influencer marketing app that works on both platforms? It is important to note that cross-platform apps reduce the overall app development costs and are, therefore, advisable.
Choosing the right cloud platform is crucial as it decides how fast the app will run, how safe the app data will be kept, and how well it will handle users in the future. For instance, you can use AWS since it offers MBaaS and PaaS solutions and streamlines the management of your cloud infrastructure, networking, middleware, and security.
An API solution plays a vital role by enabling the app to connect with social media platforms, process payments, track campaign performance, and enhance user experience. Plus, an API also helps pull data from platforms. For example, a third-party API from YouTube, Instagram, etc., allows apps to pull real-time data like post insights, engagement rates, and follower counts.
This is the stage where the company providing influencer marketing app development services focuses on making the app visually appealing and easy to use. The UI/UX design decides if the developers can navigate from one screen to another without any difficulties. In this stage, designers also test if the end users (influencers, brands, and other stakeholders) will stumble upon anything confusing. If so, such confusions and issues are addressed in this stage.
After you have the design of the influencer marketing platform sorted, it’s time to code the backend and front end using a suitable programming language. Let’s look at the probable tech stack used in influencer marketing app development.
Backend Development | Node.js, Django, and PHP |
Cloud Storage | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud |
UI/UX Design | Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch |
Payment Gateway | Stripe, PayPal |
Security | Two-factor and biometric authentication and SSL |
Project Management | Trello, Jira, and Asana |
Before launching your app on the Google Play Store or the App Store, it is important to test it properly. The testing and quality assurance phase helps find and fix problems like bugs, app crashes, and security issues. If these issues are not solved, users may have a bad experience and leave negative reviews.
A well-tested app runs smoothly and is more likely to get good ratings. Testing also ensures that the app follows the strict rules set by platforms like the Google Play Store and the App Store. This increases the chances of approval and ensures a successful launch.
Once you have developed the app or have had an app developed, it is essential to remember that it doesn’t end there. Further updates have to be carried out that ensure that the app stays error and bug-free and that new features are rolled out from time to time.
So, if you have an idea for an influencer marketing app to help connect brands and influencers, this guide can be the perfect starting point. Here, we have explored everything from features, challenges, benefits, costs, and everything that can impact your influencer marketing app development journey.
With the right approach, you can develop an app that can revolutionize the influencer marketing landscape. Do let us know if you found value in the post.
Marketing Head & Engagement Manager