11 Ultimate Instagram Influencer Tools for Marketers
By David Morneau 16 min READ | Jan 17 2024
Let's face it: we're living in a creator economy.
You can’t set up a results-driven, effective influencer marketing campaign on Instagram without reliable software.
This guide will help you sift through the best Instagram influencer tools to pick the right one for your needs. You’ll read about:
11 ultimate influencer tools for Instagram, focusing on your marketing goals
Their pros, cons, and updated pricing plans
How to use them
Keep scrolling down:
1. inBeat: Best for DIY Instagram Micro - Influencer Marketing
inBeat is an excellent software if you want to take the reins of your Instagram micro-influencer marketing campaign.
PROS:
Easy to use
Massive influencer database featuring millions of social profiles
Accurate influencer discovery
Wide range of calculators and mockup generators
UGC Creator features the top 1% of handpicked influencers
You can set up your entire influencer marketing program by contacting inBeat Agency
CONS:
Not best for mega-influencers
Limited searches in the free version
Pricing plans: Free version available (no credit card required); paid basic plans start at $35/month
1.1. The Influencer Search Tool
You can easily find relevant influencers across niches and audience sizes using the free influencer discovery platform. But you can always upgrade to a paid version to access more search results.
And after you create a list of influencers, you can export your CSV file with all their email addresses and other info. Integrate with your CRM software of choice to contact influencers.
1.2. The Influencer Discovery Lists
inBeat.co has a specific Instagram influencer discovery tool to help you find quality influencers. Scroll down to the bottom to filter results by country and region.
1.3. Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator
This influencer analysis tool helps you evaluate the social media profiles you’ve short-listed and see if they have an engaged audience.
Simply add the influencer handle in the search bar, and you’ll get the most useful stats:
Overall engagement rate
Average likes
Average comments
Follower count
Number of posts
Likes and comments per post
Engagement and impressions for the last few posts
1.4. Premium Engagement Rate Calculator
inBeat constantly releases new tools that streamline your influencer marketing strategy, whether you’re running an Instagram campaign or on another social media platform.
This tool allows you to compare multiple profiles simultaneously and organize them according to key metrics in your Profile Auditor. On the downside, this tool has a limited search option.
1.5. Instagram Fake Follower Checker
You’ll need this fake follower checker when putting together your Instagram influencer list. This influencer analysis tool helps you identify fake influencers with suspect followers to ensure a successful influencer campaign.
1.6. Instagram Money Calculator
This free money calculator for Instagram helps you gauge potential fees for different influencer collaborations. The software pulls data from your Instagram creators’ profile performance analytics, showing you the related costs.
Pro tip: Play with the type of deliverables (e.g., Posts, Instagram Stories) to optimize your marketing budget and reach your goals seamlessly.
1.7. Other Free and Paid Influencer Marketing Tools
We could write a 50,000-word dissertation paper on inBeat, but your time is probably limited.
So, let’s acknowledge that inBeat has a wide range of other free and paid tools that will help you work with hundreds of influencers.
UGC Studio: The inBeat Creator Platform is best for scaling visual content creation with the top 1% of handpicked, genuine influencers. This will help you get creator content that resonates with your audience with unlimited usage rights.
Instagram ad mockup generator: Create genuine influencer-powered Instagram ads and test them with this mockup generator to choose the top-performing ones for your target audience.
Paid marketing calculators: inBeat has a slew of marketing calculators that will help you assess your CPAs, CPMs, CTR, ROAS, and bounce rate.
Calculators for other influencer marketing platforms: inBeat has created separate calculators and mockup generators for different social channels. Use them to expand your campaign on all your social media.
And we’re still not done discussing inBeat’s tools.
That said, there’s a downside:
inBeat is not the best for mega-influencer discovery. If your marketing goals include working with nano, mid-tier, and micro-influencers, you’re in the right place.
And you can’t use the inBeat platform to build or monitor your campaign results. You’ll either need to upgrade to the UGC studio for this or contact the agency for a customized plan.
Tailored for the social media platform you’re using
Measures organic and paid content
CONS:
Not the best audience analysis
Lacks influencer search tools
Pricing plans: Free for creator and business accounts
Instagram Insights is an excellent tool for your Instagram marketing strategy because it gives you specific insights into your:
Account performance:
Follower count
Reached accounts
Engaged accounts
Content interactions
Plays
And more
Audience engagement with your Instagram Stories, Reels, posts, and live videos
Key metrics for your paid ads
This tool also shows you some good standard audience insights:
Age
Gender
Target location
Most active times of day and the week
On the downside, other influencer analysis tools offer deeper insights into your target market. And this is definitely not an influencer marketplace, so you'll need to find your nano and micro influencers' email addresses elsewhere.
Here’s how to use Instagram Insights:
Visit the summary page and tap on the metrics that interest you:
Each metric has a definition to understand why it’s useful.
You can select a customized timeframe for the last 90 days.
Pro tip: Use Instagram Insights along with inBeat.co for top-notch campaign monitoring to optimize your influencer marketing strategy.
Pricing plans: From $15.8; free trial available with no credit card required
SocialBee is a comprehensive media management tool that empowers quality influencers to optimize their Instagram marketing strategy. With pricing starting at $19/month after a 14-day free trial, SocialBee provides an affordable solution for managing your Instagram presence.
The platform includes a range of features designed to streamline the content creation and publishing process:
Generate captions with an AI assistant.
Access integrations like Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy.
Organize your posts into different content categories.
Create eye-catching Carousels, Instagram Stories, and Reels to stand out on the platform.
Track your performance on Instagram, gain insights, and optimize your strategy accordingly.
Collaborate with team members by creating multiple workspaces.
Pro tip: SocialBee also offers a unified inbox for Instagram, making it easy to manage all direct messages and comments in one place.
The tool also provides a grid preview of posts, allowing influencers to plan and visualize their Instagram grid before publishing.
4. trendHERO: Best for Influencer Discovery, Analysis, and Outreach
PROS:
Massive database of 100+ million creators
Influencer selection using 90+ metrics
Lookalike influencer discovery
Audience social listening
Competitive analysis
Qualitative analysis for audience interaction, posts, and comments
Outreach tool
CONS:
Lacks overall campaign-building and monitoring options
Pricing plans: From $9.99
trendHERO is a good all-in-one influencer marketing platform for brands. This tool helps you find, vet, and contact your ideal influencers on this social media channel.
Here’s what it can do for you:
Influencer discovery: trendHERO has a huge influencer marketplace. It analyzes Instagram influencer accounts using over 90 social metrics, including follower quality, engagement, relevant keywords, and ad return. This empowers your marketing team to identify a list of influencers' email addresses with genuine, relevant and engaged active users.
Influencer audit: The platform can even analyze influencer ad posts for engagement and mentions. It can even crawl influencers' bio links to perfect your social listening efforts. This results in a guaranteed return on your influencer marketing investment.
Audience analysis: This additional feature is in-depth, showing audience demographics, growth, and interests. You’ll also get an audience reachability score based on these metrics.
Comment checking: trendHERO allows you to perform a qualitative analysis of your influencers’ relationships with their followers. The software assesses reply speed, comment number, and comment length to gauge this interaction.
Similar accounts: trendHERO allows you to find lookalike quality influencers with alternative followers to reach multiple audience segments.
Competitor analysis and monitoring: trendHERO reveals in-depth information on your competitors’ campaigns. Use insights like growth history, content engagement, and ad buys to reverse-engineer their strategies and power up your campaign.
Outreach tool: This platform allows you to quickly contact influencers. It also shows you essential email outreach stats, such as open rate, click-through rate, replies, and rejects.
That said, trendHERO offers a 14-day free trial. The software also allows you to check one Instagram account with up to 10,000 followers for FREE.
By comparison:
inBeat has a completely free version, and you can use it for influencer analysis regardless of follower count, but:
inBeat lacks competitor and audience analysis unless you sign up with the agency.
In-depth mention tracking across influencer marketing platforms
Works fast
Social customer service
Find genuine influencers based on brand mentions
CONS:
Not specific to Instagram
Can’t be used as a standalone influencer tool
Pricing plans: From $39/month
Awario is one of the best Instagram influencer tools to help you with brand monitoring. And that's extremely important in the current influencer marketing landscape.
This social media monitoring tool helps you:
Track all your mentions: This influencer marketing software can crawl over 13 billion web pages daily. You can also check the mention sentiment and the share of mentions to understand your online reputation.
Understand and engage with customers: This social media monitoring tool helps you understand your target audience’s age, location, and language. That means:
You can target your audience with the right messages and optimize your hashtag strategy according to industry trends.
You use their exact language, thus becoming more relatable.
Create a social customer service: Awario helps you tap into these insights from your brand message to create a social client service. That means you can answer and interact with your customers based on real data to build meaningful relationships.
Find missing opportunities to develop new solutions: Awario helps you find prospects interested in your products or product category and turn them into leads. For example, you can use this valuable feature to create an Instagram Story with the right products and hashtag strategy.
Create long-run partnerships with influencers: These brand mentions will help you zero in on genuine influencers already raving about your products. And since they're already loyal, you can create long-term partnerships with them.
However, Awario isn’t an Instagram-specific influencer tool; the good news is you can use it on all influencer marketing platforms. And you may need other influencer marketing software to power your Instagram influencer campaigns, such as a discovery tool, engagement rate calculator, and outreach influencer tools.
6. Klear: Best for Enterprise Influencer Marketing at Scale
PROS:
A large database of influencers, from mega to micro-influencers
In-depth influencer analytics
Influencer relationship management
Content management
Campaign tracking
CONS:
Very few free tools
Pricing plans: Customized upon request (limited searches on the cheaper plans)
Klear is the best Instagram influencer tool for enterprise influencer marketing strategies because that’s how they define themselves.
Just kidding; let’s see what they really have to offer:
Influencer discovery tool: Klear is a massive influencer marketplace with 30+ million social profiles. Klear helps you find relevant influencers, from mega-influencers to niche and micro-influencers.
Influencer analytics: This social media marketing tool analyzes each influencer’s reach, engagement, brand affinity, and audience demographics, totaling dozens of key metrics. That means you can pick quality influencers your target audience resonates with.
Influencer relationship management: Klear helps you manage hundreds of influencer relationships throughout your Instagram campaign. Use the integrated messaging tool to share contracts & briefs for a successful influencer campaign.
Content management: Use Klear to review and approve influencer content, offer feedback, and streamline communication with hundreds of influencers.
Campaign tracking: Klear auto-generates customized coupon codes and tracking links that you can share with influencers. Klear also tracks your ROI, best-performing content, conversions, clicks, and other social metrics to get a bird’s eye view of your campaign.
On the downside, Klear lacks the multitude of free tools and additional features that inBeat boasts. You have free influencer discovery software by target location, Twitter influencers, and Twitter analysis.
Those options can be good if you want to extend your Instagram influencer campaign on Twitter too.
7. Pitchbox: Best Link-Building Influencer Marketing Software
PROS:
Fast
Intuitive target keyword search
Multiple SEO provider integrations to prevent fake influencers
Customized emails to hundreds of influencers
Campaign reporting
CONS:
You still need an additional influencer marketplace
Expensive
Pricing plans: Basic plan from $550/month
Pitchbox is one of the best tools if you want to create partnerships with influencers in your niche.
Here’s what it can help you with.
Influencer analysis and discovery: Pitchbox prospects hundreds of influencers in your niche in seconds. It also integrates with top-notch SEO providers to ensure these profiles are authoritative, with no fake influencers. And you can see all your influencers' email addresses in the dashboard.
Personalized outreach and follow-up: Pitchbox allows your social media managers to contact influencers with personalized messages and automatize follow-ups. This valuable feature helps your response rates increase considerably, and you can have a successful influencer campaign.
Campaign reporting: This campaign management tool monitors your entire outreach campaign, providing in-depth reports that help you optimize your link-building efforts.
On the downside, Pitchbox is better for link-building partnerships with influencers.
Sure, you can find the Instagram profiles of your link-building partners.
But Pitchbox helps you build a link-building campaign by contacting relevant Instagram creators who can publish/endorse your content. Therefore, it’s not the best solution for Instagram influencer marketing.
It’s also one of the most expensive tools in this review, but that’s also because you can use it for SEO link-building.
8. BuzzStream: Affordable Link-Building Tool
PROS:
Fast
Intuitive
Influencer discovery
Link-building outreach
A slew of free tools
Team management
Campaign reporting
CONS:
Not best for social media influencers
Pricing plans: Basic plan from $24, with an available free trial
BuzzStream is also a link-building tool, but it’s much more affordable than Pitchbox. And it's an excellent platform for brands who want to discover social media trends.
Why would you need these tools in the first place?
Well, link-building is an essential off-page SEO tactic. It’s important to find authoritative sources that can link to your website to increase your visibility, credibility, and sales. Bloggers can also post affiliate links to our website to power up your influencer marketing program.
But here’s the thing:
We live in a creator economy. And your link-building partners are people, too, so most will also use Instagram.
For fun and for connecting with their audiences.
BuzzStream can help you find and contact link-building partners who are also active on Instagram:
Use relevant keywords and filter your prospective partners by authority.
Create email templates and contact influencers with personalized emails.
Track key performance indicators like click, open, and response rates.
Access comprehensive campaign reporting to improve your influencer marketing campaign.
Extensive library of guides, tutorials, and video courses
CONS:
You will need other social media management tools
Pricing plans: Basic plan from $15; free version available
When you’re running an Instagram influencer campaign, you need to:
Streamline communication with those influencers.
Ensure your influencers communicate well with your target audience.
This social media marketing tool helps you:
Create personalized conversations: This tool has a flowchart-based interface that allows you to tailor your message’s visuals and texts. You can also add your website or Instagram Shops. And you don’t need any coding experience.
Create keyword-based replies: Let’s say you’re running a lead generation campaign on Instagram. Your target audience is supposed to DM you a specific keyword to get one of your resources. As soon as people send you those messages, Manychats immediately sends personalized replies with the included resources.
Comments automation: Manychats helps you interact with your followers by sending prompt, pre-automated comments, and Instagram DM.
Captures user info: This influencer marketing software remembers critical social media user information you can repurpose in other campaigns. This powers up your social listening capabilities.
This is what an automatized Instagram DM chat looks like with this platform:
That said, Manychat is not best as a standalone tool. Social media managers must still pair it with an influencer discovery platform, campaign reporting, social media management tool and any other additional software like a VPN for iPhone.
10. Upfluence: Best for Ecommerce Campaign Management
PROS:
Influencer analysis, search, and management
A huge database of creators
Social listening tools
Competitive analysis
Gifting, affiliate links, and product seeding for ecommerce influencer marketing programs
Payment processing
Workflows
CONS:
Steep learning curve
Pricing plans: Customized (cheaper programs have limited searches)
Uplfluence streamlines your influencer management from A to Z because you can use it at every step of your campaign. This platform for brands helps with:
Influencer analysis and discovery: Upfluence has a huge database of 3 million influencers, which you can browse using specific filters and weighted target keywords. Yes, you can assign weights to your target keywords to find the most relevant Instagram influencers according to industry trends. Compare your content creators by looking at their number of followers, engagement levels, other brand sponsorships, and relevancy scores.
Social listening tools: This valuable feature allows you to monitor your creators and perform competitive analysis. This helps your social media managers choose genuine influencers for a successful influencer campaign.
Specific ecommerce tools: Upfluence gives you a bird’s eye view of your loyal customers’ stats and shopping history. That helps you choose the best influencers from your existing client database. Upfluence also generates discount codes & affiliate links, facilitates product seeding, and more.
Influencer relationship management: Use Upfluence from influencer outreach to monitoring communication, discount codes, and performance. You can also organize different campaign workflows, power your social media calendar, and manage hundreds of influencers.
11. Julius: Best for Large Brands
PROS:
In-depth filters
Human influencer analysis
Comprehensive influencer partnership management
Campaign reporting across social media platforms
Continuously adds new features
CONS:
Not best for SMBs
Pricing/month: Customized
Julius is not your run-of-the-mill influencer discovery platform; it’s a full self-service campaign management tool that helps you with:
Influencer discovery: Julius’s huge database of millions of influencers is easy to browse. You have over 50 filters to ensure you’re narrowing down a relevant list of influencers using demographic and psychographic data. Even better, these influencers are not just AI-vetted; these social profiles are checked by humans to ensure your creators have no fake followers.
Pro tip: You can also add your own Instagram influencers on Julius. Here’s how intuitive and clean the dashboard looks like:
Audience analytics tool: This valuable feature helps you analyze your potential influencers’ followers as well as your own brand audience by:
Age
Ethnicity
Gender
Income
Interests
Target location
Influencer partnership management: Julius helps you organize relevant influencers in specific categories and lists. You can then message and manage them from the platform, adding customized tags and notes. You can monitor their social media activity with automatic post-detection to ensure they publish the right deliverables. You even have contracts and compliance tools to streamline your social media calendar.
Campaign reporting: Julius does influencer tracking, monitors brand mentions, and offers performance benchmarks to optimize your future influencer campaigns. Plus, you can export these reports in any format you want.
On the downside, the pricing point and services offered make Julius best for larger brands and agencies.
Which Instagram Influencer Tool Should You Choose?
The Instagram influencer tools in this review cover a wide range of uses, features, and price points.
You saw influencer discovery engines, outreach & link-building tools, and campaign management platforms.
How should you pick?
You can consider several variables and factors when discerning between these tools, but your marketing and campaign goals are the decisive factor.
All these tools are great, but few will be great for you.
The most scalable solution in this review that fits almost all companies is inBeat.
Whether you’re a hands-on marketer or want support throughout your campaign, inBeat is here to help. Let’s schedule a free strategy call, and we’ll discuss all your options or take inBeat for a ride to see if it fits.