3 Types of Influencer Gifting Platforms to Grow Your Campaigns

Searching for an influencer gifting platform so you can finally take back your schedule?

Makes sense! Especially given the legwork required to run a gifting campaign effectively.

A dedicated platform is a must-have for brands scaling their gifting programs beyond a handful of creators. With the right tools, you can streamline the moving pieces of influencer gifting like:

• Fulfilling orders to creators
• Tracking your influencer content
• Finding new influencers to send products to
• Analyzing your gifting campaign results
• Deciding which products to send to influencers

Maximizing your schedule and picking a tool depends on your needs and bandwidth. Below are the most popular kinds of influencer gifting platforms available and who they're best for.

1. Manual Influencer Gifting Platforms

This includes spreadsheets, databases and that support product gifting campaigns by helping brands organize and find influencers to send products to.

Let's be super clear: these types of platforms might not do all the work for you but can significantly reduce the time and resources spent on your next influencer gifting campaign.

These tools are best for brands that still want to manage product gifting campaigns but centralize their creators and campaign tracking in one place. 

Influencer Discovery Tools

• Influencer discovery tools help brands find the right influencers for their campaigns.
  
  
• These platforms often have basic search features to help you search for influencers based on your industry or target audience demographics. Others are simply influencer databases.
  
  
• Many of these tools (especially ones that advertised "millions of influencers") do not fully audit their creators for authenticity and accuracy. 
  
  
• Most of these tools will offer third-party integrations for product fulfillment (think: Shopify) or outsource the process. 
  
  
• These tools typically do not guarantee delivery for product gifting campaigns. They also still require some form of outreach to coordinate collabs.

Influencer Gifting Spreadsheets

• These tools help keep you organized during all the campaign chaos but calling them "platforms" might be generous! That said, they're the starting point for most brands sending products to influencers. 
  
  
• You can use them to keep track of the influencers you want to work with, who you’ve contacted, who has accepted, who has posted and basic performance data.
  
  
• Gifting campaigns in spreadsheets can realistically be limited to <15 creators (if that).
  
  
• Influencer spreadsheets are as useful as they are up-to-date. Pulling in data manually is a time-sink and not an efficient way to keep a pulse on your influencer campaigns.
  
  
• Unsurprisingly, spreadsheets offer no way to automate processes like sourcing content or finding new creators.

2. In-Person Influencer Gifting Platforms

If you’re interested in combining your social media marketing efforts with some face-to-face interaction, then utilizing an in-person gifting platform might be the way to go.

These platforms help you get your products into the hands of people, whether it be college students or celebrities, to giving them a chance to try your product for themselves. 

• You don’t have to buy a booth at an event to get the most out of it. Be a sponsor and provide your products to be added to grab bags and gifting suites.

• Work with a platform that specializes in promoting on college campuses to help your product become the newest trend among the student body. College campuses have their own micro and nano-influencers, so try getting your products into their hands first.

• Work with platforms that will place your products at events or locations where you know people will be interested in your product. It wouldn’t make sense to gift dog food at a campus swim meet, right?

• Note: There’s no guarantee you’ll see ROI with this method. When product gifting campaigns happen without incentive or to people who don’t really want them, you run the risk of your product getting tossed or thrown into a junk drawer never to be seen again.

3. Scalable Influencer Gifting Platforms

Scalable influencer gifting platforms eliminate or automate the process of gifting products, allowing brands to oversee a high volume of collabs without all the manual legwork.

These platforms are ideal for busy brands that want a more hands-off approach to influencer gifting or product seeding. By streamlining and consolidating your influencer gifting campaigns in one place, you can focus on earning content versus coordinating shipments or conducting outreach.

For example, Statusphere's platform allows brands to send products to creators with guaranteed delivery. That's because we ship products within our vetted influencer network and only match brands with creators based on 250+ first-party data points. 

• Scalable platforms manage everything from finding influencers and shipping out products to reporting on results and gathering UGC.

• With a scalable platform, you can set your requirements for collabs and compensation and source creators to fulfill them without manual outreach.

• Some tools (like Statusphere!) also serve as a product seeding platform that empowers brands to get products into the hands of new influencers at scale.

• Ideally, a scalable platform should be able to coordinate high volumes of collabs (30+ monthly) to support an always-on influencer strategy.

• Features such as reporting, analytics and sourcing content should be built into any influencer marketing platform.

What Are the Key Features of an Influencer Gifting Platform?

Deciding the best gifting platform for your brand depends on your goals and bandwidth.

To wrap things up, here are the key features of any given influencer gifting tool to ensure that you can seamlessly send products to influencers at scale:

• Automated campaign management.  This allows you to put gifting campaigns on autopilot, getting products into creators' hands on a consistent basis. As a result, you eliminate repetitive tasks like sending emails, tracking responses and following up with influencers.  

• Influencer matchmaking. This automates the process of finding influencers based on hard demographic audience data without digging through profiles. 

• Fulfillment with guaranteed delivery. Integrated inventory and shipping management helps you get products into creators' hands with confidence.

• Performance Tracking and Analytics. Brands need real-time data on the effectiveness of their gifting campaigns. With up-to-date reporting, you can determine what's working and opportunities to optimize future gifting campaigns. For example, you might discovery that some gifted products result in higher creator response rates or quality contnet.

• Pre-negotiated collabs with vetted creators. Outreach is among the biggest time-wasters of running an influencer gifting campaign. Instead of combing through profiles or a database of unvetted creators, working with a pre-approved opt-in network means that you'll earn more posts and not have to second-guess if your creators are legit. 

Which Type of Influencer Gifting Platform is Best for Your Brand?

Choosing the right product gifting platform isn't a one-size-fits-all affair.

Small, up-and-coming brands might be able to manage with spreadsheets.

But if you want to support high volumes of creator content at scale, you'll need a proper influencer marketing platform that supports always-on product gifting campaigns.

And that's exactly what Statusphere's software can support for your brand.

We’ve built the best influencer gifting platform for brands that want to confidently ship products to hyper-targeted audiences with guaranteed delivery.

Integrating your influencer campaigns with our platform, you can run consistent gifting campaigns at scale. We match brands with creators based on 250+ unique, first-party data points to ensure your products are sent to relevant influencers.

Want to learn more about how our platform works? Get in touch with one of our experts to learn how our software can help you scale product seeding in a fraction of the time. 

This article was first published in March 2019. It was last updated June 1, 2024.