Later Influence review 2024: Uncovering the latest trends in social media influence

Our Verdict

Our Verdict

Later Influence is a sophisticated influencer marketing platform that redefines how brands engage with influencers. With a programmatic approach, it streamlines campaign setup and activation, focusing on micro-influencers who are already customers. This unique strategy ensures authentic brand advocacy, as influencers are selected based on existing brand affinity. The platform's integration with ecommerce channels enables seamless influencer activation at checkout, leveraging the power of customer influence.

Pros

• Survey campaigns provide exceptional insights into your audience and customer base
• Its highly automated approach means campaigns are largely self-sustaining once established
• Leveraging existing customers as influencers is key, and Mavrck excels at identifying the ideal ones.

Cons

• There are limited options for filtering and organizing influencer
• Reporting for Snapchat and TikTok could be more comprehensive

4.8

Our ratings take into account a product's cost, features, ease of use, customer service and other category-specific attributes. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

Starting price

14-day free trial

Key features

Search/discovery, Automated recruiting, Influencer Relationship management, Influencer marketplace, Content library

Channels

Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Patreon, Snapchat, Tiktok, Amazon

On January 17th, 2024, Mavrck rebranded as Later Influence, unveiling a new logo and branding to reflect its future direction. In its initial blog post, the company emphasized the diverse nature of influencers, highlighting that they can come from anywhere and be anyone.

Originally launched in 2012 as Splashscore, Later Influence underwent a transformation in 2014 to offer a self-service and whitelabeled platform for brands to manage their influencer communities. This shift in focus has positioned Later Influence as a significant player in the influencer marketing arena, operating under innovative strategies compared to traditional influencer search engines. While these platforms serve a purpose for broader, long-term campaigns aiming for a larger and more engaged audience, Later Influence's approach is geared towards converting this audience into customers.

This question represents a unique yet practical approach to influencer marketing. Traditionally, brands tend to seek influencers who already show a liking for their products or have a large following. However, without brand affinity, they settle for high follower counts. Yet, this often leads to a lengthy process to engage the influencer, essentially marketing to them in the hope of accessing their audience in the future. Despite evidence showing that influencers with more followers tend to have less engaged audiences, brands still pursue this route.

Later Influence avoids this process by identifying influencers, particularly micro-influencers, among your existing customer base. This reflects a fully programmatic approach to every facet of influencer marketing.

Pricing

Access to the Later Influence platform is available through subscription, with pricing tailored to individual customer requirements. To gauge if it fits your budget, consider these key points:

Later Influence boasts an impressive client roster, including renowned brands like Gillette, Dunkin’ Donuts, Universal Studios, New Balance, Proctor & Gamble, Sears, and JetBlue, among others.
One of Later Influence's distinctive features is the ability to activate influencers at checkout, as customers make purchases through your web or mobile platforms. This functionality is designed for large-scale marketing efforts, indicating that your e-commerce channels likely handle a significant volume of transactions daily. Later Influence's case study metrics are presented in terms of "per 1,000 influencers," which can be interpreted as "per 1,000 customers."

The details

As previously mentioned in the Overview, Later Influence adopts a programmatic approach to influencer marketing. Essentially, this means that the platform provides a variety of campaign types that can be set up easily, almost like filling in blanks. The campaigns are pre-programmed, requiring you to specify the details, similar to a standard influencer marketplace. What sets Later Influence apart is its offering of a wide range of programs, extending beyond content creation and amplification compared to other marketplace platforms. Moreover, many of these programs can be nearly fully automated, truly embodying the concept of "marketing at scale."

Before moving on to influencer identification and activation, you must first establish and define the campaigns you intend to run. This process occurs in the backend, where you can choose from Later Influence's 20 predefined "digital activities" for influencers. These activities could range from sharing a coupon with friends to creating content featuring your brand. In return for these actions, your customers receive rewards. Influencers can be segmented based on various criteria, such as demographics and psychographics, and digital activities can be assigned to them based on their segments. This setup is completed in advance, before reaching the influencer activation stage.

Later Influence integrates with your current digital platforms, allowing you to create campaign briefs and invite participants. These can be published on a white-labeled standalone microsite or as a plugin on your existing website, mobile app, or email newsletter. Influencer identification occurs in two ways. You can use the platform's traditional discovery tool to search through its database of 2.5 million influencers. Alternatively, you can recruit your existing customers by having them log in to your e-commerce site using their Facebook profile or setting up a portal for them to sign on as "ambassadors."

Influencers from either pool must sign up for your brand's Later Influence platform using their social media accounts. This grants the platform access to their data, which is ingested via API. Later Influence's algorithm indexes and parses all available data, including the number of followers, posts, engagement (likes and comments), brand affinities, favorite movies, hometown, and more. The algorithm focuses on the influencer's reach and engagement to determine their level of influence. If deemed influential, the influencer is automatically activated into a campaign they qualify for.

Later Influence caters to various influencer personas, including micro, macro, and mega influencers. The content these influencers create aims to drive traffic back to your site for registrations or purchases. Once users sign on, you gain direct marketing access to them, including all the data they've shared on their social networks, not just their email addresses.

Depending on your campaign type, you might be able to passively wait for results. For referral programs, Later Influence manages rewards for referrers. In survey programs, where influencers act as consumer advisors, you create the questions, and Later Influence presents the results in a clear report. For traditional influencer campaigns, the platform offers a robust workflow manager, surpassing many competing marketplace platforms. Within campaigns, Later Influence resembles a comprehensive CRM rather than a typical influencer marketing platform, aligning with its customer-centric approach.

After experiencing Later Influence's demo, I've described it to my IMH team as "influencer marketing, where your influencers don’t know they’re your influencers." While accurate, this description might sound a bit sinister, which isn't the case. To customers who become influencers through the platform, the experience feels more like an advanced loyalty program. They receive special offers, purchase rewards, incentives for sharing content, and coupons. Even if they're unaware of being part of a specific marketing campaign, they understand that sharing content benefits the brand or product—and it all seems like a fair exchange.

In hindsight, a more apt description would be this: if an influencer marketing platform could merge with a loyalty/rewards platform, their offspring would be Later Influence. And that offspring would be exceptionally clever.