When it comes to influencer marketing...the team over at Grin just gets it. The fundamental workflow of the platform was thoughtfully designed and built from both the brand and influencer side. They have been extremely attentive to our program's needs and requests, but all in all, they're just all-around good people.

I'm often asked by fellow marketers at DTC ecomm brands "what features or capabilities I like 'most' about Grin." The short answer: there is no "one" thing. I give the same answer every time. Influencer marketing (as a whole) demands the successful balance and execution of a wide set of responsibilities - more so than any other marketing channel I've managed. You're dealing with real people. Actual human-to-human relationships and conversations that a computer can not do. You're fulfilling a considerable amount orders to individuals PRIOR to any promotion taking place. You're campaign and influencer deliverables can vary significantly so exceptional attention to detail and process implementation is a necessity. You're working in an ecosystem with multiple environments (Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, etc.) - all of which have their own respective nuances that dictate how you manage influencers, structure campaigns, ensure media compliance and ultimately drive conversions. Not to mention, all of those sparkly engagement KPIs every one desires, well those are guarded behind the very core of what influencer marketing is built on: social media networks. Getting access to these metrics can be a hassle if you're not equipped with the proper tool set or knowledge of what to look for. So, my favorite part about Grin? The other short answer: It takes everything above and packages it into one refreshingly comprehensive toolset that streamlines influencer marketing.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect, and neither is Grin. There have been minor usability issues I have run into throughout my time using the platform - none of which have been anywhere close to 'mission critical.' The only aspect that could use an update is the reporting visualization component. All of your high-level data is there to see, but it could use a little bit more freedom with manipulation. However, a simple 'Export' of the raw data from Grin gives you everything you'd need to see - just fire up Excel and whip up some pivot tables and graphs.

Grin makes it so much easier to do my job. Without the automation, recruiting, reporting, and many analysis tools, I would not be able to do this role alone. We'd need at least a team of 2 or 3 people to accomplish what I'm able to do in a day using Grin. I am amazed at the constant upgrades to the platform that come at no cost to the user and they are always taking feedback and implementing it where they can with new updates. I also knew nothing about Influencer Marketing when I started this role and not only did Grin provide great resources to learn the software but they also provided 1x1 training on how to use it and many resources on how to excel at influencer marketing as well.

The integration with shopify and reporting tools. Being able to create discount codes and affiliate links with the click of a button saves so much time and it's incredibly simple to track performance over a large number of influencers. The new reporting tools makes it so I can get really granular with performance on an individual level which helps me determine which influencers to really hone in on and develop even stronger relationships. It makes it really simple to track ROI and IMV to show the value of our Influencer program to leadership. Using the chrome extension to import influencers and their emails has made it super efficient to reach out to tons of influencers using automated email sequences. Instead of having to DM people and potentially never have my message read, my email is going straight to them and helps to recruit people efficiently. The different dashboards are also really helpful since you can get a really high level view of how a campaign is performing and then you can get more granular now with the report builder feature to pin point weak areas and strong areas in your network.

Sometimes there a hiccups in tracking conversions but the Grin support response time is unbelievably quick and they are always eager to hop on zoom to talk through the issue and provide updates while they fix problems as well.

Overall, I don’t recommend this software because it’s too glitchy and underdeveloped and ended up causing us a lot of frustration and costing us time. It was incredibly difficult to deal with the software for us and our influencers, especially trying to get their social media connected.

I liked the look and feel of the user interface. It’s sleek and minimalist. I also liked how well Grin tracks influencer success. This is essential for making good business decisions from analyzing data.

It was way too glitchy and underdeveloped. Customer support typically did not resolve issues. Some of our influencers couldn’t connect Instagram stories for over a year despite us reaching out many times for assistance to customer support.

Pleasure to work with and ask questions. Super transparent, which is great as we look forward to a long-term relationship with GRIN.

The customer support is amazing. They make an effort to accommodate feature requests and they give as much visibility into their roadmap as they can. Ask GRIN for a demo and see if it works for your company/program. They are constantly trying to improve the platform and it's made to fit program needs- whether that's for micro or for macro influencers.

Not entirely a con- but they do have a little bit of work to do when it comes to some of the things that streamline data exports as we have a number of team members that access GRIN daily.

GRIN is really a combination of two really important things -- cross-platform influencer search and CRM. The search is helpful because a lot of other platforms have their own internal network of influencers to search through, which means that you're going through a smaller pool of candidates. GRIN searches all social networks no matter if the users have signed up for GRIN. And the CRM piece is critical. I've been able to set up a prospect pipeline, multiple campaigns, and the tracking is simple. Everything is organized and automatic.

GRIN's greatest quality is its organization. It's not just a platform to find influencers or keep track of them -- it's a full-on relationship manager that can track every detail of your process. I like that I can see every email to a prospect, I can customize the prospect pipeline, and I can easily track exactly where the relationship is at even after they become an influencer. It's also great that I can manage all of my influencer content in one spot as well as my payments. It's so helpful that GRIN can take care of the 1099s for my influencers at the end of the year and I just have a bill from GRIN. I also love how smoothly it integrates with my Shopify store.

A downside is that I have issues with influencers connecting on the platform about 20% of the time -- either they have an IG account but not a FB account, or they used their desktop to connect their IG and the connection is more easily made on mobile. It's the only part of the process that can rocky, and I wish it were smoother. With that said, once everything is set up, it works really well.

I have been working in this field for almost two years now and have used a few other influencer platforms and I can honestly say that no other platforms compares to the capabilities of GRIN. From influencer recruitment, managing campaigns, shipping product, to analyzing data and performance - GRIN has it all! Before GRIN, I usually preferred to manage outreach with influencers via email so that my messages didn't come across as robotic and I was able to personalize each message to each influencer. This made it very difficult to manage where I was at with influencers and took a lot of time away from other tasks. With GRIN, I love that you can customize emails so that it still feels personal to each influencer, but you can reach out at much larger scale. This has not only sped up the process of our partnerships, but has boosted productivity across our team and has allowed us to manage hundreds of partnerships/ campaigns at once. Another thing that I love about GRIN is how willing the team is to help. Influencer marketing is an ever changing industry and often times it is hard for platforms to keep up. Anytime our team comes up with a suggestion on ways for which the platform could be modified, the team at GRIN is always willing to hear feedback and actually takes action on making improvements. In addition, anytime there is a glitch on the platform, they are so quick to jump in and try and fix the problem! They truly want the best for their clients!

Like any other platform that you use, there are going to be some glitches from time to time. GRIN has their fair share of small glitches that come up, but as I mentioned their team is extremely quick on fixing any that arise.

As a project manager, I've had the opportunity to dive into Grin, the influencers app, and the experience has been a bit of a mixed bag.Grin is a valuable tool for managing influencer campaigns that yield excellent content. However, it could greatly improve its user-friendliness, streamline affiliate link setup, and enhance payment tracking for a smoother experience overall.

One of Grin's standout features is its seamless integration with Shopify, which significantly simplifies the process for influencers to place orders. This linkage between Grin and our Shopify ecommerce platform has not only enhanced convenience but has also boosted the efficiency of our influencer collaborations.Moreover, Grin excels in delivering high-performing campaigns with top-notch content, which has been instrumental in achieving our marketing goals.

The user interface can be quite unfriendly, making navigation a bit of a puzzle at times. For those not deeply familiar with the platform, there's a learning curve to overcome.Setting up affiliate links and codes, a crucial aspect for many campaigns, isn't as seamless as one might hope. Grin could do with some enhancements in this area to make the process more intuitive and complete.The tracking of payments for each influencer can also be a bit confusing. Clarity and simplicity are key when dealing with finances, and this aspect could benefit from a more streamlined approach.

The biggest solution that Grin offers is that it is a one-stop-shop: -content creator discovery -influencer relationship management -campaign management and fulfillment -Payment -Campaign Tracking and Influencer Media Value (media equivalency)

I enjoy the flexibility of the campaign management, the seamless email sequences you're able to run, the ability to pay content creators through the system, and its discovery function.

I can always ask for more! I wish there was a mobile app to manage the content creator program on the phone; and I wish there was a game key repository I could upload keys to and then use a script to call each key by using a particular variable I create within my dashboard.

It's a 10 for me! GRIN employees are the most wonderful people and their love for their jobs carries over into the software and truly continues to wow me. I have yet to have anything less than a top tier experience with GRIN from the sales team to, our CSM (shoutout to Katie), and literally anyone and everyone that works with them.

GRIN is the gold standard of influencer marketing software. They are the front runners in innovation as well as amazing support both from an engineering side and customer success side. GRIN takes so much of the mess of influencer marketing and cleans it up into one beautiful and effortless software.

The ONLY drawback to GRIN is that there are specific plug ins that you have to upgrade to add on (this is so normal with any software though).

GRIN has been a great partner with attentive reps and program support.

GRIN allows us to scale our evergreen influencer programs quickly and efficiently, from onboarding to regular communications.

The UX can be overwhelming and we do not use all of the features.

My overall experience is great and only getting better. GRIN is always keeping record of our team’s recommendations which allows the system to be even more custom to help us in multiples ways! Long story short, GRIN is essential and I highly recommend it if you and/or a team are working with influencers, ambassadors, etc!

What I like most about GRIN is how well organized it keeps all influencers, brand ambassadors, etc on multiple social media platforms. As someone who works with multiple influencers on a daily basis it is essential to have GRIN as it keeps everything up to date with influencer postings on IG, Youtube, FB, etc. In addition, an amazing quality GRIN includes is custom tagging, properties, etc! These are great for when having multiple team members in working in the same GRIN company account. For instance, I work with all athletes, while my team member works with all lifestyle, being able to organize the two using tags and/or custom properties such as “Athlete, Content Creator, etc.” without jumping into/mixing up each others projects. So definitely my favorite quality is the organized set up GRIN creates. Next, GRIN also helps with keeping track on which social media platform each influencers focuses on. For example, one of my influencers is IG focused while another is focused on creating Youtube videos.. GRIN allows me to keep track of each influencers top social media platform!

There really isn’t anything to dislike about GRIN, but if I had to think.. the only issue was sometimes there were some Instagram connection issues (but that is typically an issue with IG itself) or even maybe post here or there wouldn’t get picked up by the system, but GRIN is so simple that I can easily create their profile for them and send them a link to finish creating the profile (really quick and very simple)! Then for rare occasional post that doesn’t get picked up, it’s just a quick copy and paste of the IG post link to their account. Nothing major at all and even with the minor, occasional issues the GRIN customer service is always available and ready to help in anyway they can!

GRIN has taken me from spreadsheets and hours of data pulling to being able to really interact with the community and focus my time and energy where it really matters. I love how quick they are to respond to support messages when I need an extra hand, my CSM's bi-weekly or monthly meetings with me, and my ability to be worry free when it comes to everything pulling into GRIN so I don't have to manually track it.

I love the do it all ability to have everything I could possibly want in one platform. My goal for my program is to always ensure a seamless process for my creators and GRIN does just that. Allowing me to dedicate optimal time to building relationships with my creators.

The only thing I wish GRIN had was a more mobile friendly option. I'm sure they'll be working on it soon! Being on a flexible schedule it would be great to have the option to view my campaigns from anywhere on my phone.

When we got started with GRIN, our influencer program was non-existent and, frankly, we didn't have a strong idea in place for developing it. The educational resources GRIN provided (video content and seminars) immediately helped us to kickstart our program and were critical in both the launch and growth of our program. Even more helpful was GRIN's software, which allowed us to easily discover influencers, conduct outreach, define clear expectations when onboarding creators to our program, track performance and attribute revenue, and build a strong relationship with every partner. 10 months later, and we are working with 150 active influencers, who assist with our product launches and continuously promote their favorite products. There is certainly a learning curve using GRIN's platform, but our account manager is exceptional and has always responded to every question within an hour. Overall, we couldn't recommend GRIN enough!

Our only dislike of GRIN's software is the payments system. Being that we are running 30+ campaigns at a given time, it's extremely cumbersome to go into each campaign and pay our influencers. We could really benefit from a central payments system.

Grin has been amazing in starting our Influencer program. I've worked in influencer marketing for 8 years, and it would also be amazing for people who have established programs, but want easier way to run it. (reach out, tracking, payment) It makes everything easier and more streamlined. I forgot about payments in my previous section, but it makes being able to pay a large number of influencers so much easier and collects all the right documentation. Doing large campaigns with BIG revenue goals was awesome! We've worked with people all year, were able to reach out to them, and get them signed up to promote again for Black Friday. Grin has also been great for one off marketing needs. Example, we need 10 video for ads. We can reach out to a bunch of people and set up the partnership really easily.

This allows us to find people to work that can help us increase the revenue of the program each month

We are starting to work with people on TikTok and finding creators on Tik Tok isn't as easy

My team's experience with GRIN has been great! The GRIN support team and engineers are SO helpful and work so quickly to resolve any and every issue we mention! I am very satisfied with the service and attention we have received! Kudos to everyone at GRIN, especially [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], who has made our experience so amazing!

GRIN helps my team plan and execute monthly microinfluencer campaigns with ease, reduction in work time, and on a timely basis! Anyone from the team who logs in can see what stage of the campaign each influencer is in, in real time. Also because the inbox is shared, email communications are available for all teammates, so even if someone is out of office, another associate can cover for them.

Every feature is great! The one thing I'd improve is the email feature. It has a delay, and it would be helpful to be able to organize/store the emails as we do with Outlook.

We have been able to reach out to so many more influencers than we were able to before. Also, we have been able to keep track of how many emails we have sent people in each stage of the process, how many kits we have sent, etc. We wanted to be able to specifically track and have reports on everything we do, and we have been able to with GRIN.

The best part about this software is that every piece of the process, from finding high quality influencers to viewing their posted content, is in this one place. It was very easy to learn the start to finish process and GRIN allowed us to customize the campaigns in a way that made the most sense for our needs. Our GRIN rep has always been very helpful by quickly answering any of our questions with informative tutorials.

I would like it if the inbox feature had a different layout. The filter that allows you to see unread emails is helpful, but I wish there was a way to just have our sent emails in the sent section, rather than all together in the inbox.

I love GRIN, it has helped me manager my influencer and ambassador program and really scale it!

I love the ease of campaign and activation management. Payments through GRIN! The customer service is impeccable. Email sequences and templates. Data, analytics and reporting features are amazing!

The search feature for influencers is no longer available. Inputting creators into the platform takes longer than it used to.

I love the different integrations that GRIN offers, from Shopify to Lumanu it makes it extremely simple to run creator campaigns.

Sometimes, it's difficult to find the nano or micro YouTube creators to onboard into the platform.

The support team is great. Grin made our search of finding influencers easier but there are definitely a lot of technical difficulties

the influencer search tool is extremely beneficial especially being able to select all the influencers you'd like and add them to a sequence. I like that you can assign discount codes so easily but it needs more functionality - like new customers can only use this discount code once

The campaign part needs a lot more work, there are too many things to go through each campaign = should be simpler I feel like you need to inspire people with layouts and templates and see what other brands are doing to be able to make your campaigns run better Some influencers on the content creator search platform their emails aren't right but the customer support team usually works with me to get that all figured out A few Influencers on the content creator search haven't been active on social but still pull up

Grin has helped scale our influencer intiatives remarkably, helping build a strong brand awareness on social, increasing UGC by 600%, and developing an organic funnel for our ambassador program.

So many great features and everything you need to plan, organize, and execute successful influencer campaigns. Many different ways to communicate and engage with influencers.

Small bugs and updates occasionally. But after each maintenance fix, Grin comes out working flawlessly.

I love working with GRIN. It helps streamline the overall campaign process and organize my influencers all in one place. I also love working closely with our account rep, who never fails to support us when needed, and continues to ensure we are using the platform to the fullest and successfully.

GRIN is the perfect platform for campaign management and to track the overall success of all influencers (ie. how their audience interacts with their tracking link and discount link).

I do not enjoy the influencer search engine. It pulls in influencers based on metrics, but not so great with quality in terms of look and feel.

Fantastic. I love, even when I have a stupid or obvious question, the support staff really try and help and go above and beyond to make sure all my questions are answered.

Influencer discovery Influencer contact management Helpdesk / Support staff

Too reliant on influencer cooperation for content to be captured. I wish there was a way to internally tag IG Stories, posts, or pieces of content on OTHER platforms (YouTube, Tiktok, FB) without the influencer using the appropriate hashtags.

I love how easy it is for me to view my creators, organize them by tags, and to be able to easily import new creators with their social media chrome extension. Additionally, being able to pay my creators through GRIN makes it very easy to make payments on time. I love that GRIN is continuously updating the services they offer.

I'm not really a fan of using their creator search. Although some creators will have great stats, when it comes to performance, they don't perform that well.

Overall it is still an impressive tool to use. For me as long as the tool makes the work of the user easy as can be, there is nothing more to say, but keep up the good work!

It's great for multitasking and how it provides us a step by step process works wonders. Even though we are encountering more influencers on a daily basis, Grin helps us in managing it with ease.

System updates sometime cause a delay. The system tends to slow down when multiple users are using it. But, not big of a deal and it is still manageable.

Influencer Outreach, Campaign Management, Product Shipment, Data & Analytics + Influencer Payment.

More email trigger options to consistently follow up with influencers throughout the campaign process! i.e. send emails once the package has been delivered as a reminder of content being due within 7-10 days.