Complete Review of Onalytica (What You Should Know)

Are you interested in using key influencers to promote your brand? If so, then you should follow this Onalytica review.

In this Onalytica review, I’ll go explain how the tool can benefit your business.

In a nutshell, Onalytica is best described as influencer relationship management software (IRMS). It’s designed to help you find and work with the movers and shakers in your industry. The tool relies on big data to store details gleaned from countless social media profiles and posts. That makes it easy for you, the user, to search through that data and find exactly the kinds of leaders you’re looking for.

What Is Influencer Relationship Management Software?

Before I get into the specifics of Onalytica, it’s good to go over IRMS applications in general. Influencer marketing is a strategy that uses people who are popular with folks in your target market to spread the word about your business. Usually, that’s done by getting them to mention your brand on social media. But how do you find an influencer who’ll work with you? That’s where an IRMS application comes in. Tools like Onalytica streamline the process of filtering through millions of social media profiles to find only the people who can help you with your marketing efforts. Also, you’ll likely want to engage with more than one influencer. That means you’ll need to keep track of all your influencers. Once again, an IRMS application is your best friend. It will help you organize and prioritize your brand evangelists. Beyond that, you’ll also want to track analytics so you can see which influencers are helping you reach the folks who could end up becoming paying customers. A great IRMS application, like most marketing services, will also enable you to measure the effectiveness of your influencer outreach.

Influencer Marketing and Onalytica: An Example

There’s a great example of influencer marketing on the Onalytica promo video. Let’s say you’re running a beer company. You want to get the word out that your beer uses only non-GMO products. Obviously, you’ll want to share that news. More importantly, though, you’ll want to share it with people who are more likely to buy your product because it’s GMO-free. If you post a message on social media about your new “No GMO” policy, you’re likely to reach only people who already like your beer. If you run a mass advertising campaign that your beer contains no GMO products, you’ll reach a lot of people who simply don’t care. That’s an inefficient use of marketing dollars. So what’s the solution? Find an influencer whose followers include folks that are aficionados of organic food. Then, get that influencer to talk about your brand. Additionally, you might even convince him or her to spend time with your suppliers and validate that your beer is GMO-free. That influencer will generate some buzz about your brand among people are now more likely to become customers. According to the video narrator: “If you look at the way people consume information, brands really need to get on board and change their practices to most effectively reach people again.” That’s why tools like Onalytica exist.

Onalytica Review: An Early Start

Onalytica was founded in 2009. To put things in perspective, that’s the Mesozoic Age in terms of influencer marketing. In other words, Onalytica was into influencer marketing before it was cool. Since that time, Onalytica has steadily built its reputation as an important player in the space. In 2013, the company was named one of 5 “Cool Vendors” by Gartner. In 2015, Onalytica was rated one of the top “Word-of-Mouth SaaS Platforms” by Forrester. The company’s client list includes VMWare, Canon, Microsoft, IBM, Sony, and TransUnion.

Onalytica Review: What It Offers

How do you use Onalytica to reach and manage influencers? It’s a five-step process:

• Discover – Find key influencers who are relevant to people in your target market.
• Map – Associate influencers with folks in a specific market segment.
• Listen – Understand what influencers really care about.
• Engage – Reach your influencers in a way that will likely get a positive response.
• Measure – Determine if your influencer marketing is helping you reach your goals.

Once you’ve followed those five steps, you can scale your influencer outreach program to give your brand an even bigger boost online. How does Onalytica help you traverse through each of those five stages? With several features:

• Influencer feed – Follow what your influencers are saying. The feed uses a standard timeline format so there’s no learning curve involved.
• Influencer profiles – Want to know a little more about some of your influencers? If so, check out their full profiles with Onalytica.
• Content seeding – If you’re interested in seeding relevant content with your influencers, Onalytica helps you do that with ease.
• Network maps – You might be interested to learn about the relationships between your influencers. If so, Onalytica can show you that info in a visual format.
• Real-time alerts – Stay informed about important events within your network of influencers.
• Measurement reporting – Analytics is essential for any marketing tool. Onalytica will show you how well your outreach efforts are paying off.

Onalytica will also rank your influencers based on 4 R’s:

• Reach
• Resonance
• Relevance
• Reference

Armed with that info, you’ll know which influencers to prioritize in your marketing efforts.

Nothing to Install

Onalytica is software as a service (SaaS). That means you don’t have to install any software on your PC to use it. So how do you use Onalytica? From within your browser. Just navigate to the Onalytica service URL and login with your credentials. The user interface will run within your browser. That’s definitely a point in the tool’s favor.

Searching Made Easy With Onalytica

When you’re in the Discover phase of influencer outreach, Onalytica enables you to find the right people using one of several search types:

• Category – The tool enables you to search for influencers based on a pre-selected category. You can choose anything from animation to zoology.
• Topic – If you’re looking for a more fine-grained search, Onalytica also enables you to set booleans for exact matches.
• Demographic – How would you like to reach American millennials? Onalytica lets you do that with its demographic search feature.
• Content – Maybe you’re in need of an influencer who posts content similar to what’s on your blog. If so, use the content search feature.

It’s important to know that Onalytica is also multinational. Your search results can span multiple countries.

Onalytica Review: Finding the Right Contacts

Onalytica doesn’t rely solely on bots to comb through 200 billion social posts every year and find the best influencers. Instead, the company uses humans to separate the wheat from the chaff. Those folks make sure that the data provided to users is valuable. As of now, there are more than 150,000 influencers in the company database. So if you’re looking for somebody who’s got some clout with your potential customers, you’ll probably find more than one. One downside to Onalytica: it’s speed. Search results take about 5 – 10 seconds to show up. That might seem fairly quickly on paper, but if you’re performing multiple searches over time, it all adds up. It is worth noting, though, that you do get quite a bit of info for that additional wait time. Onalytica doesn’t skimp on details. While other tools show you follower counts and some demographic info, Onalytica offers you a more comprehensive overview of an influencer, including:

• Keyword clouds – See what words and phrases the influencer is using in social media posts. As with most keyword clouds, the terms that are used the most are bold and in a larger font size.
• Key connections – Influencers are followers, too. Find out who they follow so you can get an idea of how your influencers get influenced.
• Real-time feed – See what the influencer is tweeting right now.
• Influencer ranking – A score for the influencer based on the 4 R’s mentioned above.

The Dashboard: Too Detailed?

One complaint about Onalytica is that the dashboard is a little too “busy.” There are several charts and graphs all crammed into one space. That makes it difficult for some users to get a quick assessment of how things are going. Although some people might appreciate the level of detail offered by the dashboard, it would probably be better if some of that reporting was spread throughout multiple screens.

Onalytica Review: Competitors

As with many other marketing tools, Onalytica isn’t alone in its space. Here are some of the company’s competitors:

• Mention – Although many people consider Mention an alternative to Onalytica, it’s really more of a reputation-management application.
• BuzzSumo – Not only shows the most shared links for a topic, but key influencers as well.
• Dovetale – A tool that lets you monitor competitors and find content creators.
• Julius – “Drive successful campaigns with unrivaled influencer insights, hand-curated data, and the industry’s most end-to-end influencer marketing solution.” That’s the promise of Julius, another well-rated competitor to Onalytica.
• Klear – An IRMS solution that boasts 500 million profiles, 60,000 categories, and five years worth of historical data.

Pricing

Onalytica isn’t cheap. Pricing starts at $195/month. That will give you a maximum of 250 reports per month. The next level of service (Pro) costs $495/month. For that, you get personalized influencer lists and a demographic breakdown of your influencer community. The highest level of service (Enterprise) costs $1,495/month. That will give you multi-user agreements, real-time tracking, and content sharing opportunities.

Wrapping Up This Onalytica Review

Although Onalytica is an expensive service, it does offer a free, 7-day trial. So if you’re a “try before you buy” kind of person, you’ll get that opportunity with the tool. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many Onalytica reviews online. On the G2 website, for example, there’s only one review. However, that review does give the tool 4.5 out of 5 stars. Elsewhere, you’ll find that users are generally satisfied with the product. If you’re serious about influencer marketing, you almost certainly stand to benefit with Onalytica. The trick is to run the numbers. If you think you can grow your sales enough to justify the monthly expense, then you should start the free trial to ensure that it’s what you’re looking for.