Aspire.io vs. GRIN

I used Aspire to find influencers for my fashion business and most of the influencers who signed up for my project were unreliable and did not fulfill their contract terms. For example, of 5 influencers I sent products to, only one completed the work that was agreed upon under the Terms. The others received a $195 product and disappeared, even though we signed a contract called Terms that is monitored by Aspire. The main downfall with Aspire is that it doesn't have a system in place to control this. For instance, they don't have a way for brands to leave a review for influencers and they don't block bad influencers (many just want free product) from applying for future projects. Aspire doesn't take responsibility for anything. What is the point of paying money to Aspire if they don't vet their influencers and control the quality of influencers who use their platform?

GRIN is the perfect way to manage your brand's advocates. Everything from the application process through the completion of the partnership can be handled on this platform. Additionally, our company just started utilizing the payment feature, which has streamlined our process for paying advocates.

Incentivized

• Conversation management through using automated messaging.
• Collaboration organization by putting influencers in the correct stage/status they currently are at.

Incentivized

• Superb Customer Support
• Seamless process of identifying quality creators
• Robust data reporting to lets the data tell the story and guide smart decision marking
• Great community of fellow GRINNERS to connect with and numerous workshops, webinars, and learning experiences at no additional cost

Incentivized

• Filtering Messages - things seem to get cluttered easily
• "Deleting" people in campaigns you don't want to work with instead of dismissing

Incentivized

• Creator search tool - doesn't bring up viable creator options, which means we do primarily off-platform seeding.
• The landing page is clunky and not functional for reviewing creators - it adds a lot of time to my team's day looking through the creators with the way it's set up.
• Email templates have funny formatting, and the typeface always seems to get messed up.

Incentivized

I wouldn't be able to run as high of a profitable or functioning influencer program without it. GRIN seriously is the organizational tool that propels us towards success, it is not in any way going to do the work for you, but it does make the work more efficient, easier, and WAY more organized

Incentivized

We've done countless trainings with them and have done every step as outlined. In my experience, the site does not perform at all and there are no results that ever come. I think Aspire.io seems to have no ideas on how to get a response from their influencers and to get them to do what they are suppose to do.

Once you have used Grin for a while it is super fast and super easy. The initial set up was a little clunky for me, but after I was familiar it was super easy to use, especially after I was more familiar with all the features

Incentivized

I have bi-weekly calls with my AspireIQ rep which has been very helpful. Anytime I have a question, notice a bug, etc, she is quick to respond.

Incentivized

We have been happy with the support that has been provided from Grin. They have allocated to us a dedicated customer success manager and we communicate with them consistently about different features and strategies we should be monitoring and testing. We also did a webinar in partnership with them as a visual testimonial they could use to show to prospective customers.

Incentivized

I don't have any key insights here. If you have someone organized and aware of how the influencer workflow operates then it will be a very easy implementation process for you. I would just ensure you have all of your products setup in Shopify before starting the implementation with Grin.

Incentivized

Aspire.io was the first product we have used like this. I can't imagine any of the other platforms being worse than Aspire.io is for us. We are actively searching for a platform that will be able to help our company reach its goals. In my opinion, Aspire.io is only interested in their bottom line - we ended up losing thousands of wasted dollars and time.

I was looking around at Dovetale, which connected with Shopify, and although it may be an easy connection because it's within the Shopify website, it isn't as user-friendly. It also doesn't offer the same hands-on experience from the GRIN team, 24/7 customer support, or bi-weekly calls with your direct contact. It just doesn't feel like it's worth it to me for the "convenience."

Incentivized

• Making our brand more fun!
• While our account is "small" we believe investing in influencers has broadened our brand and gotten in front of people we didn't have the capability of

Incentivized

• Grin has allowed us to grow our influencer program by at least 3 times the amount by making overall management easy and time efficient.
• Because of the data and content captured through grin, we are also able to use it as a resource to run a more successful whitelisting program

Incentivized