GRIN, a creator management platform, has launched two new integrated tools to eliminate data fragmentation in creator marketing: Social Listening for tracking brand mentions and Affiliate Hub for managing performance partnerships. 

Both are fully connected to GRIN’s core campaign platform to address a key issue that creator marketing teams face: losing insights when forced to manage influencer relationships, affiliate programs, and social conversations in separate systems.

“Up until recently, most brands doing influencer marketing have had to use multiple tools,” explains Ryan Debenham, CEO of GRIN. “Those tools don’t talk to each other, making managing an overall program much more complex.”

The disconnect, he adds, prevents brands from seeing correlations between different aspects of their creator programs. “By doing it all within GRIN now, you have the ability to see how campaign performance, creator performance, and brand awareness evolve and how they impact and affect each other,” Ryan notes.

Connecting the Dots with Social Listening

GRIN’s new Social Listening tool allows brands to track hashtags, brand mentions, and social conversations across platforms, directly within the same system they use to manage creator relationships.

“Setting up social listening in GRIN is as simple as tracking particular hashtags that you’re interested in or mentions of your brand,” explains Ryan, adding that over 60% of GRIN’s customers have implemented it within just a few weeks of launch, tracking “millions and millions of pieces of content” already.

The tool helps brands identify which creators are organically mentioning their products, creating opportunities for new partnerships.

“Social listening is a way to measure overall brand awareness, how it’s improving, but it’s also a way, ultimately, to identify where there are potential creator partnerships that could be very influential in terms of future affiliate or campaign strategies,” Ryan explains.

Beyond basic tracking, the tool incorporates sentiment analysis, providing context about how brands are being discussed, not just if they’re being mentioned. “Not only how many people are talking about you, but how they are talking about you. Is it being talked about positively or negatively?” says Ryan, noting that this emotional dimension adds context to measurement.

Transforming Affiliate Management

GRIN’s Affiliate Hub builds on the company’s previous affiliate capabilities. While GRIN has offered affiliate features for several years, Ryan reveals that they were previously tied to specific campaigns or activations, limiting their flexibility.

“What the Affiliate Hub does is it breaks out the ability to create affiliate links and to create discount codes and to manage the reporting and overall progress of that as a separate solution that is very simple to set up, very simple to manage, very simple to report on,” Ryan explains.

The hub enables brands to:

• Create and manage affiliate links and discount codes outside campaign structures
• Track key performance metrics, including conversions and total spend
• Calculate the return on investment for creator partnerships
• Monitor performance trends over time
• Identify which creators are driving the strongest results

According to Ryan, the adoption of Affiliate Hub has been somewhat slower than that of Social Listening, as many brands already have existing affiliate systems in place. “To turn on this new affiliate tool, it’s a little bit more complicated of a migration,” he notes, as creators already have active discount codes and links. 

However, he notes that new GRIN customers are readily adopting the tool as they establish fresh affiliate programs without legacy systems to migrate.

The integration with GRIN’s broader platform allows brands to transition creators between content-focused campaigns and ongoing performance-based partnerships.

The Connected Analytics Advantage

GRIN’s integrated approach aims to enhance analytics capabilities by connecting previously isolated data streams, enabling brands to understand the relationships between different aspects of their creator marketing programs.

“We are rebuilding the core reporting infrastructure and tooling within GRIN,” Ryan reveals. “Essentially [creating] a much more sophisticated data foundation in the product.”

With Social Listening and Affiliate Hub integrated into the existing campaign management platform, brands can now track relationships between three key areas:

Specifically, brands can now analyze:

• How campaign performance influences overall brand conversation
• Which creators drive strong performance across both content creation and affiliate sales
• Whether rising positive sentiment correlates with improved conversion rates

“You can look at how a particular creator performs regardless, just in general and irrespective of any specific campaign,” explains Ryan.

Standardization and Cost Efficiency

According to Ryan, the integration benefits transcend analytics improvements, delivering value to both brands and creators through standardization and cost efficiency.

For creators, GRIN’s complete platform simplifies the often fragmented relationship process with brands. “Creators mention that GRIN is a preferred platform because of how simple it is to use, how simple it is to connect, how simple it is to get paid, how simple it is to do the work that brands are asking to be done, how simple it is to identify and receive the product,” Ryan shares.

For brands, it is about cost efficiency. Rather than paying for separate subscriptions to multiple platforms, GRIN eliminates redundant costs. “If you look at the cost of using a social listening tool plus an affiliate tool plus a platform, that gets quite expensive,” Ryan points out. “As a part of GRIN, we’re building into the GRIN packages a very generous amount of content tracking that just comes as a part of our existing package.”

He explains that this cost advantage is intentionally designed to help more brands access sophisticated tools. “It ends up being a cost that people can get rid of. That cost they might have been spending on another tool can disappear.”

A Vision for Integrated Creator Marketing

“The best way to help our customers is to have something complete,” Ryan says. “If you want to do influencer marketing, we have one platform that supports all of the technology needs you have to be able to do that.”

This vision extends beyond tool consolidation to industry standardization. “Our mission at GRIN is to make it easier. We aim to make it easier for brands to achieve success. We want to bring some standardization to the industry,” Ryan explains. “We would like to help have better-defined methodology and standards for how brands can leverage influencer marketing and creator marketing strategies.”

Ryan draws parallels to his experience at Qualtrics in the customer experience industry, which was also characterized by service-heavy approaches. “Qualtrics ended up building the technology and a model to do things with you, not for you,” he notes. GRIN aims to create a similar change in creator marketing—moving from dependency on agencies to empowered brands with better technology.

Ryan emphasizes that Social Listening and Affiliate Hub represent just the beginning of GRIN’s innovation. “We are back at a point where we are pioneering the category again,” he states. “I expect that over the course of 2025, brands will clearly recognize that GRIN is back to leading the innovation here.”