6 Ways AI Elevates the Influencing Marketing Landscape

Intro

Every decade in history has one defining trend or phenomenon that sets it apart. The 90s were defined by the Internet revolution. The early 2000s saw the explosive growth of social media platforms. The phenomenon that arguably defines the last decade is the rise of the Influencer.

Influencers, and by extension influencer marketing, have revolutionized sales and marketing strategy. Imagine a start-up that makes children’s clothing. The company needs to promote their products but doesn’t have the resources for a full-scale ad campaign. How do they get seen? The answer is influencer marketing.

(Image sourced from statista.com)

The start-up would collaborate with an influencer whose social media following matches their target demographic—in this case, perhaps a mom blogger—and get them to endorse their products for a fee.

A field of technology that is increasingly aiding influencer marketing is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI is transforming business processes across the spectrum. From contact center services to online retail, AI is being adopted in the workflows of small, medium, and large businesses.

Here are six ways AI is elevating the influencing marketing landscape:

1. Identify The Right Influencers For Your Campaign

In order to have a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to choose the right influencer whose following matches your target customer group. This is where AI comes in.

Audience Demographics

Via Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI can scan through the content posted by an influencer to assess whether it matches your company’s brand style, and crucially if their following shares the demographic traits of your target audience.

This is important because businesses often wrongly choose to collaborate with an influencer based on their number of followers. Interestingly, according to a survey of over 800,000 influencer accounts, those with the highest followings don’t have the highest engagement rates. Instead, micro-influencers with as low as even 1000 followers get better ROI.

AI doesn’t take into account vanity metrics like a number of followers when assessing an influencer’s fit for your brand. Instead, it provides a list of relevant influencers from your niche within seconds. Combining this with an automated Facebook lead generation campaign could see a big return on your investment. You might even find new audiences to reach out to that you hadn’t previously considered.

Incentives and Fees

Fixing fair compensation for influencers is another gray area that businesses struggle with. There are several factors that determine an influencer’s rate, including their number of followers, length of the campaign, quality of the content, and campaign ROI.

Just as you would do your research before investing in toll free numbers for your business, AI tools backed with artificial neural networks (ANN) can check the standard rates being charged by influencers in a given niche.

They can then use these rates as a benchmark to calculate the fees that a brand should offer influencers in the same niche. These tools can simultaneously be used by influencers to analyze whether they are receiving fair pay for their work.

Some popular AI-backed tools for calculating influencer compensation include Inzpire Me, Influencer Marketing Hub, and igFace.

AI’s predictive analytics can also suggest incentives for each influencer based on their potential. Additionally, they can accurately identify the kind of incentive that can motivate an influencer to post about a brand, including the timeframe when the incentive should be offered.

2. Provide Smart Content Recommendations

Producing high-quality, engaging content is hard enough as it is. Doing this consistently is a real struggle and something that content creators labor over every day. With competition rife among brands and influencers, good content is king, and the key to boosting follower engagement.

It’s important to note that content creation requires strategy, planning, and execution. It’s equally important to know what kind of content your customers are most likely to respond to. AI can do this due diligence for you.

AI and machine learning tools can analyze the current content trends in your niche. They can also survey your social media accounts to identify what type of content works best with your audience.

Perhaps your audience wants to know how to choose the best cloud PBX phone system for their business. Or maybe, they want a short video showing cake decorating hacks. Whatever it is, AI can help you perfect the content you’re delivering.

Hubspot is a popular content strategy tool that uses AI and machine learning technology to help marketers identify trending content ideas that are being favored by social media users. It offers content suggestions based on competition and relevance. It also automatically performs competitive research on those topics to make sure they are worth spending time on.

You can use these detailed reports to plan your influencer marketing campaigns. With this information, influencers can create tailored content that is bound to get high traction. Besides text, AI can also scan through visual content using computer vision and provide accurate insights.

Just like text, AI tools can generate insights about the kind of visual content that’s best for your campaign. It is no surprise that 70% of brands invest in content marketing that includes visual marketing strategies.

3. Ensure Contract Compliance of Influencers

One of the challenges of working with influencers is ensuring they comply with the disclosure guidelines for sponsored content. This includes influencers crediting your company for any sponsored content or personalized product recommendations that you have commissioned. However, it can be difficult to monitor and guarantee compliance for every post. This gets even more difficult when you’re engaged with multiple influencers.

AI helps address this issue by automatically flagging content that breaks disclosure agreements. AI can assess an influencer’s likelihood of violating the terms of an NDA or collaboration contract even before they sign. This is how AI can preemptively protect you against infringements before they happen.

(Image sourced from lauchmetrics.com)

4. Forecasts The Success of Influencers’ Content

It is now possible to predict the success of an influencer’s campaign even before its initiation. AI can use NLP to analyze how a campaign will affect your brand’s image and calculate the volume of engagement it will generate.

This forecast helps you decide whether a particular influencer is right for you or not.

5. Determines Fraudulent And Inflated Engagement

We have already explored how AI can help identify the right influencer for your brand. But another useful function of AI is that it can help filter out the fakes.

AI analytics tools can scrutinize each individual influencer’s profile in order to vet them. They can also check their past performances and collaborations, and assess how other brands fared through those collaborations.

Nearly 55% of Instagram influencers were involved in some form of fraud in inflating their numbers of followers in 2020. AI tools can effectively track fake comments on an influencer’s posts and also spot sudden and unexpected surges in follower growth. This helps identify fake accounts that you can avoid, saving both time and money. This naturally improves your campaign’s overall ROI.

6. Calculate Campaign Metrics And ROI

Once you sign on an influencer to endorse your products or services, the next step is to monitor their performance. By tracking how much engagement your campaign is getting vis-à-vis the influencer’s posts, you can calculate your ROI and determine the efficacy of the collaboration.

Determining ROI for influencer marketing can be tricky because it doesn’t always involve quantitative benefits like lead generation. ROI can also be interpreted as raising brand awareness or enhancing your brand’s image. AI can be used to assess consumer sentiment before and after a campaign, to see if your brand image has improved.

Additionally, AI tools can provide valuable insights into improvement areas in your campaign. This helps both you and the influencer improve your marketing strategy for future campaigns. You can even make use of an Instagram for business Google sheets integration to store these insights for future reference.

AI can also evaluate influencers’ performances on an individual basis and provide you a list of the best-performing ones. This is particularly helpful when you are working with multiple influencers. This information helps you choose who to retain and who to let go.

For a long-term marketing strategy, this is an effective way of building a community of high-performing influencers who can guarantee enhanced ROI for future campaigns. At present, there are several AI-backed social media tools that can track your campaign performance. Tools like HootSuite and Sendible provide detailed reports on post performance and follower engagement.

(Image sourced from oberlo.com)

The Increasing Popularity of Virtual Influencers

One trend that is rapidly growing in social media marketing is the popularity of virtual influencers. These AI-powered influencers are being increasingly used by brands to grow their followings and reach, particularly on platforms like Instagram.

The Benefits And Drawbacks of Working With Virtual Influencers

Benefits

• Bespoke influencer personalities for target audiences
• Cost-effective
• Enhanced engagement

Drawbacks

• Lacks human appeal
• Mixed reactions from users
• Carries natural biases of human creators

Conclusion

The global AI market is expected to grow to $190.61 billion by 2025. AI and machine learning are rapidly being adopted into almost every aspect of business. Whether you’re looking at sales automation tools or customer service, AI is at the heart of each function.

Influencer marketing is the present and foreseeable future of brand promotion. The pairing of AI and influencer marketing seems only natural, as AI tools can provide crucial analytics to design campaign strategies tailored for your target audience and monitor performance.

The object of AI is to simplify business processes by offering intuitive solutions that reduce human labor. AI-powered automation provides an unmatched level of accuracy. Brands and influencers alike can leverage this accuracy to enhance and elevate the landscape of influencer marketing.