Influencer marketing has become very popular in the recent past. It has become very popular, thanks to the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns. Most brands and companies investing their time and money in influencer marketing campaigns are increasing daily.
This has become a modern approach to marketing and advertising that has become the livelihood of many businesses. But despite this huge growth, the industry is still grappling with some challenges, including influencer fraud, which has made it difficult for marketers to measure their campaigns' return on investment (ROI).
Finding the right influencers has also become difficult, as has knowing the appropriate compensation. But with the introduction of AI technology and machine learning, influencer marketers can now forget these problems once and for all. Here’s the role of AI in influencer marketing and how it has changed the influencer marketing industry:
How’s Artificial Intelligence Solving Influencer Marketing Challenges?
From fraud, accurate audience insights, and content selection to campaign analysis, influence marketers are having a rough time dealing with these problems. Fortunately, artificial intelligence in influencer marketing has helped solve this problem, even though the industry is still evolving. Here’s the role of AI in influencer marketing:
AI Has Helped Prevent Influencer Fraud
Influencer fraud is a monster that has cost brands and companies lots of money in the wasted marketing budgets. Influence marketing is quite competitive, and scrupulous influencers are taking advantage of that by buying fake followers and falsifying engagement rates. When companies and brands partner with these scrupulous influencers, their return on investment becomes a nightmare.
Since the introduction of AI technology, brands can now smile because AI tools can help you avoid influencer fraud by getting deep into an influencer’s profile and noticing any signs of fraud. AI can go beyond superficial stats of followers and recent content and detect fraud, including massive follower spikes.
The AI tools can also uncover potential problems, such as old content that doesn’t align with your brand positioning. By using AI, you can easily identify fake accounts and bots and ensure that only real people can receive your content.
AI Helps in Analyzing Influencer Audiences
For a long time, influencer marketing agencies have relied so much on Facebook’s Open Graph to get to the target audience and find the perfect influencers. This has become a thing of the past because Facebook has closed this off due to a scandal, leaving marketers to deal with inconsistent results when producing data.
Artificial intelligence in influencer marketing is addressing this challenge without any issues. Marketers can use AI and machine learning to gauge whether an influencer's followers match their target demographics. AI in influencer marketing has audience analysis, which helps to scan and identify influencer followers and leaves behind impressive demographic data.
You can use AI tools to gauge the level of engagement of your followers, and AI can reveal if your huge following is bringing massive engagement or not.
AI Improves Negotiations for Influencer Compensation and Incentives
Influencers face a lot of challenges when it comes to knowing how much to spend on each influencer marketing campaign. Artificial intelligence helps in looking at several influencers’ historical data and comparing their content and performance with each other. After that, the AI algorithm decides on the most effective incentive.
This information helps marketers have first priority when it comes to the negotiation table, enabling them to know how much to pay for the right influencers.
AI Helps Find the Ideal Influencer for Your Content
Influencer marketing's goal is to give influencers control over how they view your brand. You put all your trust in them to present your brand in the best way possible. But sometimes, you can find yourself working with the wrong influencer, leaving you with the opposite of what you expected.
To have a successful campaign, you need to find the perfect influencer, which isn’t an easy task. But with AI tools, you can do a deep search and identify the influencer’s other brand affinities and check their other activities to avoid any risks. The right influencers help you protect your brand and the brand image you’ve built.
With AI, every influencer is taken care of, and you can find the best type of content that works well with them. AI tools also help you monitor millions of topics daily and find the ones that real people interact with. You can use this information to collaborate with the influencer and create content that’s guaranteed to produce the highest engagement.
AI can also help you create personalized content for each influencer based on their followers, interests, and history with the brand. This ensures the relevancy of the content, plus engagement for each influencer, leading to higher engagement rates.
AI Makes it Easy to Analyze Campaign Metrics and Performance
When working with several influencers, knowing which campaigns are performing and which ones are not can be difficult. Artificial intelligence in influencer marketing helps you connect important metrics, including brand mentions, traffic, and conversions, directly to your influencer’s specific initiatives.
This is something you can do in real time and monitor to see if the influencers are achieving what they agreed on with their followers. AI also helps measure influencers' performance in campaigns and provides insights into what works well and what needs improvement. This can help you optimize your future campaigns to achieve better results.
AI provides real time insights into influencer campaign performance, allowing brands to make changes on the fly to improve outcomes. AI also sets competitive benchmarks to measure audience sentiments in real time, which helps monitor competitors' initiatives. AI allows you to see what’s working well and add spending to these campaigns to keep you ahead of the competition.
How’s Artificial Intelligence Is Helping The Influencer Marketing Industry To Grow?
Automation of Contract Terms and Processes
An influencing marketer is required to abide by the contract agreement, which proves to be a daunting task. Fortunately, AI tools can help you automate the entire contract process and detect if any influencer tries to break it. This will help marketers mitigate any risks before closing a deal, preventing any infringement that may arise.
If marketers comply with the FTC regulations and other government regulations, they’ll benefit a lot from using artificial intelligence. This allows brands to avoid penalties and mitigate any potential damage from non-compliance.
AI Tools Help Predict the Influencer’s Future Performance
It’s always difficult to predict the future, but with AI tools, influencers can predict what the future looks like. Artificial intelligence uses natural language processing to predict if an influencer meets a brand’s objectives. You can easily use this prediction tool to gauge whether your campaign is successful or not.
Predicting the success of your campaign also gives you a clear roadmap of what to expect and helps you avoid working with influencers who won’t be able to deliver results. By using AI, you forget about trial and error as you work with the right influencers to market your brand. Artificial intelligence can also predict if the influencer’s influence will improve or decline over time.
Businesses can use AI to identify potential partnerships with micro influencers with more engaged audiences than more prominent influencers. This helps companies reach a wider audience with more relevant content, increasing brand awareness and sales conversions.
Working with Virtual Influencers
The main contribution of AI to influencer marketing is the presence of virtual influencers. Virtual influencers have become very popular in influencer marketing. Virtual influencers aren’t real people but fictional characters with personalities and behaviors created by the AI team and marketing experts.
Businesses have adapted this kind of marketing to promote their products and services. These digital influencers are controlled by real people and are used to create genuine-seeming social media content. A good example of the first and most popular virtual influencer that has taken influencer marketing by storm is a 19-year old Brazilian-Spanish model called Lil Miquela.
This young model has collaborated with real and virtual celebrities since 2016 and is making a lot of money in this industry. Miquela has signed and partnered with big brands such as Calvin Klein, Prada, and Samsung. This artificial influencer position has earned Miquela a lot of money. That was just an example. Now let’s look at why brands love using virtual influencers to market their brands.
Virtual influencers are more flexible, making working with AI influencers easier.
- Virtual influencers are also less risky than real influencers
- Virtual influencers are more cost effective than their traditional celebrity counterparts
- Virtual influencers provide a consistent brand message
- They also result in more accurate metrics, thanks to their integrated analytics
- Virtual influencers can also reach a wider range of audiences, unlike celebrities who are limited by their follower count
- A virtual influencer has a unique way of creating an emotional bond with the target audience
With virtual influencers, you have full control over the messaging and image of the influencers
But despite having all these advantages, virtual influencers also have some disadvantages, including:
- Lack of human narrative may result in less deep engagement
- Brands and companies may have less control over virtual influencers than they think
- Many brands may also view virtual influencers as inauthentic and creepy
AI Helps with Seamless Running of Campaigns
Running an influencer marketing campaign isn’t a walk in the park. You have to determine the start and end dates and review the metrics and engagement rates. Plus, you have to track each influencer's content and compare the actual results with the initial goals. It’s a long process.
However, AI takes care of all of that by keeping all the data points in a central location and extracting powerful insights. The more data you feed AI, the more connections it will connect. Scalability is also not an issue since AI solutions can help you run campaigns seamlessly with various follower sizes.
Conclusion
AI has really changed the influence marketing industry, making it more efficient and effective than ever before. With artificial intelligence influencer marketing tools, you can address problems you’re facing as a marketer, such as influencer fraud, non-performing influencers, misfit content, etc.
If you’re not using AI tools in your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s high time you start so that you’re not left behind with this important technology. Get more out of your influencer campaigns by making use of the power of artificial intelligence.
Even TrueFanz creators are taking the help of AI to create exclusive and authentic content.
