Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence has played a significant role in the business world. AI has affected countless niches, industries, and aspects of businesses. Influencer marketing is one of them.
Influencer marketing is one of the strategies with the most ROI over the last few years – influencer campaigns earn $5.78 for every dollar spent.
Influencer marketing involves manually searching for influencers and collaborating with them. This means:
- Looking for influencers on Instagram, YouTube, etc.,
- Shortlisting the right influencers based on follower count, target audience,
- Contacting them and negotiating deals
This process requires a lot of time and resources, and you often end up with unsatisfactory campaigns. However, AI-driven influencer marketing platforms have completely changed the way businesses run influencer campaigns.
In this article, we shall discuss the impact of AI on influencer marketing.
What Challenges Does AI Solve?
Influencer marketing comes with a plethora of challenges. Here are three primary challenges that AI solves:
Scalability
Influencer marketing involves a multitude of tasks – influencer discovery, outreach, negotiation, payment, and so on. If you are running influencer marketing campaigns manually, you are going to have problems identifying the right influencer, getting through to them, negotiating work terms, and collecting payments.
All these tasks are time and resource-intensive, making it difficult to scale your influencer marketing efforts if you are doing it manually.
AI helps automate all these tasks. With AI, you can choose the right influencer based on a variety of parameters like demographics, location, etc., contact them through an influencer platform, and work with them.
Employing AI to streamline your influencer marketing helps you run multiple campaigns with multiple influencers, thus increasing your scalability.
Tracking Campaign Performance
Monitoring and managing your campaigns is another issue brands have especially when they run many campaigns. It can be difficult to track reach, engagement, conversions and other critical metrics for each campaign in real-time.
AI analyzes this data and gives you real-time analytics that you can use to tweak your campaign accordingly. Automated reporting and real-time performance tracking help you tweak multiple campaigns in real-time and optimize them.
Accurate Data
Another influencer marketing challenge that AI helps solve is fraud detection. As more and more influencers join the social media world, you can expect to run into a fair share of them who inflate their follower counts and engagement artificially.
AI analyzes data on influencer engagement and demographics, using algorithms to detect fraudulent activity and patterns. This way, it identifies influencers with fake followers, fake engagement, inflated metrics, and so forth.
Matching Content To The Influencer
While finding the right influencer is often a challenge for most brands, the real challenge lies in matching the right content for the right influencer. After all, the content you post must align with the influencer’s voice, style, and your brand’s value and mission.
Traditionally, brands would A/B test their content to determine what type of content gets the most engagement and conversions.
However, AI can help you conduct deep searches to find and monitor the different topics that followers engage with. This helps you tailor your content to your followers based on their engagement and relationship with your brand.
What Are The Benefits Of AI In Influencer Marketing?
As you are probably aware at this point, AI brings a host of benefits when it comes to influencer marketing.
Optimized Influencer Discovery
If you were to manually search for influencers on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, you would most probably run into the following problems:
- Finding the right quantity of influencers
- Finding the right quality of influencers (influencers that fit your brand and target audience)
- Getting a reply from them
AI-driven platforms allow you to search for the right influencers based on cost, performance metrics, content category, and a wide array of other critical factors.
Efficiency
Everything in influencer marketing, from influencer discovery to payments requires a substantial amount of time and resources. Tasks like campaign monitoring, payments, legal compliance, etc., are all prone to human error. AI helps you automate all these tasks – allowing you to run multiple campaigns with multiple influencers seamlessly, thus allowing you to scale your business.
Contracts
Contracts and templates make it easy for you to handle payments, legal compliance, and agreements. You can use AI to send preset notices, automate your contracts, and prevent your influencer from violating a set agreement.
Helps You Make Data-Driven Decisions
As mentioned earlier, AI helps you monitor and manage your campaigns. AI gives you real-time data and insights on your content and the influencer(s) you are working with, allowing you to modify and manage your campaign performance in real-time and help you make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.
What Are The Drawbacks Of AI In Influencer Marketing?
AI has a slew of minor drawbacks. The biggest one of them all is that AI lacks a human touch, that brands still require. AI makes for a wonderful tool to run and manage your campaigns. However, brands cannot completely rely on AI to do this for them.
Since influencer marketing is about the trust that you have built with your audience, your brand needs to come across as human and authentic. As tempting as it may be to rely on AI completely, the lack of human touch will affect your engagement, conversions, brand awareness, and more.
Secondly, handling AI requires a level of technical know-how. AI is a powerful tool, which means your team needs to understand how AI works and how they can use it to their advantage.
Conclusion
To wrap up, the impact of AI on influencer marketing (and in general) is undeniable. It is a powerful tool that can help you find the right influencers, manage your campaigns, automate operations, and ultimately scale your business. Any business can use AI to super-charge their influencer campaigns if they know how to use it.
