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Influencer marketing is human-centric. So, how can artificial intelligence (AI) for influencer marketing ever work?
Surprisingly, the interplay of AI and humans is making influencer marketing more scientific and data driven.
To put things in perspective, consider these facts:
Shudu Gram who campaigned for Rihanna has 202K followers. Lil Miquela, Prada and Nikes star influencer, has 2.4M followers. What sets Shudu and Lil apart is that they are virtual influencers powered by computer-generated imagery or CGI.
This means consumers dont really care if their favorite influencers are humans or not. If AI-powered influencers excel at storytelling, theres no reason they cant win hearts as well as human influencers.
Thats how much the influencer marketing industry has transformed since the advent of AI.
In this post, Im going to dig into four more disruptive applications of AI in influencer marketing.
AI Helps With Influencer Discovery
When you want your brands content to stand out on oversaturated social media platforms, you need an influencer with a flair for storytelling and the right brand affinity.
And that brings us to the crux of the problem faced by 61% of marketers: influencer discovery.
Image via Mediakix
In every major domain, there are hundreds if not thousands of influencers, many of whom are just bots or fake accounts. So, how do you evaluate an influencers authenticity?
Manually scouring their profiles to check their engagement and credibility is impossible for us humans. Hiring an influencer marketing agency for an audit may be heavy on your pocket.
Enter AI-based influencer marketing tools.
These tools can assess thousands of profiles in minutes. Equipped with big data functionality, they can collect and assimilate massive data from multiple touchpoints. They can even create detailed personas for each influencer on your radar, allowing you to compare them side by side.
Powered with predictive analysis, AI tools can pick winning content creators even before they create content for you. They understand your audience even better than you do, thanks to their persona-building capabilities. Moreover, they keep listening to audience sentiment across channels and look out for red flags in your brand mentions.
Using these insights, they can predict with near accuracy how your audience will receive a piece of content. When you combine that super-power with their precise influencer evaluation, youve got yourself a machine that can spot a brand-influencer mismatch from miles away.
Some powerful tools like trendHERO also help you spot influencers who have got fake followers. As a result, you can avoid those influencers and partner with genuine ones who can help in taking your campaign to the next level.
Image via trendHERO
Also, the best part about working with tools is that you dont have to worry about prejudice or subjectivity. Likewise, AI-based tools evaluate influencers objectively only on the basis of hard data and historical patterns. This enables you to make data-driven decisions with confidence.
AI Helps Measure Campaign Performance
Measuring campaign performance is another gray area for marketers. For years, they have been leveraging influencer marketing without having clarity about its ROI. As a result, theyve had a hard time justifying their expenditure in front of their management.
If you think that replicating brilliant influencer marketing campaigns can guarantee success and lock in ROI, think again. With unpredictable social media users, the move can backfire massively.
Thats where AI-driven influencer marketing tools come into play.
These tools can forecast campaign ROI with unbelievable accuracy. They can even drill down into each influencers performance, overall and per post. Using historical campaign data, these tools can predict your campaign and influencer performance even before you get started.
Not only that, but these tools can identify channels and strategies with maximum ROI-generating potential. By eliminating the guesswork from influencer marketing, these tools can help you generate good leads from your campaigns. You can fix budgets and targets and count on your influencers to deliver on them.
Once that happens, influencer marketing becomes a potent weapon in a marketers arsenal.
AI Tools Assist Influencers with Content Creation
Its well accepted that influencer-driven content strategies increase engagement rates exponentially.
But when AI is added to the mix, what you get is unbeatable content that is tailored to each platform and audience group. As discussed at length before, AI tools can decipher an influencers tone by studying their past content. Artificial neural networks (ANN) enable these tools to analyze video and image attributes deeply. Likewise, natural language processing (NLP) enables these tools to analyze user comments and figure out how they feel about different types of content.
Putting two and two together, these tools can determine if your influencer can cater to your audiences tastes and needs satisfactorily. They can provide intelligent suggestions to fine-tune content copy to perfection.
AI tools can go really granular in their analysis. They can predict minute elements such as typography and CTA copy that appeal to your target audience. When you target the right people with the right content through the right channels and tools, you can cut through the noise and get noticed on overcrowded social media platforms.
In a Gist
Brands and marketers who fuel their influencer marketing with AI find their ROI steadily climbing northwards. AI tools can not only arm them with information to make data-backed decisions but also reduce time and resources spent on repetitive tasks. Im sure youll now agree that AI is reshaping the future of marketing in a big way.
So, how do you apply AI to influencer marketing? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below. Perhaps, I can provide you with some optimization tips of my own.
