If you promote your business online, you probably know that leveraging influencers can help you increase your brand’s reach and engagement. That’s probably why influencer marketing is expected to become a $10 billion market by 2020.
Most businesses are now banking on this effective marketing strategy to grow.
A recent survey by the World Federation of Advertisers showed that multinational brands plan to spend more on influencer marketing in the next 12 months.
They also want to invest more time and resources into identifying ways to generate a higher ROI from their influencer campaigns.
Just partnering with an influencer isn’t enough. You need to follow an organized approach to plan your entire campaign. This includes everything from influencer discovery to negotiation, collaboration, content creation, promotion, and campaign performance tracking.
If you want to run effective campaigns, you can leverage technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline your campaign processes. With AI, you can get valuable insights about what works well and what doesn’t, which can help you maximize your brand’s exposure.
Let’s take a look at how you can use AI to improve your influencer marketing campaigns.
With AI, you can:
On this page
1. Find Relevant Influencers
When it comes to influencer marketing, businesses usually find it difficult to identify the right influencers to work with. You need to partner with influencers who have the same vision and values as your business.
Leveraging artificial intelligence can help you find influencers who are the right fit for your audience. With AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), you can analyze the data of various influencers directly from their social media profiles.
With the help of AI, you can evaluate every piece of content the influencer ever posted. Not only that, you can decide if their content style, engagement rate, and online persona fit what you’re looking for.
With such insights, you’ll be able to identify and collaborate with influencers who are actually relevant to your business and campaign goals. They are more likely to help you engage your target audience and get more value from your influencer marketing campaigns.
2. Decode Fake Influencers
With the increase in social media bots, it’s becoming more difficult to evaluate if an influencer is truly credible. There are a lot of fraudulent influencers out there who manipulate algorithms and use bots to increase their follower counts. That way, they create fake engagement metrics, which can cost brands a lot.
A lot of brands, don’t get the ROI they expect from their influencer marketing campaigns due to fake engagement. This includes big brands such as Ritz-Carlton, Pampers, Magnum Ice Cream, and Olay, according to a report by AdAge.
There are many AI-powered influencer marketing platforms that can help you detect fake engagement. You can evaluate the audience demographics of an influencer to see if they are real people.
Some brands also leverage influencer whitelisting to amplify their influencer content. Using this approach enables them to gain advertiser access to an influencer’s social profiles. They can run and optimize paid ads created using influencer content.
With AI, you can also evaluate the performance of each influencer. This will give you a clear picture of whether an influencer is capable enough to help you achieve your campaign goals.
3. Create a Data-Driven Content Plan
Another problem most brands deal with is to devise an effective content plan for their influencer marketing campaigns. It can be difficult to understand which types of content will resonate well with your target audience.
Most brands leave content creation to influencers as they better understand the tastes and preferences of their audiences. You can also co-create content with your influencers to ensure that it aligns with the aesthetics of your brand.
However, before you do that, you should take time to identify the content type that delivers maximum ROI. You can use AI-powered tools such as Cortex to get data-driven insights about the types of content that your audience craves.
It will help you understand which themes, subjects, photos, colours, and messages connect the most with your audience. You can use these real-time insights to create relevant and meaningful posts.
You’ll also know exactly what to post, where to post, and when to post to drive the best results.
Along with this, you can use AI to analyze which social media posts generate maximum positive sentiments for your brand. This will make it easy for you to identify the content styles that work well with the followers of each of your influencers. Then, you can create more engaging content for their audiences to build trust and loyalty.
4. Track Campaign Performance
Another major challenge that brands face is to track and measure the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns. While you can easily track engagement metrics such as shares, comments, and likes, it is difficult to measure the overall impact of the campaign.
A recent survey by Rakuten Marketing showed that 38% of marketers can’t tell if their influencer marketing campaign actually drove any sales.
If you want to make the most of your influencer campaigns, you should be able to measure them. That’s because you can’t improve something that you can’t track or measure.
If you want to get a clear picture of the effectiveness of your campaigns, you should use AI and big data to track results. This can help you evaluate the performance of an influencer over a period of time. You can evaluate if working with them can help you achieve the desired results and engagement.
Along with this, campaign tracking can also help you analyze the amount and quality of engagement that different types of content generate. This will help you plan and create content that is engaging and useful for your target audience.
Conclusion
AI has revolutionized the way brands perceive influencer marketing. Brands leverage AI to connect with authentic and relevant influencers, create data-driven content, and measure campaign performance.
Leveraging AI can help you get access to real-time data about what works and what doesn’t. Then, you can optimize your influencer-created content and campaigns to drive great results.
Have you ever used AI to fuel the success of your influencer marketing campaigns? Please share your experience with us.
