If you haven't been living under a rock, you know every kid who used to cut your lawn is trying their hand at influencer marketing. Brands use celebrities, experts, leaders, or people with lots of followers to achieve their brand's objectives. The idea is to leverage influencer credibility and reach to promote a company, brand, products, or services.
With the artificial intelligence (AI) natural language processing (NLP) revolution in full swing and every marketing team reworking their marketing strategy with an eye toward automation and campaign management, the influencer marketing industry and the social media platforms they love will change. So when I flipped a post by Gabriela Barko to our Sign of the Times Flipboard magazine this morning, I decided to write about how AI will change your influencer marketing efforts. Use the links below to discover how AI will revolutionize influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing creates partnerships with influential people, often called "influencers," to promote products, services, or ideas. Influencers have built a significant following on social media platforms or within a specific niche, and their audience values their opinions and recommendations.
In Influencer marketing, the influencer creates content featuring the brand or product and shares it with their followers, who trust and value their opinion. Influencers get found across various social media platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and others. They can have many followers, from a few thousand to millions. Partnerships with influencers can increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales, with influencers usually earning payments or free products for their recommendations.
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with an influencer to create content that promotes a product or service. Influencer marketing partnerships can include sponsored posts, reviews, endorsements, or other content showcasing the sponsor's product or service. In addition, the influencer usually shares their experience with the product or service with their followers building trust and credibility with your audience.
Influencer marketing can be effective because it often feels more authentic and genuine than traditional advertising. As a result, followers perceive influencers as trusted sources of information who respond like their endorsements. Additionally, influencer marketing can target specific niches or demographics, making it easier for brands to reach their target audience.
Brands and marketing agencies evaluate an influencer's audience, follower count, types of content, and influencer's workflow to find the best influencer for their company, brand, product, or service. Evaluation is a mixture of benchmarks, predictive analytics, and ai influencer evaluation tools such as Google Analytics, Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social and influencer marketing platforms such as AspirelIQ, Upfluence, BuzzSumo, and NinjaOutreach. These tools help companies and brands identify the right influencers for their target audience, track content creators' successes, and measure return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing efforts.
If you own or manage a website, you know bots and "fake followers" can be a problem. Fake followers could be as high as one in four, according to a Forbes post last year, so we recommend modeling in twenty to thirty percent fake followers. Here are other modeling recommendations:
Target Audience Look for influencers whose demographics and psychographics mirror your company, brand, and products. Only create partnerships with Chevy truck-driving influencers if your brand is a Ferrari.
Influencer Values As I shared in Start with Why customers buy who you are more than what or how you do what you do, so evaluate traffic and conversion that come to your website from influencer content, and use one of the sentiment analysis tools Hubspot reviewed in 2021 to understand if an influencer's content creates the same feelings, and so shares your brand's values. When in doubt, ask by completing a survey for your customers to tell you what followers they want most.
Influencer Content Pieces of content influencers share say a lot about their brand. What is better for your brand, TikTok or LinkedIn? Create a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis to understand how their digital marketing and yours can create a rising tide sure to lift all boats and win customer hearts, minds, and loyalty.
AI will impact and change influencer marketing in various ways, from content creation to audience targeting and performance measurement. Some of the ways AI will influence influencer marketing include:
Content AI-powered tools help influencers create and optimize content. Audience engagement improves as AI helps generate captions, hashtags, and relevant keywords. AI will help with video editing, or text-to-image generators like Dall-e will enhance videos and images.
Personalization AI analyzes audience data and preferences to help influencers and the hiring marketing teams better understand their target audience, creating personalized, relevant content. Better personalized content leads to higher engagement rates and stronger connections between influencers, followers, companies, and brands.
Finding Influencers AI algorithms analyze influencer data, such as follower count, engagement rates, audience demographics, and content quality, to help companies and brands identify the most suitable influencers for their marketing strategy.
Sentiment analysis Knowing how content makes your audience feel is crucial when evaluating influencer marketing partnerships. AI can gauge audience sentiment and reactions to create a SWOT for influencer content to inform marketers about influencer marketing partnerships fully.
Analytics AI automates measuring influencer campaign performance by analyzing essential engagement, reach, and conversion metrics. Metrics provide valuable insights for influencers, companies, and brands.
Virtual influencers AI can create virtual or digital influencers, such as computer-generated characters or avatars, that engage audiences in much the same way as human influencers. These virtual influencers can be customized to align with a brand's values, aesthetics, or target audience, offering new influencer marketing possibilities.
Fraud AI algorithms can detect and prevent influencer fraud, such as fake followers or engagement, ensuring that brands invest in genuine influencers with authentic audiences.
Content AI can recommend influencer content based on user behavior and preferences to create the most relevant and engaging content for a target audience or segments within your company, brands, and products.
It's important to use AI technologies responsibly and ethically. Marketers and influencers should be transparent about how they use AI, even when it requires updating privacy, data security, and other terms. While there is no putting the AI tools genie back into the bottle, how you use these new artificial intelligence social media and content creation tools to craft influencer marketing partnerships and campaigns speaks to your company's brand and products' future.