When we think about artificial intelligence, we instantly picture an intelligent robot that can mimic human behavior. However, there’s so much more to AI than that.
In recent years, AI has made an impact on almost every aspect of the business, and marketing is no exception. AI has numerous applications in marketing from engaging prospective customers using chatbots on websites to recommending products and driving more sales.
However, one area where the applications of AI are still not much talked about is influencer marketing. People think that influencer marketing is just as simple as finding a popular influencer in your field and paying them to post some promotional content.
That is simply not correct. There’s a lot of organized thought and planning that goes into running successful influencer marketing campaigns. From finding the right influencer to determining payment terms to evaluating performance, influencer marketing campaigns take a lot of work.
Luckily for you, AI can help with all of these aspects of influencer marketing and can help you improve your influencer campaigns significantly.
Want to find out how AI can help with influencer marketing?
Read this post to find out.
1. Find the Right Influencers
One of the most common use cases of AI in influencer marketing is to find influencers for brand collaborations. There are many platforms to find influencers that use AI technology to analyze influencers’ social media accounts.
AI, combined with natural language processing (NLP), can scan through all the content posted by an influencer and analyze it in detail. This way, it can understand if the influencer’s personal style matches your brand’s persona or not.
While most analytics tools can fetch metrics on followers and engagement, AI can even look at qualitative factors like relevance. And, that, is how AI can up your influencer marketing game—by finding the most relevant influencers for your brand.
Want to know the best part?
AI can do this within seconds and find you a whole list of relevant influencers from your niche for you to choose from. So, the main benefit of AI is the speed and scalability that it brings to the whole influencer search process.
2. Ensure Compliance with Disclosure Guidelines
When working with influencers, you need to make sure that they know and follow all disclosure guidelines for sponsored content. These include, but are not limited to, clearly mentioning that a piece of content is sponsored by a brand or is promotional content.
However, despite the strict FTC guidelines, most influencers still don’t follow these rules and often get away with it.
With AI, you can make sure that incidents like these do not happen. AI technology can be used to flag influencer content that does not follow disclosure guidelines. And, given that it can do this quickly and accurately, it saves marketers a lot of time and effort.
Moreover, making sure that influencers follow these guidelines also helps you avoid any potential penalties or negative publicity.
3. Vet Influencers and Weed Out Fake Ones
AI can not only help you find relevant influencers but can also help you choose the right fit for your brand and avoid falling for fake ones.
You can use AI-based tools to analyze and vet each influencer to determine whether they are right for your brand or not. You can also assess their past performance and brand collaborations and see how much they benefited the brands that they collaborated with.
Additionally, AI technology can identify fake or fraudulent influencers and make sure that you don’t waste your money on them. It can spot trends like a sudden surge in followers or fake comments posted by bots to weed out fake influencers.
This, in turn, helps you avoid a waste of money, thus improving the ROI of influencer marketing campaigns.
And, if you don’t want to invest in an AI-based tool yourself, you can always hire an agency to find influencers. Such agencies do all the work on your behalf and make sure that you work only with the best, most trustworthy people.
4. Give Accurate Content Suggestions
AI-based analytics tools can scan through tons of online content to identify the latest content trends and give content recommendations.
One of the biggest challenges that brands and influencers face on social media is to make their content stand out. Grabbing your audience’s attention when there’s so much content online is a daunting task that even influencers fail to accomplish sometimes.
Moreover, you need to tell the influencers that you work with what kind of content you want them to create and design a blog. For that, you need to understand the latest content trends and also know what your audience likes
AI can help you do that. It can not only analyze content trends in your niche, it can also analyze your social media accounts to identify the content types that work best with your audience.
You can use this information to fuel your influencer marketing campaigns. You can guide influencers to create the best-branded content that they can and also optimize your content for social media.
Want to know the best part?
AI can not only analyze text but can scan through visual content as well. AI-based tools can use computer vision to achieve this seemingly impossible task and provide accurate insights.
Based on this, it can provide you with suggestions on which kinds of visuals to use for your campaigns. And, good visual content can take your influencer campaigns to the next level.
5. Track Influencer Performance and Calculate ROI
Another common, yet important, use of AI in influencer marketing is to evaluate influencer and campaign performance and determine ROI.
Most marketers struggle with determining influencer marketing ROI as it is not always the quantitative benefits that an influencer brings to the table. Sometimes, it’s just raising brand awareness or improving your brand image.
AI, however, makes it easier to determine your campaign ROI. It can be used to assess qualitative things like consumer sentiment before and after a campaign to see if your brand image improved.
Other than that, AI can analyze your influencer campaigns over time to provide insights into improvement areas. You can identify areas that could have been improved to get better results. This helps you improve your strategy and performance over time.
Want to know more?
AI can also assess each influencer’s individual performance to help you identify the top-performing ones. You can use those insights to retain the best influencers for your future campaigns and let the others go.
Following this practice can help you create a team of top-performing influencers that get you good results every single time. This, again, helps improve the ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns.
There are many influencer marketing or social media tools that can help you track your campaign performance. And, many of these come with AI technology to provide really detailed insights.
6. Determine the Right Influencer Fees and Incentives
One of the biggest challenges of influencer marketing is to determine the right fees for influencers. When it comes to influencer payments, there’s a lot of ambiguity.
There are no hard-and-fast rules about what the ideal fee for an influencer should be. Most brands are confused about what to even offer or where to start the negotiation. In such cases, they either rely on the number of followers as a benchmark or let the influencers ask their price.
However, AI can make things easier and look beyond vanity metrics to determine an influencer’s true worth. It can accurately suggest each influencer’s fee or incentive based on their potential and how much they can benefit you.
This can, in turn, make sure that the contract is mutually beneficial for all parties involved. This, of course, also improves the return on investment of your influencer marketing campaigns.
Many AI-based tools have been launched in recent years that you can use to get an estimate of how much you should pay an influencer. Here’s an example of one such tool that uses AI and machine learning to give a fair estimate of influencer fee per post.
Image via HypeAuditor
What’s Next?
Now that you know the benefits that AI brings to your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s time that you start using it to your advantage. Invest in the right AI-based influencer marketing tools to take your influencer campaigns to the next level.
You can invest in a good influencer search tool to find the right influencers for your campaigns. Or you can also opt for all-in-one influencer marketing tools that can help you run successful campaigns end-to-end.
It is up to you to decide how much you want to rely on AI to improve your influencer campaigns. But you definitely can’t ignore the potential of AI in influencer marketing anymore.
Do you have any more questions about the applications of AI influencer marketing and how you can leverage it? Feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below.
