How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Changing Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has been rising steadily, with the market size reaching $16.4 billion in 2022 alone. With almost every marketer running some form of influencer marketing campaign strategy, it's no surprise that there's a surge in the number of influencers year after year. And why not? Influencer marketing has proven to be effective at generating conversions and sales.

But there's a catch. Although the industry is growing, it isn't without challenges. Around 67% of brands are concerned with influencer fraud, and almost 30% of marketers have difficulties measuring the ROI of their campaigns. Other common issues include finding the right influencers and knowing the appropriate compensation. 

But with the advances in AI technology and machine learning, marketers can say goodbye to these challenges for good. Here's a rundown of how AI is changing influencer marketing by solving these inherent problems and providing new and exciting avenues.

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Changing Influencer Marketing:

How AI is Solving Influencer Marketing Challenges

Influencer marketing remains one of the most effective marketing strategies in 2023 and beyond. Marketers agree that it's effective at generating the highest ROI and producing the most significant value for their brands.

But it's not all rainbows and sunshine for influencer marketers. Fraud, accurate audience insights, content selection, and campaign analysis are common challenges every marketer has to grapple with. Fortunately, AI in influencer marketing is promising, and as the industry evolves, there is hope.

Preventing Influencer Fraud

Influencer fraud is a harsh reality costing brands billions of dollars in wasted marketing budget. Influencer marketing is a highly competitive niche, and scrupulous influencers buy fake followers and falsify engagement rates. When brands partner with such individuals, their ROI expectations are skewed. Your influencer marketing metrics indicate that there's interest and engagement. However, there's no actual conversion to sales. 

AI intelligence tools help you avoid influencer fraud by deep diving into an influencer's profile and noticing any signs of fraud. They go beyond the superficial stats of followers and recent content and can detect sudden massive spikes in followers, indicating that those could be purchased. They can also uncover potential problems like old content that doesn't align with your brand positioning. 

AI helps prevent fraud by identifying fake accounts and bots, ensuring that only real people are reached with the content.

Deep Analysis of Influencer Audiences

In the past, influencer marketing agencies relied on Facebook's Open Graph to scout target audiences and find the perfect influencers instantly. But since Facebook closed off this functionality due to a scandal, marketers are left to deal with muddy data producing inconsistent results. 

AI in influencer marketing is addressing this glaring challenge. Using AI and machine learning, marketers can gauge whether an influencer's followers match their target demographics. Influencer marketing platforms commonly have audience analysis which scans an influencer's followers and churns out impressive demographic data. AI tools also help you gauge the level of engagement of an influencer's followers. A huge follower count doesn't always translate to massive engagement, and AI tools reveal that. 

Brands can now choose influencers based on their expertise. 

Matching the right content for the right influencer

Influencer marketing involves giving influencers control over how they depict your brand. You trust them to present your brand in the best possible way but sometimes, working with the wrong influencers achieves the opposite. 

Finding the perfect influencer is key to the success of any campaign, but it's easier said than done. AI intelligence tools help brands find the ideal influencer by checking how well they align with your values and mission. AI tools can conduct a deep search to identify the influencer's other brand affinities and check their other activities to mitigate any risks. Working with the right influencers ensures you protect your brand and the brand image you've worked hard to build. 

AI also helps you find the best type of content that works well with every influencer. Say goodbye to A/B testing and rely on data to tell you the winning content for every influencer. With AI tools, you can monitor millions of topics daily to find the ones that real people interact with. Using this information, you can collaborate with the influencer to create content guaranteed to produce the highest engagement. 

AI can help to create personalized content for each influencer based on their followers, interests, and history with the brand. This ensures that the content is relevant and engaging for each influencer, resulting in higher engagement rates.

Analyzing campaign metrics and performance

When working with dozens of influencers, it can be challenging to know which campaigns are performing and which aren't. AI in influencer marketing helps you connect important metrics like brand mentions, traffic, and conversions directly to an influencer's specific initiatives. You can do this in real-time and monitor if influencers are achieving the agreed goals with their followers. 

AI helps measure an influencer campaign's performance and provides insights into what works well and what could be improved. This helps to optimize future campaigns for better results. AI also offers real-time insights into the performance of an influencer campaign, allowing businesses to make changes on the fly to improve outcomes.

AI also monitors competitors' initiatives by setting competitive benchmarks to measure audience sentiments in real time. With 9 out of 10 marketers using influencer marketing, there's a huge chance your competitors are doing the same. If you know how your campaigns stack up against the competition, you can quickly launch new campaigns when you notice that they're eating up your share of voice. You can also quickly see what's working well and increase spending for these campaigns. 

Improved negotiations for influencer compensation and incentives

One of the biggest challenges for marketers is knowing how much to spend for each influencer marketing campaign. AI tools for influencer marketing can look at tons of influencers' historical data and compare their content and performance with each other. Then the AI algorithm can decide on the most effective incentives. 

Knowing this information helps marketers have the upper hand during negotiations, so they know how much to pay for the right influencers.

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How AI Is Transforming the Influencer Marketing Industry

AI in influencer marketing doesn't just solve challenges. It brings the game to a whole new level. 

Enforcing contract terms and NDAs

Copyright infringement automatic notices are essential in ensuring that every influencer abides by the contract. Artificial intelligence tools can automate the entire contract process and detect if an influencer is likely to break it. This information will help marketers mitigate any risks before closing a deal and prevent any infringements from happening. 

AI can also help monitor influencers if they comply with FTC regulations and other government regulations. This will help brands avoid penalties and mitigate potential damage from non-compliance.

Predicting an influencer's future performance

No one can predict the future, but with AI tools, you can get a pretty accurate depiction. With the help of natural language processing (NLP), AI can predict if an influencer can meet a brand's objectives. This prediction is a powerful tool that accurately gauges the success of a campaign. 

By predicting in advance the likelihood of an influencer campaign's success, marketers can avoid working with those who won't be able to deliver results. AI reduces trial and error in looking for and working with the right influencers. AI can even predict if an influencer's "influence" will improve or decline over time. 

AI can also help businesses identify potential partnerships with micro-influencers, who often have more engaged audiences than more prominent influencers. This helps to reach a wider audience with more relevant content, resulting in increased brand awareness and higher sales conversions.

Running simultaneous influencer campaigns seamlessly

Running an influencer marketing campaign involves a lot of moving parts. You determine the start and end dates of the campaign, review the metrics and engagement rates, track the content each influencer produces, and compare the actual results with the initial goals. 

Using AI, you can keep all these data points in a central location and extract powerful insights. The more data points are fed to an AI solution, the more dots it can connect. Plus, scalability doesn't become an issue since AI solutions help run campaigns seamlessly for influencers with various follower sizes. 

Working with virtual influencers

Perhaps the most visible contribution of AI to influencer marketing is the presence of virtual influencers. In recent years, there has been a growing trend of businesses using virtual influencers to promote their products or services. Virtual influencers are digital avatars that are controlled by real people and used to create genuine-seeming social media content. 

There are several advantages to using virtual influencers. 

• More cost-effective than traditional celebrity endorsements 
• Greater control over the messaging and image of virtual influencers
• Ability to provide a consistent brand message
• Reach a wider audience than celebrities who are limited by their follower count 
• A unique way to create an emotional bond with target audiences
• Curated influencer personalities for each target segment
• Provides integrated analytics that results in more accurate metrics

However, there are also some disadvantages. 

• Businesses may have less control over virtual influencers than they think
• Virtual influencers can be perceived as inauthentic or even creepy 
• Human narrative can be lacking, resulting in less deep engagement

Using virtual influencers offer high engagement for now because of the novelty, but it remains to be seen whether they will be a mainstay in the future. 

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AI Influencer Marketing Platforms

Here are some of the leading influencer marketing platforms with integrated AI tools to help you achieve the above advantages. 

1. Grin

Grin is one of the best AI influencer marketing platforms for businesses seeking to scale influencer marketing efforts. With its AI-driven analytics, Grin provides users with valuable insights into audience demographics, engagement rates, and ROI. Campaign creation is quite user-friendly and in-platform product seeding and payments streamline operations. Grin’s proprietary algorithm evaluates influencers’ authority, ensuring data-backed decisions. The platform also enables influencer collaboration and compensation management, making it an all-in-one solution for influencer marketing success. 

2. Influencity

Influencity is one of the oldest and most established influencer marketing platforms out there. It got this far because it kept innovating to address the needs of the industry. One way it does that is by providing precision discovery and look-alike tools that help marketers create highly relevant influencer lists. Their AI platform predicts how the influencer group will perform as a whole, helping you understand the success or failure of your campaign.