Influencer marketing has seen a massive explosion in popularity over the last year. Big Commerce goes on to note that 17% of businesses who use influencer marketing will sink more than half of their marketing budget on this channel in 2020. With such a massively growing industry, it’s not surprising to see companies making a few missteps here and there. Influencers are, after all, only human. However, with the help of artificial intelligence, businesses might get a little bit of assistance with their influencer marketing woes.
AI and Influencer Marketing
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have already proven their use. Whether it’s finding cost-effective local SEO services directing us to the best deals in the shopping district, AI has shown it has the potential to understand humanity at a fundamental level. However, AI can do more than just help us figure out mundane, everyday things like this. Development in the field has made it useful in finding influencers that appeal to a business’s core demographic. Let’s look at a few of the ways that AI can help businesses with their influencer marketing.
Choosing The Right Influencer
Influencers can either be general or niche. General influencers command a larger audience and have more extensive outreach. You can think about them like tapping into the audience of a television channel. Not all the viewers will want your product, but some may be interested enough to find out more. Niche influencers are a lot more focused on a topic, but as a result, they tend to have fewer overall followers. This fact might sound like a bad thing. Still, if those followers are interested in a particular niche, and your product serves that niche, it might be more lucrative than signing a general influencer. Buffer calls these niche personnel “micro-influencers” and states that they tend to have higher engagement rates than general influencers. AI can help businesses locate the micro-influencer that best appeals to the product they’re marketing.
Limit the Post Presence
One of the less explored yet powerful methods of increasing engagement is to sponsor a single post by an influencer. When hiring an influencer over a month, some of them make the mistake of overposting. Having multiple posts throughout the contract period saturates their feed and lowers your product placement’s overall impact. Selecting an influencer then pinpointing what they should post and when would take a lot of research, usually. Artificial intelligence has made this a much easier process. Smart Data Collective mentions that Big Data allows us to delve into the intricacies of influencer outreach, enabling us to inform our decisions better. This decision is one that could benefit from leveraging AI.
Bypassing the Agency
Typically, when a business is seeking an influencer that matches their needs, they go to an influencer agency. Agencies usually have several dozen to several hundred influencers working with them. Because companies don’t have the time, influencer agencies often take creative control and advise the influencer on how to approach the campaign. AI allows a business to bypass these agencies and contact influencers directly. The influencer themselves might be a bit more inclined to listen since they don’t have to pay a cut out of the price to their agency. This difference may result in more manageable costs for influencer marketing.
AI can Offer Remarkable Influencer Results
Artificial intelligence has the potential to advise us on a wide variety of topics. Once it gets enough data, it can give you valuable insights based on the target demographic and product coverage. With a well-trained analytics staff, a company can potentially start pitching influencers directly, cutting out the agency as a middle man. Not only does it allow the business to have full creative control over their ad campaigns. It also helps them to hyper-focus their targeting and lower their costs, all in one move.
