The Impact of AI on the Influencer Marketing Industry

As sure as smartphones have transformed our everyday lives, artificial intelligence (AI) has influenced the influencers and changed the marketing industry for good.

 

Brands and influencers alike are leveraging the power of AI to change the ways they work, but what does that look like in practice? What’s actually changing for good and not for worse and how can we manage it to make our collective world of marketing and consumerism a better place?

 

Let’s take a look at the impact AI has had and perhaps will have on the influencer marketing industry we know and love…

 

Understanding the Role of AI in Influencer Marketing

What is AI in Influencer Marketing?

AI has a range of applications in the influencer marketing industry and the list is ever-growing (sort of inevitable really, wasn’t it?). It’s currently leveraged to assist with everything from influencer selection and targeting to content creation and analytics, so it’s already an established tool with many a benefit, but it also comes with significant challenges and limitations (more on those later).

How Does AI Work in the Influencer Marketing Industry?

Influencer marketing currently enjoys a bunch of benefits from the use of AI. Data analysis of user profiles is quicker, audience insights are vaster and campaign optimisation is slicker all-round. 

 

Influencers can turn to AI for help with content creation, so long as its usage adheres to rules and regulations set by their partner brands and the wider industry. Of course, transparency and trustworthiness are crucial elements of this practice—no influencer is going to be getting any influencing done if their content is blatantly AI-generated and far from tailored to their audience.

 

Brands can use AI for overall campaign management from start to finish, making it easier to pinpoint the right voices to market their products and speed up processes like payments and approvals of the content influencers provide.

 

Take influencer selection as a quick example. AI can analyse thousands of social profiles post-haste and deliver instant insights on follower numbers, engagement rates and even tones of voice, so brands can quickly develop long-lists of potential partners to assess. 

 

That’s where the element of personalisation comes in for brand managers to find the right storyteller for their brand and decide how to reach out to influencers in the appropriate field in the right ways. Crucially, AI can do the big jobs quickly, but still relies on human input for true personalisation. 

 

It also comes to the fore for the likes of tracking and reporting for accurate results—real-time engagement insights can lead to real-time changes to campaigns by way of predictive analytics, so campaign managers don’t have to keep their eyes peeled 24 hours a day.

 

Bulls-AI: Enhanced Targeting and Personalisation

Every brand’s (pipe)dream is to achieve pinpoint precision with its audience targeting. Of course, that can never be 100% accurate, but AI is getting us closer to such a marketing utopia.

 

Campaign effectiveness can be drastically improved when AI is trained on collecting data about demographics, user behaviours and industry interests. Brand managers armed with such insights can be more confident about picking the right collaborators to promote their products because they know they’ll be talking to an audience that’s more engaged with what they have to say.

 

This level of personalisation can lead to greater customer engagement and, ultimately, long-term loyalty if brands can hit the bulls-AI.

 

McDonald’s, for instance, collaborated with Influential on an AI-driven marketing campaign for its new Buttermilk Crispy Tenders a few years back. Analysing millions of data points to find the right users to target led to an uptick in purchase intent of 6.6% versus previous campaigns. 

 

Volvo Cars turned to Influencer.ai to find target buyers for its XC90 in Sweden and identified micro-influencers to help it do so via audience demographic and behavioural data.

 

Consumer targeting is only becoming more accurate thanks to AI, but that’s not the only benefit for brands like those. 

 

Getting Smart with Content Creation and Optimisation

Both brands and influencers can reap the rewards of putting AI to work on their content. From relevance to rapid deployment, this is where the manual processes involved in creation and optimisation get chucked into the gutter.

 

AI can personalise content to match tone of voice and look and feel so both parties can better engage their target audiences. From editing scripts to colour-grading images, AI tools analyse millions of pieces of existing content to know what works and what doesn’t, so there’s much less guesswork involved these days.

 

Content creators can lean on AI to suggest hashtags, descriptions, captions, alt texts and calls-to-action for images and videos, too, so their appeals feel as relevant to potential buyers as they would if they came from a friend.

 

Naturally, no two platforms are the same, so it’s necessary for brands and influencers to adapt their approaches to content creation across different channels. 

 

Taking a Closer Look with Visual Recognition Technology

Content optimisation with AI doesn’t stop there. Top brands can not only use it in the research process to pick out appearances of their logos and products, but they can even glean insights into the sentiment portrayed by influencers in their videos, which can be particularly handy for competitor analysis and content creator oneupmanship if they detect gaps in the reviews.

 

AI can also read audience engagement stats of such videos to inform ongoing content optimisation as part of a wider strategy. If it can spot when logos or products are used incorrectly by any given influencers, it can offer insights and suggestions for improvements in the next piece of campaign content. Smart stuff, indeed.

 

Not-So-Deep Fakes: Detecting Influencer Fraud with AI

Transparency is a hot topic in the influencer marketing industry—and rightly so. How are consumers expected to engage with a brand or an influencer if their content is disingenuous? 

 

This is another area in which we’re seeing significant growth in the assistance machine learning (ML) can provide. AI algorithms can be trained on key indicators of fraudulent activity and they know fake followers and engagement numbers when they see them. This allows brands to give wannabe influencers the swerve and avoid wasting any time or money on them from the start. 

 

It’s this level of insight that can help build trust in influencer marketing campaigns because both the brands and influencers involved can start building genuine relationships from the get-go. Again, it all comes down to that word: transparency.

 

Adhering to Industry Regulations around AI

While there are no rules or regulations in place right now with regard to using AI in influencer marketing, there are some relevant guidelines that can help ensure transparency remains at the core for all parties.

 

Brands and influencers in the UK are expected to fully disclose their collaboration in any content generated for a campaign, whether it came via AI or not. A lot of influencer-generated content is designed to seamlessly slip into a social feed as an editorial and not an advertorial, so the onus is on the creators of said content to make the nature of the collaboration clear to any viewers. The importance of this transparency increases if, indeed, AI was used to create the content in the first place.

 

Most people can call out fake or poor-quality AI-generated content in their social feeds, so brands and influencers can only come good with such an approach if they maintain complete honesty throughout.

 

Naturally, as the use of AI in the industry grows, the likelihood of AI-focused regulations entering the fray increases, so it’s only a matter of time before deliberately misleading content becomes illegal in many regions. 

 

Until then, brands, influencers and influencer marketing platforms like Gifta are rightly expected to hold themselves accountable when it comes to leveraging AI for content campaigns.

Navigating the Ethics of AI in Influencer Marketing

On top of the broader ethical considerations around trust and transparency, there are also issues around bias, privacy and data security to overcome before AI use is fully integrated into the influencer marketing industry.

 

Mass analyses of social profiles and personal information like content consumption and general online behaviours throw up a number of questions. How do brands ensure they have the necessary consent to use AI to gather these details about potential customers? How do they navigate the privacy requirements that come with hyper-personalisation? 

 

By virtue of the fact that AI algorithms are fed only information that came before (owing to the nature of human input), how do we ensure they make unbiased recommendations on an ongoing basis? 

 

When the world is constantly changing around us, it’s so important that AI is used sensibly and responsibly with these challenges in mind. They won’t be solved overnight, but they can’t be ignored through a lack of due diligence either…

What Does the Future of Influencer Marketing with AI Hold?

The possibilities that AI brings to the table in influencer marketing are almost endless, but their effectiveness depends on brands, influencers and platforms taking responsibility from day dot.

 

We need meticulously managed databases if we’re going to rely on increasingly complex algorithms to find target buyers. We need sharper sentiment analysis if AI is going to eventually create virtual influencers and, indeed, real-world buyers are going to relate to them. We need a deeper understanding of how humans and AI can collaborate to benefit everyone and not just a select few.

 

If it’s not implemented properly, automation can create as many issues as it can solve, so the future of AI in influencer marketing remains both precarious and promising in equal measures. 

 

Wherever AI goes as a technology, one thing’s for sure: we’re undeniably in a watch-this-space kind of moment right now…