How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Influencer Marketing Industry

Recently, influencer marketing has become increasingly data-driven and this trend is here to stay. The more data we have, the more overwhelming it will be to process it manually.

Even the number of creators is hitting records: the barrier to entry is close to non-existent and new nano-influencers go viral every other day.

That's why businesses of all sizes are looking for efficient ways to capitalize on AI in influencer marketing, implement marketing automation, easily detect patterns, and improve their overall decision-making processes. In a world where time is money and information is in over-abundance, spot-on business insights become an invaluable asset.

While many companies bet on influencer marketing effectiveness, as with everything else, it needs proper analytics tools. In this post, we'll have a look into the evolution of influencer marketing and the role AI is playing in it right now.

When talking about AI in marketing, people usually refer to tools that help automate time-consuming tasks. But AI is not just automation. AI-driven analytics is another important area. It is a process of analyzing data and deriving insights.

There are a few ways how AI and analytics can transform the way you run and view your campaigns: from something as obvious as measuring effectiveness to something as complex as building forecasting models.

With proper AI and analytics solutions, you can feel more at ease when measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. AI can detect what went wrong and what was successful and provide you with analytics for better (and quicker!) decision-making.

Despite what you might have heard about AI and the way it can take over the world, at the end of the day, it is still just a tool. And it's up to us, humans, to choose in what way we use this tool — whether it is to get analytics or anything else.

With greater power come greater analytics.

Thanks to various automation apps and smart algorithms, there are now dozens of fraudulent behaviors employed by creators of all sorts and kinds:

• Buying fake audience,
  
• Using engagement pods,
  
• Phishing,
  
• And others.
  

These behavior patterns are quite difficult to detect because they evolve very quickly and are usually used in combination. For example, some Instagram users might use several fraudulent tactics that are hard to detect manually. AI and analytics tools can help you with this.

A successful influencer marketing campaign starts with a correctly defined target audience.

A deep analysis of the target audience is not just related to demographics. If you incorporate AI and analytics into your day-to-day job, your audience analysis can go much deeper:

• Does the influencer's content match your brand voice and style?
  
• What other brands does the influencer promote and mention?
  
• How many fake vs. real followers does the influencer have?
  
  

You can ask even more granular questions and drill down into the audience analytics until you detect the perfect fit.

Doing tedious A/B testing and manual analytics will soon be a thing of the past.

AI and modern analytics solutions can do the work for you and detect what type of content works best with which influencer. Not everyone is great with videos and not everyone is a word wizard. Depending on what you need for your campaign and what your target audience wants, you can detect creators that specialize in a specific type of content.

AI can do a lot of different tasks:

• monitor and scan millions of recently published posts,
  
• determine the ones that generated the highest engagement or exposure,
  
• provide you with in-depth analytics on the influencer's audience and profile.

AI is also good for building forecasts. Long gone are the days when marketers had to manually create forecasts and predictions. AI has access to publicly available information and can analyze it for you.

While the heated discussion around the metaverse might have subsided for the time being, virtual influencers are still in the spotlight.

They are not real people, they are animated characters generated by artificial intelligence. These characters have personalities and some distinctive characteristics that differentiate them from others.

Brands use them for their flexibility. Unlike real people, characters created by AI can work anytime and from anywhere in the world. They are not humans after all, so they don't engage in political discussions and can be very much aligned with the brand's campaign (in fact, as much aligned as the brand needs them to be).

Whether it's a passing trend or they are here to stay, only time will tell. But they are for sure getting some traction and eyeballs of a few very large corporations. So if you have the budget and have been thinking about what it would take to make your influencer marketing a bit spicier, roll up your sleeves — this trend is worth your attention.

As you can see, AI and analytics are transforming influencer marketing in different ways. Even if you're not ready for something as trendy as virtual influencers (or if you are not inspired by this idea), you can still find many different applications for AI that will help you optimize your campaign.

And if you need help with this, let us know. We have an in-house team of AI influencer marketing experts. HypeFactory has also developed HypeDetect, a powerful AI tool, that we successfully use to optimize client's campaigns.