No matter what type of product or service your brand offers, chances are you have at least heard of influencer marketing — or you may already be leveraging it. Influencer marketing aligns you with specific creators who will help draw awareness to your brand, create credibility, and ultimately drive conversions. The influencer industry is already projected to reach $16.4 billion globally in 2022.
But the industry is evolving. Working with influencers used to be a guessing game, which typically boxed them into working with major players only (think Tyler Oakley and Warby Parker). Now, as the industry has grown, smaller influencers and brands are able to form partnerships successfully, thanks to better technology. So not only has technology expanded access in the world of influencer marketing, but it’s now equipping brands with more information about which influencers will best meet their needs.
Artificial intelligence offers an instant upgrade to any digital marketer’s strategy — especially when it comes to influencer marketing. AI advertising tools can scan a potential influencer’s followers and insights to give you a sense of whether they’re a good fit for your brand. Plus, AI can help determine which influencers have truly quality accounts that you would be proud to associate with your brand.
Read on to find out our top five best practices for leveraging AI advertising tools to jump-start your influencer marketing.
1.Stay away from inflated metrics.
As with all forms of digital advertising, finding the right influencers comes with inherent risk. Even when dealing with influencer networks, which can give you access to trust influencers across various industries, advertisers have to be cautious about inflated metrics, engagement, or followers. Make sure an influencer’s engagement rate isn’t inflated by fake followers or other tactics.
2. Find influencers that share your brand’s vision and values.
Many influencer partnerships are obvious, such as beauty influencers and makeup brands or travel influencers and luggage companies. However, the rise of micro-influencers has brought more opportunities for brands to partner with people across varying types of content and in varying niches. This means that you have opportunities for less obvious influencer partnerships based on other interests their followers may have that align with certain segments of your audience.
The increase in AI technology across influencer marketing enables brands to uncover these previously hidden audience segment connections. Within an influencer’s scope, there may be crossover to other industries that brands had never realized until audience targeting, analysis, and AI came into play. As a result, the world of influencer marketing has opened up far beyond the 1:1 connection, giving brands more opportunities to interact and work with influencers.
3. Leverage AI to inform compensation.
Because influencer marketing is still a relatively new medium, influencer compensation can be tricky to navigate. Bigger influencers who’ve been around longer may establish terms of their own and minimums, but micro-influencers or creators newer to the industry may be more willing to negotiate. Either way, it’s important to ensure that your investment is worthwhile by doing appropriate quality checks and vetting potential partners. AI-powered advertising tools can help you predict how much engagement a specific influencer is likely to create for your brand.
4. Maintain your brand image.
When partnering with influencers, brands are putting trust in the creators to marry their own authenticity with the brand’s image and tone. The last thing you want is to invest in an advertising campaign that ends up striking the wrong tone with your audience and alienating them. AI advertising tools allow you to maintain an authentic brand strategy by analyzing photos across different platforms that contain your products, relevant themes, or competitor products. Then, they can generate reports that allow you to understand which influencers fit best with your brand.
5. Test and match the right content type with the right influencer.
AI advertising tools allow you to get granular with the types of content or products you match with certain creators. Think of this as elevated A/B testing in which you can skip the wasted media spend and instead get answers upfront about which creators and content types best prompt potential customers to buy specific products. That means you can more quickly, easily, and cheaply scale your influencer marketing buys across different product or service divisions.
At Digilant, as part of our performance marketing solution, we offer comprehensive influencer marketing solutions to ensure brands are partnered with the best creators to reach their audience. We partner with over 25,000 creators through strategic influencer networks to help you find the best partners for your brand’s advertising needs. We also help monitor and analyze social media content to learn more about consumer insights and provide a detailed report on brand positioning, awareness, and relevance across social media and display platforms.
Most importantly, we’ll help you get optimal digital advertising ROI — while still maintaining an authentic brand strategy and properly leveraging AI advertising tools. Get in touch today to learn more!