Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing every aspect of business, but influencer marketing has been comparatively slow to keep up. Most areas of digital marketing have leveraged analytics and AI for years, while influencer marketing remains to a large extent manual. Many strategies depend on subjective selection criteria and antiquated ways of tracking ROI. These strategies often prove wasteful, missing marketing goals and wasting budgets.
Inaccurate measures, such as irrelevant statistics, are often used to track ROI. In the fog of guesswork and intuition that characterizes traditional influencer marketing, strategies for scaling hit their targets with the unpredictability of a shot in the dark.
Fortunately, technological advancement presents a bright new frontier for influencer marketing. Today’s AI enables creative intelligence data to be harnessed to understand target audience personas, match audiences with influencers, optimize campaign content, and track performance against quantifiable KPIs. Influencer marketing campaigns can now attain the same measurable ROI tracking as pay-for-performance advertising.
This article will probe how creative intelligence and content AI are disrupting influencer marketing. Part 1 delves into the existing practices in influencer marketing and why they are outdated and ineffective.
Traditional influencer marketing is plagued with a host of issues. Marketing managers use manual methods and subjective criteria to select influencers. As a result, they often spend significant time and resources without achieving the desired ROI. Researching, negotiating contracts and developing content can be arduous, costly and inefficient. Often the result is high impression campaigns that fail to resonate with the intended audience, resulting in wasted investments and underwhelming conversions. Agencies and influencers may feed marketers misleading data that does not reflect meaningful results.
The core problem with influencer marketing is a lack of actionable intelligence. Successful digital marketing automation requires reliable data and accurate analyses, but these are lacking in traditional influencer marketing approaches. Relevant data from a variety of sources, including social media, website data, and emails, is often overlooked. Analysis of this data is also frequently skewed or insufficient, leading to high impressions but low engagement and conversion rates.
Furthermore, many businesses struggle to track their return on investment accurately. They fail to define the most relevant KPIs for their objectives and to establish measurable benchmarks. The result is a spiralling cycle of intuitive guesswork, confusing results, and an inability to gauge performance or improve ROI effectively.
Looking to the future, the answer lies in performance-based influencer marketing powered by creative intelligence. Part 2 of this series will explore how this innovative approach is rewriting influencer marketing standards. By harnessing AI, marketers can identify relevant data, gain actionable insights, and make informed decisions to enhance their influencer marketing strategies.
