Six steps to boost your Influencer Marketing Strategy with AI in 2024

Imagine you have an unlimited budget for your next influencer marketing campaign. Intriguing, isn't it? 🤑

With such vast resources, would you partner with top influencers who have a multi-million audience of followers or take a chance on smaller, niche ones? Tricky question!

The answer might be more complex than the follower count suggests. There is something to reflect on: does a massive follower count always equate to an engaged and dedicated audience?

Let's dive into social media data and influencer industry insights to shed light on this issue. 🚀

The industry snapshot

Influencer Marketing Hub recently published the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report, packed with insights from around 3.5 thousand marketing agencies, brands, and other influencer marketing professionals.

A notable trend to spotlight: 👇

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is transforming how we discover influencers and create impactful campaigns.

Just glance at the diagram below, and you'll see how many marketers plan to use AI and ML in 2023 for their influencer ventures.

Almost 63% of respondents plan to use AI and ML in their influencer marketing strategies. Exciting! 🤩

But, there's more – the trend is leaning towards collaborating with smaller-scale (nano 39% and micro 30%) influencers, leaving behind the pricier macro-influencers (19%) and celebs (12%).

As we navigate the world of influencers and AI-driven strategies, we are happy to showcase how you can harness YouScan’s social listening and influencer discovery capabilities to boost your influencer marketing efforts.

Step 1 – Use Social Audiences to put your influencer discovery on autopilot

First, you can put your influencer discovery on autopilot with our recently announced Social Audiences! 🔥

Picture this: An emerging interior design brand wants to collaborate with influencers who align with interior design and decoration projects. The brand aims to showcase its sophisticated and unique home decor items. 🏡

Instead of tracking specific keywords in social media posts, we can now look at what influencers say about themselves in their profile descriptions on social platforms. This way, we can find the best match for the brand's needs. Cool, isn't it?

Our influencer search focuses on popular platforms like Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and TikTok. And we are also looking for influencers who communicate with an audience in English.

So, with such a search query, we found a bunch of authors with desired profile descriptions! Here are some examples:

With Social Audiences, you can make your influencer search query even more precise by indicating the specific follower count of authors, desired authors’ demographics (gender, age, geography), or mention the required authors' interests.

Make sure to read about the capabilities and use cases of Social Audiences to learn more! 🤓

Step 2 – Explore Audience Insights

Huh, just the list of influencers – not super insightful information, you say? OK, let’s dive deeper then.

With a simple click in the list of influencers in YouScan, you can now choose between:

• nano (1K – 10K followers),

• micro (10K – 100K followers), or 

• macro-influencers (more than 100K followers).

Step 3 – Consider Engagement Rate

In the world of influencer metrics, it's important to look beyond the followers count because not every follower represents genuine engagement.

Let's illustrate with an example: We've identified the top three authors by the number of followers, yet the engagement rates of their posts on social media are surprisingly low.

Why is this happening? 🤔

Overexposure to promotional content can lead genuine followers to skim through influencers’ posts without meaningful interaction. Additionally, among these numerous followers, some accounts may be inactive or less responsive.

So, instead of subscriber count, we recommend shifting your focus to Engagement Rate and Influence Score. You can find these metrics in YouScans Audience Insights report.

• Engagement rate (ER) measures the proportion of the audience that reacts to an author's content with likes, comments, and shares.
  
  

• Influence Score provides a comparative measure of an author's performance against peers on the same platform, rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A higher score indicates higher engagement relative to others.
  

Let's find the ideal influencers on TikTok tailored for the earlier mentioned hypothetical interior design brand. To do this, we sort our authors based on the Engagement Rate.

Interestingly, authors with thousands of subscribers boast a higher Engagement Rate than those with millions. Couple this with an Influence Score, and it's evident that these smaller influencers consistently outperform in terms of engagement compared to the average engagement rate generated by other content creators on TikTok. 

Now, that's a discovery worth acting upon!

Step 4 – Dive into influencers content

To smoothly and effectively integrate our interior design brand promotional message, it's vital to examine the content being published by these influencers.

Let's check the content created by our 5th most successful author, measured by Engagement Rate. It appears that TikToker Marco Zamora, who describes himself as an interior designer and home decorator,not just mentions his profession in his TikTok bio but also crafts content relevant to the field. Perfect match!

Step 5 – Take a look at the content views

Another good strategy for finding influencers relevant to the field is to analyze best-performing pieces of content in terms of views. 

For instance, thanks to TikTok's sophisticated algorithms, a video can gain significant traction and visibility regardless of the influencer's follower count. This demonstrates the importance of content quality for its potential reach.

For example, the highest-viewed publication was a TikTok video by Brianna Via, boasting “just” 134K followers – far fewer than multi-million follower counts. 

Yet, her video garnered an astounding 24.6 million views! 🚀 If we had focused solely on follower count, we might have overlooked the chance to collaborate with this influential creator.

Step 6 – Take a look at visuals

Indeed, while numbers are crucial, occasionally directing your strategy towards visuals can be fruitful. You might discover the ideal influencer to collaborate with, not solely based on their social media buzz but because their content genuinely resonates with your brand's ideas, visual style, and vibe. ✨

YouScan's AI-powered image analysis capabilities, aka Visual Insights, automatically detect more than thousand objects, scenes and activities (and even dominant colors!) in images from social media. They will help you analyze visual content and focus on influencers’ whose aesthetic matches best with your brand!

Imagine a brand that has just unveiled a new collection of furniture for the living room, with lime-colored accents. They're eager to collaborate with influencers, highlighting their living spaces in photographs. 

By leveraging YouScan's Visual Insights, the brand can pinpoint influencers whose living room images predominantly feature the refreshing and vibrant shade of lime 🍋. 

This way, the brand ensures that the influencer has the right audience and aesthetic to represent and genuinely promote the brand's new collection.

The takeaways

✨ Use AI for influencer discovery

Leverage new technologies like YouScan’s Social Audiences and Audience Insights for more innovative and effortless influencer discovery.

🎯 Prioritize niche influencers

Trend alert: micro (10K – 100K) and nano influencers (1K – 10K) are gaining more traction on social platforms. Niche influencers can boast higher engagement and provide better ROI.

💬 Engagement before the follower amount

Consider influencers with high engagement rates and influence scores over mere follower numbers.

🔍 Deep dive into influencer content

The influencers' content should align with your brand and genuinely appeal to your target audience.

🎨 Visual and brand alignment is key

Ensuring the influencers' aesthetic and content vibe align with your brand is as important as the numbers.

Try YouScan now

Want to boost your Influencer Marketing Strategy? Wait no more! 🚀 Book a free Demo of YouScan and experience its powerful capabilities for influencer discovery and influencer marketing.