Creative Intelligence for Influencer Marketing Delivers Higher ROI

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing every aspect of business, but influencer marketing is behind the curve. While other areas of digital marketing have been using analytics for years, influencer marketing continues to take an old-fashioned manual approach. Creative marketers stumble through a fog of intuitive assumptions instead of following data-driven criteria.

Subjective criteria drive the selection of influencers and creative strategies. Irrelevant statistics are passed for ROI tracking. Scaling strategies hit their targets with all the accuracy of a shot in the dark.

This blind inefficiency translates into wasted marketing spend. Efforts to cut costs through automated solutions typically fail to maintain the tone of human authenticity necessary for effective influencer marketing. Budgets are being filled at the expense of missing marketing goals and revenue targets. Marketing teams need a better solution, and they need it now.

There’s good news, though—a new and better way to leverage influencers is for marketers who are asking for more. Today’s AI now allows you to use creative intelligence data to understand target audience personas, connect audiences with influencers, optimize campaign content, and track your performance with measurable KPIs.

The result is that influencer marketing campaigns can now benefit from the same measurable ROI tracking as paid performance advertising. Now you can achieve your influencer marketing goals without breaking your budget.

In this three-part series, we’ll explore the future of influencer marketing by exploring how creative intelligence and content AI are disrupting the industry. First, here in Part 1, we’ll take a look at the old way of doing influencer marketing and determine why it doesn’t work.

Then, in Part 2, we’ll reveal how Creative Intelligence overcomes traditional limitations through data analysis, influencer selection, campaign messaging, and results tracking. Finally, in Part 3, we discuss an action plan for launching an effective ROI-based influencer marketing campaign using today’s technology.

What’s wrong with influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing exists like social media, but has been slower to harness the full power of automation. Marketing campaign managers still use mechanical methods to select influencers, using intuitive, subjective criteria.

This can involve time-consuming prospecting, lengthy contract negotiations, and high costs for content development. If you’re lucky, you might end up connecting with the right influencer for your target audience. If you’re not, you could be spending long hours at high costs without seeing any return on investment.

Despite these drawbacks, influencer marketers still use manual methods alongside inadequate influencer search platforms. Often times, this manual approach seems to be the only way to build genuine connections with influencers who create authentic content.

The alternative is automation, which works well when done right, but can be just as wasteful as manual methods and even less effective when done conventionally. Automated solutions mediated by advertising agencies can create more impressions faster, but at the cost of sacrificing human authenticity.

High impressions don’t mean much when you’re delivering your message through influencers who don’t match your target market, or if your message and content aren’t targeted to what your audience wants. If your automated campaigns aren’t guided by a smart strategy and informed by measurable goals and benchmarks, you’ll end up losing money without real profit.

Adding to the pile of issues, agencies and influencers are more than happy to take your money to provide you with misleading statistics that don’t reflect meaningful results. For example, CPM-based influencer marketing KPIs might show how many impressions you’re getting without demonstrating how well those impressions are converting to business goals.

Without knowing which metrics matter and where your data is coming from, you are vulnerable to statistical games of your marketing budget. These disappointing and confusing results may question the value of influencer marketing. These are some of the symptoms of what is wrong with conventional creator marketing as it is widely practiced today. But what is the cause of the problem? And what is the solution?

Traditional influencer marketing doesn’t work

A lack of actionable business intelligence is at the root of many problems with influencer marketing. Effective use of automation for digital marketing requires reliable data and accurate analysis. This includes intelligently gathering historical performance data to create a baseline.

This gives you a foundation for driving future results by replicating what works and fixing what doesn’t. To do this, you need the ability to analyze previous posts, messages, keywords and phrases to see what is driving current performance.

1. Missing data will miss the mark

Unfortunately, if you don’t have this data and the tools to analyze it, you don’t have a reliable basis for managing the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign. And getting the data you need manually is not easy.

For example, you might rely primarily on Facebook data and not know that the influencers you need to connect with are talking on Reddit. There are literally hundreds of data sources with potentially relevant information, including social media, website data, and email, that can be used as a guide if used correctly. And in today’s multimedia environment, you need to include not only textual data, but also images and videos.

If you only use data from your favorite sources, at best you will only have a partial perspective on your market. At worst, you may end up chasing biased exceptions and missing the mark.

2. Skewed data analysis distorts the focus of the campaign

Lack of relevant data is only part of the problem. Even when you have data, analyzing it and turning it into actionable intelligence is a challenge. Here you need to know which metrics are important for your goals. If you’re not using the right KPIs to segment your data, all the information in the world won’t help.

For example, let’s say you focused on which influencers make the most impressions. However, in the process, you inadvertently neglect to discover what type of content works best with your target audience. You may end up presenting your brand to the right audience but with the wrong content. This can result in high impressions but low engagement and low conversion.

Optimizing your content isn’t just about knowing which medium or channel to use. For example, you may know that your audience prefers videos, but what kind of videos do they like? How long do you like to watch? What camera angles, subjects, and editing styles are perfect for your target audience?

For best results, you need to look deeper into your data than superficial analytics. This is another problem with manual methods and old-school automation: you’re only scratching the surface of all the relevant variables that could affect your results.

3. Poor data tracking skews ROI in the wrong direction

Ignoring relevant variables ultimately limits your ability to track your investment. To accurately measure ROI, you need to go beyond generic KPIs and specify which metrics are important to your campaign goals and the channels you’re targeting. For example, the KPIs that define a successful brand awareness campaign on TikTok are different from the ones you would use for a product promotion campaign on YouTube.

Along with relevant KPIs, you need measurable benchmarks to guide your campaign and track your results. This allows you to adjust your performance in progressive iterations that will drive you towards your campaign goals. Without these guidelines, you have no way to monitor your ROI and correct campaign underperformance.

Stop guessing

Without the right data and analytics tools to track accurate ROI, what you’re left with is intuitive guesswork that doesn’t work as a marketing strategy. Without the necessary business intelligence, you’re stuck with speculation.

Without relevant data, you have to make educated guesses about who your audience is, what they want, and where to find them. You can only guess which influencers to work with, what creative strategy to use, and how to track your return on investment.

It’s not hard to see where this approach will lead us. Instead of a profitable return on investment, you get meaningless metrics and confusing results that don’t tell you what you need to know. At the end of your campaign, you have no quantifiable way to measure your performance and no actionable insights on what steps to take to improve your ROI.

So what is the solution? Enter performance-based influencer marketing built on creative intelligence:

Part 2 of 3: Creative Intelligence is rewriting the standards of influencer marketing—