Before discussing how AI can help you find KOLs, let take discuss the context. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly changed and affected our daily lives. It assists people in ways that are beyond human capabilities, and makes tasks a lot easier. Business world is no exception. No matter what type of product or service your business offers, AI has a wide range of uses. Broadly speaking, generative AI can support crucial business needs of many kinds. These cognitive technology solutions are increasingly used to solve challenging business problems.
AI has entered almost all spheres of the business world. Likewise, this AI technology has rapidly been adopted and utilized by marketing industries in recent years. Businesses are developing and implementing AI to increase marketing efficiency. AI technology’s basic principle of automating the process of learning, data capturing, and decision-making significantly enhances marketing performance, especially in digital marketing.
Including Thailand, one of the most innovative and creative ways to utilize AI in digital marketing is to implement AI in key opinion leader (KOL) marketing. This cognitive technology offers an instant upgrade to KOL marketing strategy, and automates marketers’ various everyday tasks. It specifically helps marketers to find the right KOL and significantly increases the success rate of marketing campaigns. However, downsides also coexist with benefits of AI technology. Wrong usage of AI in KOL marketing can damage your campaigns and even cause a loss to your business. This article will delve into AI usage in KOL marketing, and show you how you can utilize AI to successfully grow your business.
How AI Helps You Find the Right KOL
One of the biggest challenges that businesses and marketers commonly face in KOL marketing is identifying the most suitable KOL. This is often due to the difficulties of evaluating the true potential of the KOLs. The process of selecting the right KOL for a given campaign requires deep analysis and understanding of audiences. Therefore, AI technology comes into play here. It revolutionizes the methods that businesses can utilize in their KOL marketing. This artificial cognitive technology enables businesses to analyze facts and figures to get a real idea of whether the KOLs are suitable for their campaigns or not.
Applications of AI in KOL Marketing
Collecting Demographic Data
AI can capture thousands of data that can be used for different purposes. In KOL marketing, AI is often used to extract some essential demographic information. AI analyzes and generates statistics of audiences’ average age, gender, location, and interests. These obtained demographic data significantly supports the businesses’ decision making process. It allows businesses to find a KOL that will be able to connect with the right audience for your brands and define the right target customer group.
AI provides an added insight into relevant and accurate data collection, and simplifies KOL search. AI demographic data capturing technology helps businesses to decide whether or not to approach the KOL with their brands. Moreover, it produces more strategic KOL marketing plans.
Evaluating the KOL’s Performance
Different KOLs, different performance. This is another challenging aspect of KOL marketing. ROI is highly dependent on the choice of the KOL and their performances. Therefore, it is often very difficult to measure and evaluate KOLs’ performances.
With AI, this measurement and evaluation process become easy. Using natural language processing (NLP), AI can forecast how well a KOL will match the businesses’ objectives in marketing campaigns. NLP enables businesses to assess KOLs’ performances by evaluating their content and comments post-by-post. It significantly analyzes how well the audiences have responded to the KOL’s content and posts. Hence, businesses can figure out how much your target audiences have engaged with the KOL, and how aligned the audiences’ voices are with your brands.
If multiple KOLs are working on your campaign, you can use AI to analyze each KOL’s individual performance and identify the best-performing KOLs and posts. This comparison data provided by AI technology can help businesses evaluate how effectively each KOL works with your brands.
Filtering Fake Followers and Detecting Fake Engagement
It is easy to find some cases of marketing campaign failures due to fraudulent KOLs. There are some KOLs who use certain apps and bots to increase their social media activities. Many bands and marketing agencies face challenges when discovering these artificially inflated actions.
The biggest difficulty in selecting the right KOLs for the businesses is often based on these fake followers and fake engagement. As a result, it is the next application of AI in KOL marketing. AI gives an instant analysis of the profile of the KOL. AI technology supports identifying such apps and bots and eliminating phony actions. It makes the distinction between fraudulent KOLs and authentic KOLs, thus, making it simple to distinguish computer-generated followers and engagement.
AI also provides some important metrics to consider when determining whether the KOL’s followers and engagement are genuine or fake. These metrics automatically check the KOL’s follower growth evolution, audience authenticity and demographics, and real engagement rates. These AI programs analyze KOL against collected data, and help businesses to find the right authentic KOL.
Identifying and Delivering Relevant Content
AI in KOL marketing can also be applied when identifying and delivering relevant content. Today, people want and consume content that is tailored to their specific needs and interests. However, for businesses and marketers, it is not easy to predict consumer needs and interests in real time. Regarding these difficulties, AI can assist in content creation. Using AI-powered content creation tools, it becomes a lot easier to analyze numerous content pieces that your target consumers like and share. AI assists observing target audiences’ content consumption and helps your businesses to create similar and better content.
This predictive analytics tool can suggest content improvements for brands’ KOL marketing campaigns. It processes and analyzes large amounts of data, and enables businesses to test KOL ad variants on real audiences and identify the most promising KOL campaigns. This way, businesses can risk-proof their KOL campaign investment and generate a higher ROI from their marketing spend.
Downsides of AI in KOL Marketing
As you can see, AI helps businesses to be automatically matched with the right KOLs. AI-based tools save lots of time and effort for many businesses and marketers to search for the suitable KOLs. However, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to be aware of the downsides of AI in KOL marketing.
Al-based Tools Can be Wrong
AI-based tools might always be mathematically or formulaically accurate. Nevertheless, human activities are a lot more than statistics and figures. Individual consumers are often all unique. They have many different tastes and preferences that cannot be simplified into formulas. Consumer tastes and preferences are constantly growing and transforming, hence AI analytics can not always be right.
Businesses should implement AI tools thoughtfully across their KOL marketing campaigns. AI tools can help them develop strategies and solve problems, but they should understand that there are always outliers. Be aware of the limitation of AI’s ability to operate on these outliers. AI suggested predictions and analysis are reliable, but sometimes it is not enough. Thus, don’t be too obsessed with the AI matrix. Don’t turn to AI simply because you believe it can solve all the problems, but rather because it helps your businesses reach target customers more efficiently.
AI Can’t Replace Human 100%
Another limitation of AI-based tools is that building systems where AI replaces humans 100% is very difficult. Especially when it comes to marketing jobs. KOL marketing jobs often include changing customers’ minds, making unique and creative decisions, and building significant relationships between customers and brands. Businesses will be greatly lacking creativity and cultural reference if they only rely on AI for marketing campaigns.
AI can be used to empower humans for many tasks, however, AI isn’t human enough and limited to creative ability. It is still humans’ job to determine the correct actions based on emotions, feelings, and subjective thinking. AI can become skilled machines, but making creative decisions and translating certain feelings into emotional connections is something only humans can do.
Privacy Inhibiting Collecting Data
Businesses also should not overlook privacy factors. People’s online personal information is legally protected. When businesses use AI-based tools to collect customers’ data, they have a right to know where and how their information will be used and monetized. The privacy law and personal information act are constantly being reviewed, nonetheless, data privacy does impact the effectiveness of AI. Therefore, balancing the needs of businesses and customers is often not a simple task under these regulations. Investing in AI technology is typically profitable. However, AI processing makes use of large amounts of data, thus, businesses should be aware of possible risks.
Influencer House
At Influencer House, we offer powerful KOL marketing solutions to ensure your business is partnered with the best KOL. We use AI powered real time data measurement and sophisticated anti-fraud technology to develop and protect your campaign. Influencer House helps you discover the right KOL for your campaign to effectively reach your target customers. Our team of professional KOL experts fully manage your KOL campaigns from start to finish. For more information, please visit our website or email us at inquiries@influencerhouse.co.th