While Google used to be the first place consumers would turn to discover brands and products, today 75% begin their purchasing journeys from recommendations of influential third-party sources on social media.
This is catalysing a shift within marketing strategies. The significance of the channel within the marketing mix is increasing, as brands look at how earned media can improve brand discoverability over traditional search engines.
However, while brands can easily see how they rank on Google, many don’t know how they perform across earned media channels in relation to competitors, and importantly how they can improve their strategies. This is where AI is becoming an increasingly critical tool for marketing leaders, not only to power more data-driven decisions to inform their earned media strategies, but to enable them to access the entire ROI of the channel and evaluate brand and business impact.
AI is helping brands identify strong partnership opportunities
If you’ve read the book or watched the film Moneyball, then you’ll know that the story focuses on how data and analytics were used to create a successful baseball team of players who were too often overlooked. With AI, the same principle is applied to influencer selection, enabling marketers to assess a much wider pool of influencers against important KPIs, allowing them to discover previously unknown high-performing influencers and "moneyball" their influencer strategies.
Leveraging AI-enhanced analytics, marketers can set advanced selection criteria ranging from previous brand collaborations to engagement rates, which in turn enables them to discover new, targeted partnership recommendations. This makes partnership decisions data-backed and allows for more effective allocation of investments. Importantly, brands can also ensure collaborations are brand-aligned and brand-safe through advanced influencer risk and loyalty assessments.
Eliminating the need to manually search for influencers saves time and resources, and enables marketers to focus on building creative strategies around the collaborations and the more expansive pool of influencers, to form novice, creative partnerships.
Measuring and optimising strategy effectiveness with AI
The power of AI doesn’t stop at selection. It enables marketers to measure campaign effectiveness, optimise strategies and evaluate the holistic impact and ROI of the channel.
Brands and agencies can use the technology to analyse and sift through data quickly, capturing how brands and products are perceived and talked about across important brand and performance metrics. AI is effective in not only quantifying brand mentions and engagements but in assessing if these interactions are effective in driving brand affinity and loyalty.
The technology can also be used to benchmark performance against competitors and identify key learnings, gaps and opportunities to optimise strategies. The patterns and learnings extracted from the data can help inform budget allocation, strategy focus and partnership selection. Armed with these insights, marketers can justify earned media spend to the broader business by providing evidence of the value created.
Driving impact in the era of earned media
With competition on social media high amongst consumer-facing brands, AI-driven influencer strategies can be a powerful tool to enhance brand discoverability, loyalty and
AI offers not just an effective way to both simplify and be more strategic in influencers selection but importantly gives marketers the tools to efficiently measure campaign effectiveness, benchmark against competitors and understand where they need to shift strategies to maximise ROI in the era of earned media.
Jenny Tsai is the CEO of WeArisma.
