Influencers are the new celebrities, especially in the online space where most of your customer base is. So, influencer marketing is an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
However, manual management of influencers is time and resource-consuming. It also complicates the process of measuring ROI and tracking campaign performance. Automation can help resolve these issues, which is why 63% of marketers have already planned to use AI in their influencer campaigns.
Let's discuss how you can follow suit without over-automating influencer marketing and losing the human touch that makes it so effective and relatable.
- Why Automation Matters in Influencer Marketing
- The Human vs. Automation Balance: What Should (and Shouldn't) Be Automated?
- How to Seamlessly Integrate Automation into Your Influencer Marketing Workflow
- How to Scale Influencer Campaigns Without Losing Authenticity
- How AI-Driven Tools Are Redefining Influencer Campaigns
- Take an Automation-Human Hybrid Approach to Influencer Marketing
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Automation Matters in Influencer Marketing
A lot goes into influencer marketing campaigns. It begins with finding the right influencers to work with, creating content briefs, choosing platforms, tracking performance, and analyzing results.
Multiple stakeholders have to be a part of this process, including influencers, content creators, marketing teams, and data analysts. Automation simplifies the workflow and reduces the need for resources. For example, instead of a human marketer spending hours going through influencer profiles to find the best fit, an influencer marketing software can do it in seconds.
Automation also helps make the process more efficient. An AI-based tool can recommend the best platform to reach your target audience based on their online behavior and engagement patterns. So, you can run your influencer campaigns there for the best results.
In the same vein, AI helps analyze audience sentiments to show you the kind of response your influencer content elicits. That's why nearly 55% of marketers report seeing AI as a favorable option for enhancing the efficiency of influencer campaigns and personalizing interactions.
The insights you collect from the AI sentiment analyzer can then help optimize future campaigns. For example, if a certain content type or format receives more of a positive response, you can focus on creating more of that for future collaborations.
The Human vs. Automation Balance: What Should (and Shouldn't) Be Automated?
When using automation in influencer marketing, you must know where human involvement is paramount and where a tool can replace or complement that involvement. The perfect balance of the two keeps your campaigns authentic and effective.
Tasks Perfect for Automation
Typically, marketers tend to automate tasks that are repetitive. That's a good approach since it saves you a lot of time. In influencer marketing, these tasks include:
- Influencer Identifications: Finding the right influencers manually can be a time-consuming process, requiring extensive research across multiple platforms. You can use influencer marketing tools to find the best-fit creators on different social media platforms faster.
- Fraud Detection: Verifying the authenticity of an influencer’s audience can be daunting, especially when dealing with large-scale campaigns. Automation tools can also detect if the influencer has fake followers or engagement, saving you from partnering with inauthentic creators.
- Performance Tracking: Measuring campaign success often involves sifting through vast amounts of data, which can be both tedious and error-prone when done manually. AI-powered analytics tools can simplify this by collecting and analyzing data from your influencer campaigns and show you in-depth performance metrics.
- Content Scheduling: Manually posting influencer content can lead to missed opportunities for optimal engagement. You can use content scheduling tools to post influencer content at peak engagement times.
Besides saving time, automation also helps reduce errors. Plus, you have a digital record of every task conducted during the campaign. Even better, it can boost your ROI by ensuring tasks are handled efficiently, resources are optimized, and campaigns are laser-focused on delivering results.
If you're a small team with a limited budget and resources, you can prioritize automation based on the resource availability. For example, if your team's overall skill set is better at analytics than curation, you can automate influencer selection and content scheduling while manually analyzing influencer content. Influencer marketing platforms for small businesses tend to be budget-friendly, so you can opt for them rather than expensive enterprise solutions.
When Human Input Is Essential
Automating influencer marketing doesn't mean sitting back and watching the tools do all the work. Human input is a must, especially in the following domains:
- Relationship Building: You need to establish and maintain a personal rapport with influencers. For that, a human team member has to stay in touch with them.
- Creative Ideation: While automation can schedule influencer content, it can't replace manual curation. Human creativity is needed to come up with content ideas that will appeal to your audience.
- Content Approval: Someone needs to manually check if the influencer content ticks the boxes of brand guidelines, regulatory rules, campaign objectives, and audience expectations.
Human involvement helps prevent over-automation and keeps the campaigns authentic. There have been situations in which too much reliance on AI and automation has done more harm than good.
For example, when Casual, a finance app, used Byword's AI to generate content, they initially saw excellent results. However, after Google's core update that addressed content quality and validity, the company's website experienced a 99.3% decrease in monthly traffic. Had there been more human involvement in content creation, this mishap could have been avoided.
How to Seamlessly Integrate Automation into Your Influencer Marketing Workflow
Influencer marketing isn't exactly a novel approach, and most businesses already have a workflow that they follow. So, there's no need to start from scratch. Instead, you can just make the current processes more error-free, quick, efficient, and time-saving by adding automation to them.
Here's how.
Evaluating Your Workflow for Automation Opportunities
Start by going through your current influencer marketing workflow and deciding where automation can assist. Look for areas that involve repetitive tasks, data collection and analysis, and outreach. When auditing your workflow, ask the following questions:
- Which tasks are taking up most of our time?
- Which tasks can be done more efficiently with automation?
- Are there existing tools or platforms that can manage these tasks for us?
- Is human involvement necessary for these tasks?
Another question that you can ask in certain situations is whether your campaign needs to be scaled. That's what Kinguin, a gaming marketplace, did when they made the switch to automation for their brand ambassador program.
They were previously finding and vetting influencers manually. However, they quickly realized that this was no way to scale their program up. So, they began using Upfluence, an influencer marketing platform, to identify the best influencers for their campaign.
You can also identify similar shortcomings in your campaigns and fill them with automation. Some other aspects in which automation can help are influencer onboarding, fraud detection, campaign reporting, payment processing, and performance tracking.
Choosing the Right Tool for Influencer Marketing Automation
Once you've decided which tasks to automate, the next step is choosing the best tool for it. A ton of tools are available, and selecting just one or two from them can be a bit overwhelming. But if you look at these two factors, you're off to a good start:
- Campaign Alignment: The platform must be able to meet the specific needs that you've found in the step above. Be it payment automation, influencer discovery, or anything else, the tool should serve your main purpose.
- Integration: As we've said, you probably already have a workflow. The tool you select should fit right into your existing tech stack. So, it should have integration capabilities with your existing tools, and if not available out-of-the-box, it should have an API or webhooks for custom integrations.
Next, prioritize certain features since they will make influencer marketing automation more fruitful. First, the platform should be scalable so that no matter what your growth rate is, it can keep up.
Apart from this, it should have a solid analytics and reporting system that you can use to track engagement. Sentiment analysis is an added bonus.
Now that it's possible to buy followers, you also need the tool to be able to detect fraud. Look for influencer marketing automation platforms with fraud detection systems so that you don't end up spending your marketing budget on fake followers.
There are many AI influencer marketing platforms out there, too, with proprietary algorithms that can assist in many tasks, such as influencer discovery and scrip generation. Regardless of the platforms you narrow down to, it's best to use the free trial or demo version before getting the paid version.
For example, when Effectix, a marketing agency, was searching for an influencer marketing tool, they tried out around 10 platforms before settling on HypeAuditor. It takes time initially, but you save yourself from a lot of hassle later.
Effectix testimonial
As a small team, you can start with a lower-tier plan that meets your needs. As your needs increase, move to the upper tiers. Compare pricing across platforms to find the best value for money. Alternatively, try free influencer marketing tools first and then move to more advanced paid options as your budget allows.
While you're at it, don't forget to read reviews from other users on third-party platforms. Also, go through the platform's case studies, especially those of similar businesses to yours, to get an idea of how effective it can be.
Building a Unified Workflow
Influencer marketing shouldn't exist in silo since it relies on data from multiple sources, such as the customer relationship management (CRM) system and social media analytics tools. You must combine these data sources into one streamlined workflow to maximize your influencer marketing efforts.
As we explained earlier, choose a tool that can integrate with your existing workflow. This way, you can use data from one source to drive decisions and actions in another.
For example, you can use social media analytics tools to identify top-performing post formats and then instruct your influencers to produce similar content. Similarly, engagement metrics and performance reports from influencer content can further give you insights into your customers' preferences.
A collaborative workflow offers rich data insights that allow you to create more relevant content and optimize campaigns for better results. More importantly, each department knows how they're all working towards the same goal. Such connectivity fosters teamwork and eliminates miscommunications that can derail your campaign.
Balancing Personalization with Automation
Over-automation can make your influencer campaigns look generic. The human side of your workflow is what adds personalization. Human marketers can help personalize campaigns by working closely with influencers and incorporating their audience insights into the content creation process.
In Effectix's example above, the agency relied on automation (through HypeAuditor) to get information about creators like audience demographics, collaboration history, engagement, and follower dynamics. However, their human marketers then assessed this data to determine which influencers fit different clients' campaigns. They also explained the value of the selected influencers to clients instead of simply sharing the results from the tool.
Besides influencer discovery, human intervention can help personalize many other aspects of influencer marketing, too. For example, in your initial communication with a creator, you can share an automated brief with them.
Still, a human marketer can take the time to add personalization elements like reaching out to the creator after receiving the filled brief. Similarly, if you need a specific influencer to work on your campaign because of a recent video or trend of theirs that went viral, you'll need to personalize your pitch. This is something a human marketer is better at than an automated system. However, the tool can then automate further tasks like tracking and reporting.
How to Scale Influencer Campaigns Without Losing Authenticity
At times, when scaling influencer campaigns, brands tend to over-automate tasks since that's the most efficient way to manage multiple campaigns. However, this approach can lead to a loss of authenticity, especially if the content feels too scripted or salesy.
Another challenge that arises when you're managing hundreds of influencers is maintaining a consistent brand tone across all collaborations. Sure, you want the influencer to add their unique touch to the content. However, you can't risk having wildly different messaging and branding for each campaign.
To avoid this, create a standard onboarding process. It should include a brand guideline and content guidelines that the influencers need to know before creating content for your campaign.
Don't rely on automation for everything. Repetitive communication, like follow-up messaging, can be automated. However, you need to bring in personalization where necessary. For example, communicate with the influencer directly if they are a top-performing creator or if you need them to take a certain content angle that you're certain will do well with their audience.
In Kinguin's example above, the gaming platform significantly enhanced its ambassador program using Upfluence. The tool enabled them to swiftly pinpoint influencers on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and other social networks who aligned with their objectives. Through bulk outreach, Kinguin initiated conversations seamlessly, resulting in a remarkable 600% increase in their ambassador pool within just three months.
Kinguin campaign results
The platform also empowered Kinguin to efficiently manage ambassador relationships, onboard new talent, and monitor the brand's performance. While the bulk outreach was automated, the rest of the relationship was not. Human marketers communicated with the creators for specific campaigns or tasks. While automation helped scale operations, the involvement of actual people ensured that the personal touch was still there.
To make sure that your audience doesn't get lost amidst these collaborations, use insights from them to maintain a steady connection. AI-driven sentiment analysis is your ally here. Use these tools to see your audience's response to influencer-generated content. Then, use these insights to modify your content guidelines, onboarding process, and campaign goals to better align them with your audience's interests.
With an automation platform, you can then track the impact of each campaign, even at an influencer level. This way, you get to view the engagement metrics and conversion rates of each influencer and plan future collaborations based on these results.
How AI-Driven Tools Are Redefining Influencer Campaigns
AI marketing automation has found its way into influencer marketing, too, where it allows hyper-targeting and audience sentiment analysis. These technologies make it easier for you to identify what your audience wants to see and what they respond well to.
Previously, brands could only get basic information about their audience, such as demographics and location. However, AI gives deep-level insights into audiences, including how long they spend on a platform, which content format they engage with the most, and how they feel about your content.
Going forward, we'll see more of this data-driven approach being used to fine-tune influencer campaigns and drive better results. The reliance on AI tools will increase, especially for brands that have to run campaigns with dozens or hundreds of influencers.
Brands and marketers are increasing their investment in AI-driven platforms, which signals the importance of data-driven decision-making in digital marketing strategies. In influencer marketing, this will likely result in higher efficiency and scalability while keeping audience sentiments in check.
Take an Automation-Human Hybrid Approach to Influencer Marketing
Modern consumers keep authenticity at the top of their priorities, which is why AI use in influencer marketing may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, bots can make things feel less personal and authentic. However, the key to success is to take an automation-human hybrid approach to satisfy 40% of consumers who prioritize authenticity in any form of endorsement.
While automation can streamline the influencer marketing workflow and help you scale campaigns, you can't merely let a tool or platform take over. Instead, it would be best if you combined AI-driven insights with human intuition and creativity to create truly authentic campaigns.
This way, you get the best of both worlds. While automation saves time and money, the human side maintains the authenticity and personal touch that consumers crave.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can automation improve ROI in influencer marketing?
Automation improves ROI by making influencer campaigns more efficient and precise. It helps optimize workflows, reduce manual errors, and target audiences more effectively.
What are the best platforms for influencer marketing automation?
The best platforms for influencer marketing automation are:
| Platform | Features | Ideal For |
| Upfluence | Influencer discovery, campaign management | Medium to large teams |
| HypeAuditor | Fraud detection, audience analytics | Ensuring influencer authenticity |
| Aspire | Influencer outreach, reporting | Small teams, scalability |
What tasks should not be automated in influencer marketing?
Certain tasks in influencer marketing require human involvement to maintain authenticity and creativity. Relationship building is one such area where human interaction fosters trust and long-term partnerships. Additionally, creative ideation benefits from a human perspective to align content with the brand’s unique voice.
How to measure the effectiveness of automated influencer campaigns?
Measuring campaign effectiveness involves tracking key metrics such as ROI, engagement rates, and conversions. Utilize built-in analytics tools in automation platforms to gather data and compare it with previous campaigns or industry benchmarks.
What tools help analyze influencer authenticity?
Tools like HypeAuditor and Modash are excellent for analyzing influencer authenticity. They provide insights into audience demographics, engagement rates, and detect fake followers, ensuring that brands work with credible influencers.
How does AI-driven sentiment analysis improve campaigns?
AI-driven sentiment analysis enables brands to understand how audiences feel about influencer-generated content. By identifying positive or negative feedback trends, brands can optimize future campaigns and create content that resonates more with their target audience.
Can automation personalize influencer outreach?
Yes, automation can personalize influencer outreach by segmenting influencers based on niche, audience demographics, and past performance. Platforms like Aspire enable tailored communication through dynamic templates. However, adding a personal touch manually to key messages ensures authenticity.
What are the risks of over-automating influencer marketing?
Over-automation can make campaigns feel generic and less personal. Additionally, relying solely on tools can result in missed nuances, such as cultural subtleties or changing audience preferences. Balancing automation with human involvement prevents these pitfalls.
How do small teams manage large influencer campaigns?
Small teams can leverage automation tools to handle repetitive tasks like influencer discovery and performance tracking. This allows them to focus their resources on creative tasks and relationship building.
What’s the role of predictive analytics in influencer marketing?
Predictive analytics uses historical data to forecast campaign outcomes. It helps brands select influencers likely to deliver the best engagement and ROI while enabling smarter allocation of resources based on audience insights.
What’s the difference between partial and full automation?
Partial automation complements human involvement by automating repetitive tasks like outreach and tracking. In contrast, full automation handles end-to-end processes, including influencer selection, campaign management, and reporting, with minimal human input.
Are there any all-in-one influencer marketing automation platforms?
Yes, platforms like Aspire, Traackr, and Upfluence offer comprehensive solutions that cover influencer discovery, outreach, and campaign management. Brands should select tools that align with their specific needs, such as fraud detection or integration capabilities.
