Though the age of influencers isn’t over yet, here is the latest innovation that is conquering the realm of digital marketing: Generative Artificial Intelligence. After its appearance, it didn’t take long for influencers - and marketing professionals alike - to realize how much help GenAI can provide in content creation and optimization.
But how often do influencers use GenAI for content creation? Does this mean that influencer marketing will lose its most attractive feature: authenticity? Should brands exclude influencers who use GenAI from their campaigns? These are legitimate worries, which is why we delve into the topic and try to dispel them.
What Is Generative Artificial Intelligence?
With generative AI tools users can create texts, images, and videos based on prompts. GenAI uses a massive database and refined algorithms to create human-like content. ChatGPT, Claude.ai, DALL-E, and Midjourney are only a few of the powerful tools that facilitate content production and ensure consistency in quality and posting.
Do Influencers Use AI Tools? Results of Our Survey
Generative AI is still relatively new and its use cases in marketing aren’t thoroughly researched. Therefore, we decided to survey 620 influencers and ask their opinion about digital clones and their AI usage. We chose English-speaking influencers from various countries where English is the dominant language of marketing campaigns. We recruited influencers from different niches, including beauty, technology, lifestyle, and fitness. Let’s look at the answers relevant to the article’s topic.
Right away, the first question produced a shocking revelation. 82.9% of the interviewed creators stated they use AI tools for content creation. An outstanding 76.3% use them for producing texts, images, and videos. Only 6.8% utilize it for content scheduling and 5.6% for audience engagement. When asked how often they use tools, 38.5% answered often, and 23.9% always.
GenAI indeed revolutionizes content creation for influencers, which in turn can improve campaign development and execution for brands.
Despite its high rate of use, influencers have their personal concerns about generative AI. 31% are worried about the content quality, 21.6% have ethical considerations and 19.5% feel they lack control over the final input. 45% said yes when asked if AI-generated content makes it harder for real influencers to stand out. 64% think AI tools will cause a content overload on social media.
How GenAI Improves Influencer Marketing Efforts
For influencers
Overcoming creative blocks: One of the scenarios when GenAI can help influencers is breaking through creative barriers. To keep up with the competition, maintain their credibility, and be favored by social media algorithms, creators must constantly produce engaging content. Yet, this is a creative job with all its ups and downs. It’s quite natural that influencers sometimes feel they lack the inspiration to create posts and videos for a couple of days or weeks.
Content creators can use GenAI tools to generate new ideas, discover new perspectives on a theme, or learn about how they can diversify their content across multiple platforms.
Ensuring consistency in content quality and posting: The pressure is huge on influencers if they want their content to pop up in users’ feeds. Social media channels prioritize creators who share high-quality content regularly with their followers. Nevertheless, creative limitations, health and family issues, time constraints, or their main career can prevent them from regularly publishing with consistent quality.
Apart from helping creators defeat artistic obstacles, AI tools can help them maintain their tone and style thus ensuring content coherence.
For brands
Scaling influencer partnerships: AI analytics tools help brands increase the number of influencers they work with by evaluating a vast number of influencers. As for Gen AI, it can help businesses make personalized guides tailored to creators’ niche, style, and audience demographics speeding up the briefing process.
Performing content approval and optimization: Content optimization tools leveraging GenAI can study the content for brand alignment and legal compliance. Additionally, AI tools check the grammar and may provide suggestions to enhance readability.
For both parties
Accelerating content creation: As we mentioned earlier GenAI significantly accelerates content creation for influencers. For brands, this means the campaign runs smoothly.
Enabling personalization: On the one hand, AI technology can help customize influencers’ content to fit the target audience’s interests and needs. Personalized content builds a stronger connection between the audience and the influencer, resulting in higher conversions or increased brand awareness.
On the other hand, brands can personalize outreach messages and briefs with GenAI. If brands want to win influencers for their campaigns, customization in outreach and communication is key.
Considerations for Brands Before Collaborating with Influencers Who Use Generative AI
While GenAI technology clearly has many benefits, over-relying on it can backfire on both influencers and brands.
Erosion of authenticity and credibility: The real connection between influencers and their audiences is what sets influencer marketing apart from other digital marketing methods. Authenticity and credibility are the result of hard work, persistence, knowledge, and talent. If creators exclusively rely on AI tools to create content, their followers will lose their trust in them, leading to reduced engagement and conversions.
Loss of unique voice: What makes an influencer stand out from the crowd is their personal style, tone, and voice. This is what attracts followers and builds rapport with them. Overusing AI in content generation may result in the influencer content’s homogenization. It would literally kill one of the major elements an influencer possesses to differentiate themselves from millions of others.
False or misleading expertise: Generative AI uses an enormous dataset for answering questions, solving problems, and educating users about anything. Of course, this is amazing and reduces the time people would spend researching a topic on Google. Despite having little to no industry knowledge, some people can exploit this feature of generative AI to pose as subject experts.
Risk of inaccuracies in content: Content created by GenAI must be fact-checked, especially data related to current events. Yes, these tools are trained with a huge amount of data, yet they can produce false information. Inaccuracies may occur because historical data isn't aligned with current events.
Implementing GenAI in Influencer Marketing Without Causing Harm to Your Brand
Generative AI - or for that matter - any AI technology should complement human creativity not replace it. While AI is great for enhancing ideas or breaking through creative barriers, you must ensure that the content still reflects the influencer's personality. You may establish in your agreements what influencers can use GenAI for.
Work with influencers who truly understand your industry or have used and recommended your product. Assess their background, and older content and test their knowledge in interviews. Implement several checkpoints for reviewing creators’ drafts, ideas, and content before it is published. Double-check content with tools that can detect AI usage.
Generative AI can transform content generation and personalization, leading to more engaging content and efficient influencer marketing campaigns. To maintain authenticity, credibility, and audience trust, you must balance human creativity and AI's capabilities.
