Content marketing? Check.

SEO? Check.

Social media marketing? Check.

Influencer marketing? Not working as expected?

Not when one thinks influencer marketing is simply about getting an influencer to promote your brand.

There’s a lot more to it, especially since AI entered the scene.

Keep scrolling to learn more about how you can keep your influencer marketing game on point with the rise of creative intelligence. 

What should you know about influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that involves partnering with individuals who have a significant online presence and influence over their audience. These influencers create content that promotes a brand's products or services, leveraging their credibility and engagement with their followers to drive awareness, engagement, and conversions.

One example of influencer marketing is the collaboration between Swedish watch brand Daniel Wellington and various social media influencers. To promote their watches and increase brand awareness, they strategically partnered with influencers who had a strong presence on platforms like Instagram. This included sharing photos of themselves wearing the watches sent by the brand and mentioning them in their captions. These posts were naturally seen by their followers, and because influencers are viewed as trusted sources, their suggestions are more likely to be relied upon. As a result, Daniel Wellington experienced a significant rise in brand visibility, website traffic, and ultimately, sales.

However, with the audience becoming increasingly aware of the products around them these days, it is not easy to simply partner up with an influencer to promote your brand, expecting to create a buzz on social media and receive a high ROI. 

But to find the solution, let’s take a look at where your strategies and practices could be improved.

Influencer marketing practices to avoid

The days when you turned to guesswork for every action are long gone. The rise of fake followers and inconclusive engagement numbers has made it crucial to look beyond vanity metrics. Consumers have become more discerning — seeking authenticity and meaningful connections. Traditional methods fail to consider these factors, leading to campaigns that lack relevance and cannot resonate with the target audience.

So, here are the practices you need to avoid:

1. Focusing solely on the follower count

Taking just the follower count of an influencer into account can be misleading. While having a large following can have its benefits, it doesn't guarantee wide engagement or influence. Instead, look for influencers with genuine engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, as well as a strong connection with their audience.

2. Neglecting relevance

It's crucial to collaborate with influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target market. Avoid selecting influencers solely based on their popularity or reach if their followers don't match your ideal customer profile. Relevance is key in ensuring that your message reaches the right audience and resonates with them.

3. Ignoring performance metrics

Neglecting to track and analyze key performance metrics can restrict you from optimizing future influencer campaigns. Metrics such as reach, engagement rate, click-through rates, and conversions provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaign. Use data and analytics to identify what works and what can be improved, allowing you to refine your strategies and maximize ROI.

By avoiding these traditional steps, brands can create more impactful and successful influencer marketing campaigns. But to implement it the right way and stand out among your competitors, you need to know how to incorporate creative intelligence into your influencer marketing campaigns. 

The role of creative intelligence in influencer marketing

The power of creative intelligence in influencer marketing is significant and can affect the success of a campaign by boosting return on investment (ROI). Creative intelligence helps gather insights on how your creatives perform and help you make data-driven decisions. It also helps to visualize and generate innovative and compelling messaging that resonates with the target audience. 

When applied to influencer marketing, it involves leveraging creative thinking and strategic planning to develop authentic, engaging, and impactful content that captures the attention and interest of the audience for better results.

Here's a closer look at the role of creative intelligence in speeding influencer marketing ROI:

1. Performance tracking

Creative intelligence allows you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluate the success of your brand’s influencer marketing campaigns. Metrics such as reach, engagement rate, click-through rates, conversions, and sales can provide valuable insights into the campaign's performance. By analyzing these metrics, brands can identify which influencers, creatives, or campaigns drive the highest ROI.

2. Content optimization

With creative intelligence, your brand can gain insights into the content that resonates most with the target audience. By analyzing engagement metrics, sentiment analysis, and audience feedback, brands can identify the types of content that generate the highest levels of engagement and impact. This information can optimize future content strategies, aligning them more effectively with audience preferences and maximizing ROI.

3. Audience insights

You can understand your target audience better with creative analytics results. By analyzing audience demographics, interests, behavior patterns, and engagement metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers' preferences and needs. This insight can identify the most relevant influencers, refine targeting strategies, and create content that your audience can resonate with, ultimately leading to improved ROI.

4. Influencer performance evaluation

Creative intelligence enables you to assess the performance of influencers in your campaigns. By analyzing influencer-specific metrics such as engagement rate, audience demographics, follower growth, and audience sentiment, you can evaluate the effectiveness of different influencers in driving results. This analysis helps in identifying high-performing influencers for future collaborations, ensuring optimal ROI for influencer partnerships.

5. ROI measurement

Creative intelligence plays a vital role in quantifying the ROI of influencer marketing efforts. By tracking and analyzing your campaign costs and comparing them against the generated revenue or other defined objectives, you can calculate the return on investment. This information helps in evaluating the overall effectiveness of influencer marketing strategies and optimizing future campaigns to achieve higher ROI.

Adopt creative intelligence with Artwork Flow 

Now that you have learned how influential creative intelligence can be in influencer marketing campaigns, it’s time to apply all the necessary steps with the right tool.

Artwork Flow’s creative intelligence software is what you’re looking for if you need to drive ROI from your influencer marketing at an impressive pace. 

Here’s why:

1. Make data-backed decisions

Depending on the data that AI gathers from your running creatives, you can plan more carefully for your upcoming marketing campaigns. There are two types of data that Artwork Flow’s creative intelligence software picks on. They are classified into two:

• KPIs from creatives - It includes brand recall, CTR, and conversion.
• Data within your creative - Which colors and elements work and don't work for your ad.

2. Gain insights into customer behavior

Learn which creatives became a hit and a flop with your audience. In this way, you can make your brand experience smoother for your customers next time by designing creatives accordingly.

3. Personalized creatives

When you get a better understanding of your target audience and their preferences, you can personalize your creatives and collaborate with an influencer who also knows their audience.

4. Run effective campaigns

To gain maximum ROI, you need to run successful ad campaigns. For that, Artwork Flow helps you optimize your creatives with data-driven insights. The insights show what works and what doesn't based on text sentiment, text area (%), colors, and aspect ratio.

5. Keep your brand consistent

It's challenging to maintain brand consistency when dealing with multiple tasks demanded by the influencer marketing industry. You can use creative intelligence to design your creatives according to the brand guidelines. This helps you to focus more on delivering a consistent brand and customer experience.

6. Identify current trends in the market

Every day, a new trend emerges, and meeting the expectations of a dynamic audience can be overwhelming. Using Artwork Flow's creative intelligence platform, you can identify the current trends from millions of data points and create content that isn't based on intuition, driving more ROI for your business.

7. Integration 

Through Artwork Flow’s integration with Facebook Ads Manager, you can monitor the paid ads running on your Facebook account and improve elements such as colors, copy, and imagery in the ad that need work.

Conclusion

To summarize, with the right mix of creative intelligence and data-driven strategies, your brand can achieve remarkable results from its influencer marketing efforts. By defining clear objectives, collaborating on creative content, leveraging data and analytics, and fostering good relationships with influencers, you can devise memorable campaigns that reap a fair amount of ROI. As the influencer marketing landscape continues to evolve, brands that embrace creative intelligence will have a competitive edge in capturing the attention and loyalty of their customers.

To learn more about how creative intelligence can improve the overall performance of your brand, schedule a demo with Artwork Flow’s expert team.

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