Finding the right influencer is the biggest challenge faced by brands nowadays. A wrong choice could be more of a wasted effort as working with the wrong influencer can harm the brand.
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies use predictive algorithms to identify influencers that might best align with brand values. It is the same technology they used to identify customer’s lifecycle including the key areas of relationship growth, acquisition, retention and win-back.
According to Salesforce Research’s survey conducted last year, 92% of consumers surveyed state that trusting a brand makes them more likely to buy their products and services. About 32% of participants also commented the influencer’s core values should also adjust with that of the consumer’s value. The marketing teams can search the past social media feeds of influencers to judge suitability as well as effectiveness, which is a time-consuming effort and could still miss something important. It is important to find an influencer, who should be the right fit and going to provide a reasonable ROI (Return on Investment) concerning sales or traffic.
IBM has announced the launch of “Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential” last week, which is a social target tool that can aid brands to communicate with their audience. It supports IBM public cloud’s IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding to process and analyse data from social media to identify expedite influencer. This technology was to support Watson APIs, which involves Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse the brand health and the potential influencer candidates, giving a strategic recommendation on whom to target. It can be used to identify brand-safe influencers by measuring profanity ratings to ensure that brands partner with those of shared values.
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning can be used to deliver the relevant ads to real people at the right time to further help drive engagement, which eliminates waste in media buys. The solution from Watson Advertising draws from an Influential’s invite-only network, which comprises more than 500,000 leading social influencers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. This influencer’s network currently reaches more than 5-billion followers as brands need to meet consumers where they are.
