03.21.2023
Influencer marketing and Instagram literally mean the same for most brands and its customers. Used extensively for dispensing highly relevant and visually enticing content, instagram stories and feeds are the simplest ways to boost brand awareness, customer engagement and conversion.
But with nearly 93 percent of influencer marketing campaigns happening on the platform, instagram is evidently inundated with competitors’ influencers. To stand out with effective content about a product or service to influence followers at super speed, brands and influencers need automation.
Automation in influencer marketing helps save time and costs involved in the creation, management and execution of campaigns. What may take hours will be done in a matter of minutes or even seconds with automation. That means, influencers and brands have a lot of time in hand to conceptualise new ideas or simply move on to the next task!
To boot-strap influencer programs, below are some of the areas of influencer marketing campaign that warrants automation for higher engagement rate and conversion:
- Influencer Identification: To stand out in the sea of influencers is a challenging and time-consuming task. When manually done, it requires extensive amount of waiting, doing Google research and experimenting with tools to grow followers/fan base organically. Some may use influencer databases to scout influencers. The arbitrary search and lack of relevant data such as audience/ customer demographics, location and trends can confuse brands to zero in on the right influencers and marketing strategies. Automation can solve this daunting task through quick, insight-driven influencer identification.
- Outreach: Automation helps take a break from inconsequential attempts to communicate with influencers to bring them on board. It is most effective when the influencer marketing campaign is bigger and makes outreach easier. Brands and businesses would not have to send follow-up emails when required. It will be meticulously managed with automation.
- Monitoring: Influencer marketing involves content shared on disparate platforms and social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others. To measure the effectiveness of the individual campaigns, marketers need real-time metrics and continuously track reach, views, engagement rates and impressions of the sponsored influencer content. Automated monitoring can free marketers from endless tracking in real-time by providing timely checks on the campaign performance.
Measurement of Campaign Effectiveness:
Precise measurement of influencer campaign results by tracking reach, views, engagement rate, impressions and ROI is important for understanding campaign success. In order to identify the most appropriate influencer strategy and keep a tab of the best influencer performances, marketers can use some automation tools to optimize their influencer marketing budget. It also simplifies the search for long-term partnerships and helps invite new influencers for their upcoming marketing campaigns.
Bottomline, Automate but Keep it Personal
According to Instagram data, nearly 80 per cent of its users follow at least one brand on social media. While the pressure to develop unique stories, perform daily research and find the right mix of hashtags every day seems endless. Automation serves as an ‘antidote’ to redundancy in influencer marketing.
However, the human touch and a personal approach are extremely important. Most influencers know that the key to successful partnerships and engagements is through real content with a personal touch. To get your audience and customers to trust your brand, it is wise to combine automated outreach with elements that make the messages to influencers more personal and resonate with their values.
