How Martech is helping the influencer marketing industry evolve

Authored by  Shubham Singhal, CEO & Co-Founder, Dot Media

The present digitally driven market is evolving at an unprecedented pace and the majority of brands are shifting their focus towards the creator economy. It has experienced massive growth in recent years with marketers allocating more budget in getting the hold of influencer marketing campaigns. The creator economy will continue to strive though, the dynamics of influencer marketing is making it daunting for marketers to keep pace with the technological advancements in the emerging landscape. 

According to the stats – India is home to more than 20 Lakh content creators across different platforms with the market recording a valuation of over Rs. 12 billion in 2022 with a projected CAGR of 25 percent to touch Rs. 28 billion by 2026. This clearly indicates that influencer marketing will continue to dominate marketing activities. 

Influencer marketing creates a huge impact on the way brands plan their marketing campaigns to harness the capabilities of influencers. They help brands gain the trust of their followers and influence the everyday buying decision of their customers. In the present competitive influencer landscape, brands are struggling to find authentic influencer profiles in terms of a genuine follower base, engagement rate, etc. to fulfil their marketing goals. 

The emergence of Martech in the influencer industry

Many brands and marketers have started leveraging the capabilities of technology to identify the most relevant influencers. As part of tech integration, AI-driven data and analytics have become instrumental in addressing several credibility and authenticity doubts concerning influencers’ profiles. 

Every popular social media channel houses a vast pool of influencers from different domains. It is highly challenging for a brand and its marketing team to spot the right set of influencers ideal to promote a product line or service offerings. By embedding the use of AI and other data-enabled tools, Martech has created a powerful ecosystem to identify reliable influencers aligning with the brand’s marketing goals, vision and outcome. 

The new age Martech tools enabled with AI consider various factors such as engagement rates, followers’ genuineness, overall account credibility and reliability for the brand. This allows marketers to make informed decisions about which influencers to work with and anticipate the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Detecting fake followers 

Against the reliability of influencers, buying fake followers is a critical issue sweeping across the industry. Before the advent of tech-integrated tools, it was highly challenging for brands to identify an influencer’s profile with an organic follower base. As a result, several brands have burned their marketing budgets by falling for influencer profiles with fake followers that fail to drive positive results. Martech can play a significant role in monitoring the sudden spike in the follower base of an influencer while analysing the genuineness of the surge.   

Automating and streamlining content

The content creation process can be extremely exhaustive for marketers given that they have to come up with something innovative in every marketing campaign. On the other hand, AI technology is gaining huge traction in automating mundane tasks where content is not an exception. Marketers equipped with AI tools are supplemented with automation and hyper personalization. By gathering useful customer insights, marketers can better understand their preference to produce ideas around customers’ expectations.  

The valuable insights further help marketers create content strategy based on real-time consumer analytics while it facilitates the customers with personalized content and recommendations. This can equip the marketers with the right tools to automate the content creation process and bring more efficiency to prioritize engagement tactics and maximized campaign ROI.

Tracking performance metrics

Campaign optimization is one of the biggest painstaking tasks for marketers. In the digitally driven creator economy, Martech tools can prove to be powerful in gathering real-time insights on how a particular campaign is performing. Additionally, it can also generate insights into the traffic on the influencer’s channel and the behaviour of viewers. This provides key metrics amid the ongoing campaign to help marketers with the scope of improvements to drive tangible results. This ensures data-driven decisions at both ends – brands and influencers, cultivating strong relationships between each stakeholder. 

Despite several benefits, marketers need to use Martech tools while addressing the potential challenges arising against human aspects. Often tech tools used in managing influencer marketing campaigns leave the marketer in algorithm bubbles which can result in homogenized content. The influencer marketing business is one that is and will always be driven by people. Hence, balancing the focus to avoid heavily relying on data can truly utilize the potential of technology for maximized optimization, ROI and impact.