How Can Influencers Use AI in Their Work?

Influencers are experimenting with AI to reach their audience and connect with brands. AI tools, while still in their infant stages, can ease a creator’s workload by writing text, producing images, or generating catchy marketing slogans.  

Now, influencers are trying to figure out how these tools fit into their routine. What jobs can AI help with? What are its limitations? We’ll explore how creators utilize AI and what it can and can’t do in the realm of influencer marketing. 

Current AI capabilities that can help influencers

When you talk about AI, it’s hard to conceptualize. Think of AI tools as a supercharged chatbot that can scour the internet for resources, follow instructions, and respond thoughtfully. You can ask it a question or give it instructions via a prompt, and it can provide an answer or execute small tasks. 

When it comes to influencer marketing, here’s a look at the specific jobs that AI tools can help influencers with:   

Write short snippets of text

Right now, tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can write pieces of content. While it can produce blog-length articles, its best use is for shorter pieces like social media messages or email copy.

Create content mockups

Creators can use AI to quickly create mockups of content and run them by the brand’s marketing team before creating an original. The mockups provide more options for a brand without a large time commitment from an influencer, making it an added value. A brand gets to consider several concepts before committing to one.

Brands can also use AI tools like AI Storyboards in IZEA Flex to create similar visualizations to provide content guidance to the influencers they hire for collaborations.

Pitch brands

Influencers spend a fair amount of time identifying brands they’d like to partner with. Once they find one, a courting dance begins. From following the brand on social and commenting on posts to sending pitch emails, it takes time and effort for influencers to connect with brands. 

However, there are AI tools that can write personalized pitch emails that influencers can use to reach out to brands. 

Brainstorm campaign pieces

AI can create a list of hashtags to add to a post or suggest a catchy tagline for a campaign. It has the potential to ease some of the mental workloads for influencers when it comes to small, specific tasks like these. 

Develop a brief

A brand can rely on AI Briefs or AI Brainstorm in IZEA Flex to create content briefs, which provide campaign-specific details influencers need to succeed. A brief often includes the product or service description, describes the purpose of the campaign, specifies the target audience, details the content type, and lists desired outcomes. With such detailed direction, influencers can efficiently meet the needs of a brand.

Once a marketer creates a campaign brief, they can begin brainstorming with AI Brainstorm, which generates text and images automatically using the brief. AI Brainstorm helps marketers create campaigns by leveraging AI technology to produce innovative campaign ideas.

Cautionary tips to consider before using AI as an influencer 

AI can certainly augment an influencer’s to-do list, but like any automation tool, you have to use it carefully. Here are a few cautionary tips you should consider as you experiment with this new technology:

AI shouldn’t produce the final piece of content

Can AI produce pieces of content that influencers can instantly deliver to brands? Yes. Should influencers do that? No. The whole point of working with an influencer is to authentically endorse your product or service. If a creator relies on AI to create content, it erodes the campaign’s originality. 

AI can provide content inspiration, but influencer marketing is meant to be human-to-human interaction, which is why the final piece of content should be produced by an influencer. 

Always disclose how you’ll use AI

If you work with a brand, be honest about using AI-powered tools. As with all parts of a campaign, open communication plays an important role. If you want to use AI, talk about it early on and discuss the specific tasks you’d like it to complete. 

If, during your collaboration, you do decide to publish any kind of AI-generated content, it should be disclosed to the audience too. Research shows there’s already growing distrust of AI-created content. Thirty-seven percent of internet users say they’d distrust Al-generated influencer content either “a little more” or “a great deal more” compared to content created without the help of tech, according to Insider Intelligence. 

AI is only as helpful as the information you can give it

To produce specific content, AI tools require large amounts of data. 

To explore this idea on a small scale, here’s an example. To get an AI platform to produce content that’s geared toward your specific audience, it has to learn who your audience is. 

As a result, you’ll have to feed your audience data into AI software so it can produce relevant content that your audience connects with. 

In general, large data sets are used to “train” AI tools to be effective for a creator or brand. Creators might not have the data needed or know how to “train” an AI tool to assist. It’s something to consider as you research AI tools. 

AI is more than a buzzword. It will likely change how many people do their job, including influencers. While this tech can help, it’s important to realize that it has limitations, too, and can’t replace the authenticity that influencers bring to a campaign.  

Influencers:

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Marketers:

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