It is easy to lie, put a mask on and act like someone you are not for a short period of time. Over time, humans will reveal their default personality. In the world of social media and influencer marketing creators must stay relevant with their niche audience; movie reviewers have to actually love watching movies; travel tippers have to actually love traveling.
Generative AI Shall Amplify Not Replace Creators
Same alike for ChatGPT, Gemini, Dall-E, Synthesia and all other generative AI, prompt is still the most important for them all. Knowing what to ask in a particularly specific manner defines the usefulness of AI as a tool. As much as we can prompt Bard to list the top 5 pain points of a mother in the format of social media text on a screen hook, we will never understand that the sense of putting the first child to sleep is different to putting the second to sleep. The risk of waking up the sleeping child by the cry of the second is so scary, and only a mother of 2 can relate.
Creators are Irreplaceable
Despite all the tools available to generate content, we still need a living person to live through the life of the target audience we would like to engage. Surely, brands can conduct focus group discussions, and the CEO can go undercover as a taxi driver for one day, but that all cannot be faked constantly at a pace that social media requires creators to be. Think about it, most of AI Machine Learning are from social media platforms anyway, yet they are still so dependent on creators, I would even argue to be increasingly dependent. Soon enough, the main obstacle to training AI will not be the short supply of hardware but the lack of new data.
Source: Statista
Sequence 4 = Midpoint
To conclude the above 3 paragraphs and 1 chart in a sentence: “The reason that influencer marketing will keep growing is authenticity; it is necessary for creators to live the life of their target audience where technology such as generative AI are tools to amplify instead of a threat.” Now onwards, we shall state that 53% of brands surveyed do not run niche influencer campaigns on a regular basis, why they should and how to start. Then, we will end with a closing statement for those who already have started: what we should do next.
Source: Statista
Low Competition High Return
With as many as 24% surveyed brands never performed nano influencer marketing and 29% only performing it on an ad hoc basis, only as low as 45% of brands are constantly doing influencer marketing. This is even though selebgram & selebtok are performing more than 3X better than celebrity influencers as per data shown below.
Source: Bardi
The Problem Statement
The staggering volume of influencers makes it physically impossible for brands to attempt them all and then continue with the ones that work. Even the biggest of brands may not have the budget for that. Moreover, influencers have no full control over the kind of content that will get views, they have to stick with their native content so as to reach the usual audience amount.
Source: Bardi
The Solution and The Framework
Brands need to first post organic content in brand-owned channels with multiple variations to find common ground for content that is performing. I call this the funnel campaign, which is the direct opposite of the umbrella campaign. After finding the centrifuge, that element that exists in almost every performing video, we shall start the search for influencers. Yes, finding influencers is hard; not everyone has access to a dashboard with the right filters and sorting functions. But if brands come with a brief accurate to the dot, like, for example, “find me influencers native to the content of married couple fighting over what to do with the second child”, most KOL agencies will be able to provide that specific list.
That Happy Ending
Once brands have gone through the cycle of opening a new audience persona and conquering at least 16% of that audience group, just let the snowball effect happen and start opening a new audience persona. The number of 16% is in accordance with Crossing the Chasm theory by Geoffrey A. Moore as an adaptation of an innovation-adoption model called diffusion of innovations theory created by Everett Rogers.
Source: Bardi
Example from BARDI Smart Home
Today, it may seem that we have an evenly distributed audience persona, but trust me we did not start this perfectly.
For about 4 years, we were focusing on audience persona so widely apart that we were not even thinking about retaining the audience group we won. Here is the screenshot of how it looked exactly one year ago.
Source: Bardi
