In the AI era, the baton of global brand marketing has been passed to influencers.
Author | Yang Zi
Editor | Li Xiaotian
In the AI era, the rules of the game for overseas marketing have changed.
“Overseas, each influencer is like a billboard, representing traffic. The key to the current competition lies in whether there are pioneers who know how to use these billboards.” A North American cross - border merchant told Xiaguang She that after more short - videos frantically occupied users' time, influencer marketing has begun to play an increasingly important role. “Because where the traffic is, the money is.”
Data from the social media management platform Sprout Social shows that compared with 2024, 59% of marketers plan to cooperate with more influencers this year. Influencer marketing is gradually taking a more important position. The marketing path of global brands is no longer satisfied with traditional advertising channels but aims to achieve brand goals through the influence of overseas influencers.
Generally speaking, advertising is the last step in a company's commercialization but the first step to reach consumers. Building a brand in the global market is like being a “commercial director”, requiring both the creativity of an artist and the precision of an engineer. In the AI era, this art of “commercial directing” has become purer. When more users shift their searches from Google Chrome and Baidu to Chatgpt and Deepseek, AI will screen performance - based ads and give users a “clean” answer. Therefore, native advertising based on social media is becoming a more mainstream choice.
In addition, compared with traditional channels, the traffic cost of doing influencer marketing overseas is relatively lower but more targeted. The founder of a North American MCN company told Xiaguang She that the click - through rate of overseas influencer recommendations can reach 5%, 3 percentage points higher than that of traditional ads. The purchase conversion rate can be increased by 10 times, and the ROI ratio will be tripled.
Currently, when influencer marketing plays a more prominent role, “commercial directors” need a keen sense to find suitable influencers and build an aesthetic system highly compatible with the brand to do well in influencer marketing. Although the importance of influencer marketing is well - known, due to problems such as information opacity and inefficient communication, it is not easy for Chinese brand owners to quickly find influencers with aesthetic compatibility.
AI may be the key to solving this problem. At the Third Sequoia Capital AI Summit, a new consensus was put forward: the next round of AI will sell not tools but profits. Whoever commercializes “profits” first will seize the next ten - fold market.
This is especially true for overseas influencer marketing. Chen Daiyi, the founder of the AI overseas influencer marketing company VANZO MEDIA, told Xiaguang She, “If the three major pain points of influencer marketing, namely price, delivery time, and content, can be coordinated throughout the entire process through AI, it will be a more beautiful marketing paradigm that AI brings to Chinese brands.”
According to Statista data, the global KOL market size exceeded $10 billion in 2023 and is expected to exceed $20 billion by 2025. The decentralized global consumer market drives the demand for influencer marketing to grow at a high speed. In the Southeast Asian market where the Internet market penetration rate has exceeded 70%, the growth rate is the fastest, with a CAGR of 45%; the expenditure on influencer marketing in the United States accounts for 32% of the global share, with a CAGR of 18%; the market shares of emerging markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America are $4.5 billion, $800 million, and $1.5 billion respectively.
In this article, we attempt to gain insights into the different marketing approaches between Chinese and foreign marketers in the global influencer marketing market and the potential new opportunities in the changing landscape.
In 2019, when Douyin's daily active users exceeded 600 million and reached the growth ceiling, many MCN companies and short - video marketing companies began to turn their attention overseas. People believed that in the overseas market, Douyin's wealth - creating story would be repeated on TikTok.
The overseas market is full of potential, but there are significant differences in the business models of influencers at home and abroad. First of all, in the United States, influencers initially emerged by sharing content, so people usually call them creators because they regard content as their main product. Only in this way can they gain the respect of their fans, and they are more willing to see themselves as artists.
In China, the influencer marketing model is more dominated by MCN companies, usually using the “influencer + e - commerce + live - streaming” sales method. Influencers can be regarded as a link in this method, which is actually a business model with Chinese Internet characteristics. It can be said that the influencer economy is largely driven by e - commerce. Therefore, domestic influencers often take their own IP as the main product.
That is to say, in China, influencers are created; overseas, influencers grow on their own and gradually come to the forefront in the process of traffic changes and become a key force in brand marketing. As a result, many Chinese MCNs encounter difficulties when going overseas. For example, overseas influencers pursue freedom, are not as obedient, or may even inflate their prices. These are common problems that MCNs face when going global. This also leads to a huge difference in influencer marketing between China and the United States: who has the right to control the content?
In terms of style, different from domestic influencers with strong label characteristics, the popular influencers on TikTok are often not very “glamorous” and are more like “ordinary people”, which makes viewers feel more intimate and results in a larger number of fans. These influencers want to protect their own style and stance. They need to rely on content and their own style to retain fans. If an MCN company gives them a pre - written script to perform directly, the influencers will feel “offended”, which is the main reason for the incompatibility between the two sides.
Therefore, there are also differences in the results of brand - influencer cooperation at home and abroad. Brands establish in - depth cooperation with overseas influencers and convey brand image and values through original content, usually paying more attention to storytelling, creativity, and emotional resonance. In China, influencer marketing focuses more on product promotion and sales conversion, and is more inclined to rapidly boost sales through live - streaming sales and other forms. This difference often puts MCNs in a dilemma of being unable to control “free” overseas influencers after going global.
In response, Thomas, the founder of the overseas influencer marketing company Bandalabs, shared: “Overseas influencers generally won't try to figure out your implications. Just directly tell them what to do, let them repeat the 12345 points, and if there are no problems, let them execute. Take it slowly step by step, and make them feel recognized and growing. Don't expect the high - profile and rapid progress like in China. As long as they perform better than other local influencers, isn't that enough?”
Another significant difference is that the social media landscape in North America is highly fragmented. Different from the domestic industry landscape where Douyin has 1.1 billion MAUs, American users have highly dispersed usage habits for different platforms. In China, brand owners can connect with all KOLs on Juxingxingtu, which is the result of the above - mentioned business model. However, overseas, platforms and agencies are more independent of each other. Platforms hope that third - party service providers can do a better job in the commercialization ecosystem of influencers, which leads to more than 85% of influencer cooperation orders being generated by third parties.
For Chinese brand owners, an even greater difficulty lies in the first step, that is, the process of connecting with influencers. In the North American social environment, brand owners often need to connect with influencers through in - app messages or emails. The success rate of in - app message reach is less than 2%, and although email reach has the highest response rate, it consumes a lot of manpower. Even if brand owners search for influencers in niche fields like looking for a needle in a haystack, they still cannot accurately position the content of influencers.
Weak cooperation constraints and serious information asymmetry have pushed cross - border influencer marketing into a risky field of resource investment. Brand owners have to face a dual dilemma: they need to cooperate while respecting the freedom of the overseas content ecosystem, but they cannot build a mandatory agreement execution framework. In this situation, the batch cooperation model has gradually become the key to breaking the deadlock - business owners win by quantity, hoping to increase the probability of success through wide coverage. However, even so, the conversion rate from email invitation - fan profile matching - bargaining - cooperation content negotiation - ad release is less than 1%.
However, it cannot be ignored that although influencer marketing is a difficult problem in overseas marketing, it is also a key step in finding solutions. According to an influencer marketing company practitioner, when Jackery, the global leading brand of outdoor power supplies, entered the US market, due to the cultural incompatibility of its hardcore technology - style content, the conversion rate in the first month was only 30% of the expected value. However, after transforming the obscure “1000Wh capacity” into the real - life scenario of “maintaining power supply for an RV for 48 hours during a blizzard” in terms of content and cooperating with a series of influencers such as @SurvivalPrepper, experts in wilderness survival, its market share in the US jumped from fifth to second.
For overseas influencer marketing, an industry in the growth stage with information opacity and lack of industry norms is a good place for digital revolution. So, can AI solve the pain points of information opacity and low communication efficiency?
“Fake traffic will lead to price bubbles,” Chen Daiyi told Xiaguang She. “Influencers generally have 25% fake interaction volume and 15% fake follower volume, which causes brands to lose about 12% - 18% of their annual budget. Due to the lack of data dimensions and information opacity, the completeness of overseas influencer information in public data is less than 60%, so it is difficult to standardize the real price and delivery time data of overseas influencers.”
However, there are still ways to build order in the chaos. In the view of Chen Daiyi, the founder of VANZO, the unclear and opaque parts of influencer marketing can be divided into three aspects: content, delivery time, and price.
Specifically, content is the underlying competitiveness of influencer marketing and the core criterion for brand owners to select influencers. If brand owners only rely on subjective experience and manpower to screen influencers, there will be a problem of low matching efficiency. Secondly, delivery time also plays a key role in influencer marketing. If the probability of influencer delivery delay is 20% - 25%, and the interaction decline rate is 15% - 20% for each day of delay, and delivery delay may break the entire marketing chain, so delivery time is also the key to the game between time cost and marketing rhythm.
Thirdly, there are greater deviations in price expectations. Since influencers do not have enough price resources and lack an understanding of the overall market price, the quotes of the same influencer may vary by 2 - 5 times. And brand owners' active quotes are often lower than the fair price, so there are often inconsistent price expectations between the two sides, resulting in the failure of cooperation.
The information opacity in content, delivery time, and price has led to new pain points, namely low efficiency and an unattractive business model. Therefore, overseas markets also set up the Influencer Marketing position, a job for communicating with influencers at any time. This position has no high - tech barriers but requires manual efforts to promote every aspect of cooperation with influencers.
Business specialists find leads and connect with KOLs by sending cold emails, bargain in contract details, and need to urge influencers to complete script hand - over and other details. Even in the delivery stage, there is no standardized industrial solution between brands and influencers, and non - standard links have also brought high communication barriers.
In other words, the core of traditional influencer marketing service agencies is experience - oriented by business specialists, highly relying on manpower to complete multiple links from influencer search, influencer negotiation, script production, content release, to effect summary reports.
It is labor - intensive, and the barrier lies in human resources. “It's like a manual contact workshop,” an employee of an overseas MCN enterprise explained to Xiaguang She. And with the help of influencer marketing AI, there is a possibility of solving the problems of information opacity and low communication efficiency.
First of all, in the data link, relying on a large - scale database of prices and blogger profiles accumulated from negotiations, with the help of multi - dimensional AI modeling, automated retrieval can be promoted. Multi - modality can also solve the pain points in content, that is, through cross - modal structural analysis, conduct multi - dimensional dissections of historical hit content in terms of visual composition, copywriting style, emotional tendency, and audience interaction, making the positioning of content clearer.
Secondly, in the negotiation link where manpower consumption is the most serious, AI agents can improve negotiation accuracy by 30%, and increase the overall marketing ROI by more than 50%, which directly determines the budget utilization rate and the cost - effectiveness of influencers. According to overseas influencer marketing practitioners, 70% of the time in manual negotiation is wasted on price haggling. “This is also the point that can most improve work comfort.”
In addition, marketing effect prediction and effect attribution can be carried out. By establishing a correlation analysis of “content - traffic - conversion”, with the help of AI, the reasons for hit content can be found.
According to Chen Daiyi, the founder of VANZO, in order to better optimize content planning and data monitoring, they established an AI中台 team called “Vanzo Lightning”, which can provide influencer list proposals within 24 hours, with a match rate of 80% for influencer list submissions, and complete influencer signing within 5 days. It can be precise in creative planning for individual influencers, achieving a communication efficiency of 18 hours with influencers.
That is to say, the empowerment of AI agents has upgraded influencer marketing from “labor - intensive” to “algorithm - driven”, solving the three major pain points of price, delivery time, and content, and transforming the original non - standard experience - based judgment into a quantifiable prediction model.
Then, the problems of fake traffic bubbles and insufficient information completeness mentioned above can also be solved with the help of AI.
VANZO is not the only one looking forward to standardizing influencer marketing through AI. For example, the AI marketing enterprise Aha Lab, which has received investments from Jinqiu Fund and GSR Ventures, is also positioned to create a new paradigm for AI influencer marketing.
In 2024, the overseas revenue of Chinese listed companies increased by nearly 10% on the basis of double - digit growth last year, breaking through the 10 - trillion - yuan mark for the first time in history, and overseas revenue now accounts for 13.8% of the total revenue. The figures show that the path for Chinese brands to go global is becoming clearer, and the global narrative of brands is becoming more distinct. In the expectation of entering larger markets, the unsolved problem is not just about numbers but about seeking resonance.
Cara, who is engaged in overseas influencer marketing in Munich, shared her insights with Xiaguang She: “The biggest obstacle for Chinese brands going global is not product strength but the ability of cultural translation. We need a group of people who understand both the Eastern supply chain and Western narratives.” And this kind of cross - time and space resonance is being bridged by AI. Influencer service providers are starting to develop their own automated systems, combining AI technology with manual review to optimize the influencer screening process, enabling brand owners to communicate with KOLs/KOCs efficiently without pain and abandoning the inefficient traditional third - party intermediary model.
More overseas Chinese are trying to connect with local influencers. According to many influencer marketing practitioners, when employees work as digital nomads, salespeople living around the world can accumulate local influencer resources and better understand local needs, which becomes the first batch of data for AI.
Currently, overseas influencer marketing is just at the beginning stage, and there is a consensus with a promising ending: good brands should not be restricted by regions, and influencer marketing is the megaphone that allows more brands to be heard. In the future, if we see more overseas influencers speaking up for Chinese brands, it may be inseparable from the efforts of AI in shortening the distance of communication and understanding.
This article is from the WeChat official account “Xiaguang She”, author: Yang Zi.
