Influencer Marketing For Lifestyle Brands

How Lifestyle Brands Can Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a proven way to promote your brand or products with established and profitable content creators on the internet. True influencers have a proven track record of making authentic connections with their audience and moving them to take buying actions.

Their followers are already loyal. They already trust them. You are paying to borrow that loyalty and trust.

Most influencers operate on social media, blogs, and podcasts. Leveraging an influencer in your marketing strategy could be part of a brand awareness campaign or new product launch and will often see a boost in conversions and sales.

Related: Top Fashion Bloggers

If you’re considering influencer marketing for your lifestyle brand, here is what you need to know before getting started.

What Does Influencer Marketing Campaigns Do For Lifestyle Brands?

Lifestyle brands are focused on inspiring consumers to reach for or make purchases that give them the life they desire. Consumers who are looking for an outlet for this desire aren’t looking for just one product, but rather a theme or a vision.

Lifestyle influencers will embody the lifestyle the target consumer wants to replicate. They will be able to tap into the goals, emotions, desires, pain points, and challenges that the target audience faces. They can inspire viewers to take actions that are driven by those desires and challenges.

Content creators in the desired lifestyle niche will deeply understand audience demographics and user behavior. They will know what content style is most effective and what calls to action yield the best results.

They will know how to elicit engagement and conversions from their audience. They have the creative skills to produce beautiful content that resonates with the ideal customer.

They may be the first line of feedback for happy or dissatisfied customers. They operate as a voice that is not the same as the brand and is trusted on a deeper level.

In short, the influencer lives the life the target audience wants to live. Learning about the products and services that make that influencer’s lifestyle possible is part of adapting that lifestyle for themselves.

The target market will desire to replicate what they see and make it a reality in their own life. They may even realize they’re being sold to, or they may not. The difference lies in the level of trust in the influencer. They believe what they share.

An influencer that’s part of a lifestyle brand’s marketing campaign can deliver incredible results in awareness, credibility, conversions, and engagement.

Choosing Your Influencer

Unless you already know an influencer that will represent your brand for a reasonable price, you’ll need to find one. You’ll have the most success with an influencer who already operates in your niche or someone with whom you share a target audience.

If your lifestyle brand specializes in high-quality home furnishings for upper-middle-class ladies, you probably don’t share the target audience of someone who markets primarily to high-performance fitness junkies or DIY crafters.

Once you find a potential match, you’ll need to measure or request their engagement metrics to see how effective your campaign has the potential to be. Likes and follows are great, but they’re considered “vanity metrics” and not necessarily indicative of authentic engagement.

Here are a few things to check when gauging the true influence of your influencer:

Calculate Their Engagement Rate

This is a simple calculation of dividing their average number of engagements (likes, comments, and shares) by the number of fans or followers. For example, if their average post gets 300 likes, 50 comments, and 20 shares, you total this up to 370 and divide by their 10,000 followers.

This results in an engagement rate of 3.7 percent. But take care to actually look at the comments and check for any fake or bot activity.

Who Follows Them Back?

It’s all about who you know, right? Check to see what kind of accounts are engaging with this influencer. Is it your target audience? Do they engage with this influencer already?

What Is Their True Reach Potential?

Is this influencer active on more than one platform? Can they prove they’re good at what they do and not just lucky on one channel? You don’t want to be pigeonholed by their limitations.

How Have they Cultivated Their Community?

An influencer has created their own community on social media or through their blog by being, saying, and showing their target market what they want to see.

They understand their target audience on a deeper, more personal level than any brand ever could. They engage with followers authentically and share valuable insights consumers want to see.

They’re experts in their niche. Content creators focus on value and engagement, not just sales. They’re helping and nurturing their audience with no strings attached. Social media users seek out influencers on topics they’re interested in because they view them as authority.

Social media and blogging influencers have cultivated their audience by becoming a reflection of their audience’s experiences, desires, or challenges. They show up with the right message on a consistent basis.

Cultivating an audience also comes from collaborating with other industry influencers or content creators in an adjacent niche. They can play off of one another’s strengths and create something together to reach even more audience members.

What Campaigns Have They Worked With in the Past?

As with any influencer marketing campaign, the first question should always be, “What is the objective of this campaign?” Start here to figure that out.

Brand Awareness

Increasing awareness is how brands can expand the reach of their products and services. Awareness includes metrics such as reach, impressions, and views. It tells the story of how many social media followers or subscribers saw the branded content.

If there are consumers that brands know they’re not reaching, influencers can help spread the word and spark a higher level of awareness. This campaign will work well for a newer brand that wants to grow its customer base or an existing brand that is launching a new product line.

Engagement

Brands that need to generate a stronger or more targeted conversation around their brand need to launch an influencer marketing campaign that’s focused on generating engagement. Influencers design content that is intended to generate likes, comments, shares, and views.

This engagement sparks a conversation around brands and products that can get consumers excited about new products and services. It creates sharable content that target audience members are happy to share. In turn, it spreads the word even among those who aren’t in the influencer’s community.

Conversions

Campaigns with the objective to convert are looking for increased website traffic, sales, and off-platform engagement. This includes downloading lead magnets, registering for events, scrolling a sales page, shopping on product pages, viewing off-platform content, and making a purchase.

Take the time to build a lasting relationship with your influencer that will stand the test of time. Don’t approach this arrangement as a once-only campaign.  Connect with influencers as people, not just marketing channels.

Does Their Audience Align With Yours?

Lifestyle Brands and Compass a wide range of nieces, including farming lifestyle, city lifestyle LGBTQ+ lifestyle, and a host of other related markets.

Finding a social media or blogging influencer that has a targeted audience match is essential for campaign success.  Dig into the audience of a preferred content creator and see who is there.

Who else do they follow? What competitors do they follow? Are there other influencers in their sphere? Who is engaged? What topics are they engaged about? These are all indicators of an audience match or mismatch.

Solo Influencer vs. Influencer Agency

When forging out on your own to recruit an influencer, you don’t want to pitch them right away. You need to make a genuine connection, follow them, engage, and build a relationship. Prove to them that your brand is a good fit for their image.

This takes time. And that’s before all the legal and financial negotiations begin.

An influencer agency comes pre-loaded with an arsenal of vetted influencers, and they can help you find that perfect match. They will also help you develop a strategy, provide you with campaign analytics, and manage all of the contracts and payments.

Explore All Content Types

With all the diversity that social media offers today, don’t settle for “just a blog post.” Those still have incredible potential for ROI, but so do a lot of other mediums. Consider all the forms of content available on the platform where your target market is most likely to be.

Influencers, and thereby your audience, don’t exist solely on Instagram and Facebook. Think outside the box! Consider audio-only platforms like Clubhouse or podcast features. If you’re marketing to those DIY crafters, your brand might be more at home on Pinterest.

Wherever you end up, diversify your campaign with stories, live videos, or short videos like Reels or TikTok videos. Always negotiate for more than one type of content.

Lifestyle, But Make It Real

Most users are over the days of fake and highly filtered social media. As a lifestyle brand, your goal is to embody the interests, values, and goals of your target market in order to make a connection.

Who you work with is crucial, so choose your influencer wisely! You want to inspire and motivate your ideal customer by contributing positively to their life, not by intimidating them and showcasing something disingenuous or phony.

Influencer marketing for lifestyle brands is the best way to create an emotional connection and a sensory-driven experience – one that gets results.