The ultimate guide to influencer marketing for luxury brands

Learn how to keep your luxury brand relevant and authentic by reaching across all generations through established influencer connections.

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Luxury brands are built on quality, exclusivity, and unique brand identity. To build brand awareness, attract online shoppers, engage loyal buyers, and reach new generations of customers, influencer marketing is becoming a must. 

Luxury brands have long depended on creators acting as personal shoppers across social media, to authentically share new styles, designs and products. Now, as most consumers shop online, luxury brands are elevating their strategy, relying on influencers even more.

Influencer marketing – when based on data – drives brand awareness and sales, while maintaining brand identity.

What is luxury influencer marketing?

Luxury influencer marketing: high-end brands work with influencers to promote their luxury goods in an authentic way that drives engagement, increases relevance, maintains exclusivity, and establishes brand personality.

 

Today’s luxury consumer is concerned with quality, social and environmental issues. They make purchases based on values, actions, transparency, inclusivity, product quality, sustainability, and other ethical aspects of society. Luxury brands often collaborate with influencers to add another dimension to the brand that goes beyond unique design and exceptional quality.

Influencer marketing also opens the door to new aspiring luxury consumers for luxury brands and retailers alike. Content marketing allows a brand’s unique story to be told with detail in an authentic way.

Benefits of influencer marketing for luxury brands

All luxury brands can benefit from working with influencers. Luxury lifestyle influencers, when they align with your brand aesthetic and understand your voice, can inspire their followers to dream and buy big. 

Whether you’re a luxury fashion brand or sell women’s fashion, men’s fashion, beauty, CPG, home, travel, entertainment, luxury cars or real estate, you can benefit your brand by:

Why invest in Influencer Marketing now

Luxury Handbag Case Study

Learn how an elite luxury designer partnered with LTK Creators to drive awareness and sales for a new limited handbag collection here.

 

Casting luxury influencers for brand identity, voice, and aesthetic

Work with mid-tier and micro-influencers

 

Luxury brands often seek high profile celebrities with 100,000 to 1 million followers who live extravagant lifestyles. However, in a national study, we found most influential shoppers prefer influencers over celebrities.

Ultimately, when it comes to casting the right influencers, engagement and content quality are just as critical as reach. Mid-tier and micro-influencers (10,000 to 100,000 followers) have the highest levels of engagement.  

These smaller-scale digital influencers have a loyal following and can speak to the subset of consumers your luxury brand is aiming for. As skilled content creators, designers, and even artists themselves, these influencers take the time to create quality content that truly represents the quality of your product.

Prioritise brand alignment with luxury lifestyle influencers

To successfully cast influencers for your luxury brand, assess the influencer’s personal aesthetic, brand, promoted products, and past brand collaborations.

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Do they have a natural affinity toward your brand?
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Does their existing content align with your aesthetic? Could it?
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Do they speak to your target audience?
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Do they align with your brand’s core values?
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DOES THEIR AUDIENCE PURHCASE LUXURY GOODS?
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What is their average order value?

Use influencer data for luxury marketing strategy 

Influencer data should inform your influencer collaborations. With historical performance data, you can answer the following questions:

  • Who have they partnered with in the past?
  • How do they perform in your niche? 
  • Are they driving sales? Brand awareness?
  • Which social platforms are they the most successful on?
  • Which products perform best for their audience?
  • Which content performs the best?

Goals vary for each brand. Using the right influencer marketing hub helps you determine which unique qualities and price points will benefit each campaign, find the right creators to cast and their average order value, and then test those different types of influencers and content channels. From there, the data tells us how to grow your program going forward.

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The LTK Brand Awards recognize brand excellence in Creator Commerce. Brands were selected based on their unique and impactful creator strategy and LTK proprietary benchmark data. SEE THE WINNERS

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International Brand Impact

 

International Brand Impact

 

Influential Shoppers™ grow influencer recommended sales and engagement 2X.

 

Download LTK's Influential Shopper study

Instagram: reaching luxury global consumers

Content creator in silk black outfit and gold accessories at a musical theater show

 

Instagram is a top social media platform for influencers. Highly visual and scrollable, it has nearly 130 million users tapping on shoppable posts each month. This gives influencers the chance to leverage aesthetic content to drive their followers to purchase– often directly from their post or bio.

The aspirational nature of Instagram makes it an effective platform for luxury influencers and upscale brands. A study by Instagram found that over 58% of luxury global consumers use Instagram to track lifestyle trends, and 56% use Instagram to see brands’ newest collections. What’s more, luxury global consumers engage 3X more content than the average global Instagrammer.

This social platform connects luxury brands with younger luxury consumers. Millennials and Gen Z comprise about 60% of Instagram’s audience, which is close to the average age of the luxury global consumer (35 years old).

LTK Shop: top creator platform leading luxury shoppers from inspiration to purchase

 

LTK is the single largest creator platform, with 30M+ shoppers. The LTK Shop platform connects brands, creators, and shoppers with the LTK shopping app for instantly shoppable content across social. The platform extends the longevity of content, allowing consumers to search and shop at their leisure.

The collective LTK Creator community is full of vetted creators who generate mobile-first, shoppable content that reaches an audience of high-intent luxury shoppers. 

Luxury shopping is unique, as consumers rarely see something they want and immediately hit “purchase” or “swipe up.” These luxury products require thought and research. Having an influencer’s stamp of approval on a luxury product – and seeing their repeated use of that product – helps the consumer feel confident when they’re at the point of purchase. 

For example, a shopper may be looking for a luxury tote bag and unsure sure where to start. They could reference influencers known for posting luxury items to help them make a choice. From their profiles, a shopper could go straight to the influencer’s LTK shop, search “tote” and find what they’re looking for, easily. By this point, they’ve already been courting these influencers long enough to trust their recommendations.

Built by creators, LTK has a multi-layered mission: to be a destination for consumers to discover and shop, and to help you reach the niche audiences for your luxury brand, maintain relevance, and increase brand awareness and ROI. In fact, last year, LTK Creators generated £3.2B in retail sales through the LTK platform, and by introducing influencer marketing as a core part of its marketing approach, LTK nearly doubled Missguided’s sales in 2020, with a 92% year-on-year revenue growth.

Gen Z has emerged as a powerful and unique group of consumers. Download our on-demand webinar and study to learn how to effectively market to Gen Z shoppers with insights from our national study and a panel discussion.

Download the study

Tips for creating a successful luxury influencer marketing strategy

 

1—Offer clear expectations

Be clear in your influencer proposal template about your brand expectations, starting your campaign with a clear contract and specific deliverables. Once you’re all aligned with clear objectives, you can move forward with confidence. 

 

2—Be collaborative, not prescriptive

Offer your luxury influencers aesthetic and content inspiration, but let them have creative freedom. Collaborative content must be authentic and align with the influencer’s look and feel. If you’re experiencing a lot of friction here, it may be that you’re working with the wrong influencer.

 

3—Use influencer benchmarking

LTK has 10+ years of data to benchmark and guide influencer strategy. Tracking benchmarks help you strategically improve areas of influence and brand positioning.

 

4—Utilise content-first creator campaigns and influencer boosting

Content-first creator campaigns and influencers outperform traditional ad creative. Retailers are seeing double-digit engagement increases in offer and awareness messaging using creators’ content. This is driving a significant increase in demand for creator content, both in brand advertising and creators’ placements, where they sometimes double or triple ad reach. Learn more about these trends here. 

 

5—Grow influence

When managing your influencer marketing campaign, return on ad spend and results don’t always happen instantly. Lifestyle influencers help you build your reputation and influence via evergreen data-driven strategies. 

Learn how an elite luxury designer partnered with LTK Creators to drive awareness and sales for a new limited handbag collection.

Read the case study

Scale campaigns with influencer marketing management

 

Most luxury brands have a comprehensive budget but not the in-house capacity to:

  • Determine goals and budget
  • Conduct influencer research and casting  
  • Determine target deliverables
  • Write and facilitate contracts 
  • Negotiate influencer rates 
  • Ensure contract fulfillment
  • Monitor budget and prove ROI 

Influencer marketing management enables you to develop and maintain partnerships with the right influencers through a layered, full-funnel approach. This helps you:

  • Scale your influencer marketing program with diverse influencers
  • Test new channels, verticals, and audiences
  • Create multi-channel campaign strategies


As an influencer marketing platform designed for creator management, LTK helps you do it all, so you have the influencer intelligence to run effective influencer marketing campaigns without completely outsourcing to an agency.

 

Join the most trusted and impactful influencer marketing platform.

• Hundreds of thousands of top-tier curated creators
• Advanced Audience Reporting™
• Global in reach

Get started with LTK

Investing in luxury creator commerce

 

If you aren’t sure where to start, consider starting with a test campaign, guided by influencer data. After a decade of pioneering the influencer marketing industry, we’ve solved influencer marketing challenges for luxury brands with:

 

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Amplified distribution through the largest creator shopping channel: shopLTK.com with 30M+ monthly shoppers
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Full-service creator programmes that deliver on your unique objectives
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Strategic planning based on historical brand performance data
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Expert brand consulting, planning, executing, and reporting
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End-to-end campaign execution and influencer casting
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Access to the most successful influencer platform in the world

 

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Licensed imagery from premium creators for your own marketing channels
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Conference and event integration to build long-term relationships
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Access to real-time measurable results on the top influencer campaign management software

 

Use your test campaign as an opportunity to discover best-match lifestyle influencers who convert. As you think longer-term strategy down the road, our influencer marketing platform will help you secure those influencers as your ambassadors.

LTK recently identified the Top 5 Trends in Influencer Marketing.

 

Those trends included 

  • Video content
  • Gen Z partnerships
  • Competitive benchmarking
  • Co-op influencer marketing
  • Content-first campaigns

Connect with top-performing influencers. Grow your brand.

 

Get started with LTK