The home furnishing ecommerce industry has boomed, reaching $92.32 billion in sales, and included a surge in home gyms, home offices, and DIY projects to improve surroundings.
With consumers looking to social media for design ideas and products, brands need to boost brand awareness and connect with shoppers by getting products in front of consumers online. In this guide, you’ll learn how home decor brands can leverage influencers to grow their brands and prepare for the coming years of fluctuating trends.
What is influencer marketing for home decor brands?
For years, consumers relied on HGTV and magazines to take them into beautiful homes. Now, people get home design ideas through content social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. By partnering with influencers to showcase pieces, decor brands can gain brand awareness in niches of aesthetic inspiration and remain top-of-mind as people shop for their home.
What home-obsessed consumers want
The home is an extension of one’s personal style, and many put a lot of thought and research into the pieces they choose.
Home goods consumers are looking for content that catches their eye, helps them envision the products in their space, and a true testimony of quality. Here’s what consumers are looking for in home design brands:
1
Choices with different price ranges
With stretched budgets, most consumers decorate their homes with a mix of high-end and low-end pieces. By pairing items of different price points, interior design influencers can elevate cheaper items, while making splurge items feel like home centerpieces and essentials.
2
Uniqueness
Consumers want pieces that help them achieve self-expression. While they may also be looking for standard furnishings, an influencer can help put your product in a unique setting and showcase its potential. One influencer may add your product to their cottage core living room, while another influencer may let your product live amidst their balcony plant life.
3
Comfort
During lockdown, comfort became a necessity in the home. More time at home has meant more projects to make it feel cozier, safer, and mentally stimulating. Work with influencers to show how your home goods will support their goals for daily self-soothing.
4
Sustainability
With increased environmental consciousness, home decor brands are expected to be transparent about manufacturing and sustainability efforts. Influencers know how to tell your brand’s story in a personal way that gives buyers confidence they’re making a smart, ethical decision.
5
Longevity
Once consumers find home brands they love and trust, they keep coming back. Influencers keep your brand narrative top-of-mind and at their followers’ fingertips.
6
Convenience
Consumers are looking for brands that make it easy to return, work with customer service, and a website that is shoppable. A home decor influencer can speak to each of these experiences with your brand and provide an easy path to purchase.
What is a home decor influencer?
A home decor influencer is ultimately a lifestyle influencer.
Interior design influencers can be interior designers, architects, and other professionals in the home design space. But many are comprehensive lifestyle influencers, sharing everything from their DIY home improvement projects to fashion, food, and routines.
As consumers look for new styles to add to their homes, gyms, offices, and living spaces, they’re also searching a full lifestyle landscape of influencers, who have become a go-to l resource for what to do and buy.
Home decor influencers are:
Trusted for their reviews and opinions through authentic content
Always aware of new trends
Adaptable to specific niches for unique, targeted campaigns
The most agile, cost-effective, and trackable sales channel
Excellent digital content creators and brand collaborators
More influential than paid advertising according to LTK’s national shopper study
Brands work with influencers to create content that will boost brand awareness, increase engagement, and drive sales. With authentic content that aligns with their personal brand, influencers help position your home decor business as a trusted source in your industry.
By leveraging an influencer network platform and expert in creator management, home decor brands can confidently execute a successful influencer marketing strategy based on unmatched influencer data in the home retail sector.
Home decor influencer content
Home decor content creators know how to produce images and video content that is beautiful yet attainable, unlike polished catalogs.
Top home influencers are curating beautiful home spaces and speaking directly to their followers about how they did it. They offer styling advice, DIY tips and how-to’s, and home furnishing recommendations on a budget.
Ultimately, home brands aren’t selling a couch or a lamp; they’re selling a lifestyle. That’s why influencer lifestyle content is so effective. While influencers are reading in their jacuzzi tub by candlelight or cuddling with their pup by the fireplace, they’re showcasing and selling your products.
Home decor influencer content includes:
- Static, quality product images
- Reels with trending music
- Seasonal ambient decor
- Social channel takeovers
- Strategically placed greenery
- Roundups of treasured finds
- Aesthetic interior composition
- Behind-the-scenes footage
- Before-and-afters
- Shopping trips to creative outlets
- Unique depictions of trends
- Unboxing and tutorials
- Lengthy, informative descriptions
- Image-heavy blog posts
- User-generated content
Consumers are looking to their favorite influencers before making big purchase decisions. So, whether you’re a high-end home decor brand or a low-end, budget-friendly brand, the right mix of influencers can help you scale, drive brand awareness, and increase sales.
What top home design influencers want in a brand
Home influencers are looking for the same things their followers are looking for: comfort, beauty, wellness, peace-of-mind, family, and quality of life.
To keep their loyal followers and inspire them to buy, influencers must maintain their authenticity and speak to all of the needs listed above.
Here’s what home decor influencers are looking for in brands:
Aligned design preferences
To remain authentic to their dedicated followers, home influencers partner with brands that make sense for their personal aesthetic, beliefs (e.g. sustainability), and lifestyle.
If they lose authenticity, they lose followers, and you don’t get results. Working with an expert in influencer management helps you sift through the sea of influencers for best-fit casting from the start.
Inspiration
A mood board, along with any helpful messaging, can inspire the influencer to bring the content to life in a way that represents your brand identity.
Unique, trending decor
The unique content creator is looking for new, eye-catching ways to decorate and furnish their home – whether that involves classic essentials or trendier accessories. Where possible, tap into your most unique services, furnishings, and offerings to highlight across your influencer marketing campaigns.
Eco-friendly initiatives
Does your brand have any environmentally conscious values, statements, or initiatives? Influencers can spread the word about how you’re impacting the world. This helps improve your brand perception and sets your business apart.
Creative freedom
Home design is creative at its core. Allow your influencers to interpret campaigns and create content that balances your brand identity with their personal, stylish, and themed brand.
Customer-centric services and policies
Influencers want to promote brands that value the customer, especially in an industry full of large and expensive purchases. Working with them will drive the narrative that these purchases are smart and meaningful, and that they’ll be in good hands.
Subtlety
For home design brands just starting out with influencer marketing, it’s smart to begin with featuring products from a smaller price range. Influencers know this is the way to nurture their followers into committing to larger purchases over time.
Clear contractual terms and conditions
Your contract is the start of a collaborative partnership. Provide your influencers talking points, brand information, and helpful tips for deliverables without being too prescriptive.
How Can Your Home Brand Benefit from Influencer Marketing?
Nearly every type of home furnishings brand can benefit from influencer marketing. Whether you’re in indoor and outdoor furnishings, appliances and entertainment, cookwares, bedding, cleaning products, furniture, and textile… influencer marketing can be the key to exceeding your growth goals.
Influencer marketing for boutique home brands
Influencer marketing can put a small brand on the map by spreading brand awareness across popular social channels. Smaller home decor brands with customer-centric services, unique pieces, and online accessibility can see great success when using the right mix of influencers.
It happens all the time: a highly engaged influencer features a boutique brand’s antique table with a modern chair, and inspiration takes hold of their followers.
Influencer marketing has helped many boutique brands reach audiences in different parts of the country or the world or even led to discovery by other prospective design business partners.
Influencer marketing can also help smaller brands make the most of their marketing spend through licensed influencer content. Over the course of your influencer campaigns, you can build a collection of licensed evergreen and reusable content that continues to convert across your owned channels.
Don’t have the budget for a full influencer campaign? LTK offers other placements at lower flat fees to help spread brand awareness.
Scaling larger home design brands
Larger brands are often more established in the saturated market, but it’s critical to stay relevant and top-of-mind. Influencers can help larger home brands scale their approach, keeping them in front of consumers and above competitors.
These large home retail brands work with us to develop a layered, full-funnel approach to scale their influencer marketing program with new influencers, test new channels and verticals, and create multi-channel campaign strategies.
LTK Most Loved Product Awards
As the global leader in Creator Commerce™, we used our proprietary benchmarking technology to evaluate billions of Creator-linked products and compile our annual list of top performers. Check out the 2021 award winners to see what products—from fashion to fitness and family—everyone is crazy about now.
Home improvement and design trends
Consider the following DIY home improvement and interior design trends when starting new influencer campaigns.
Mixing high-end and low-end
As mentioned, most consumers today are balancing furnishings from luxury home decor brands and budget-friendly, lower-end pieces. Your audience follows influencers who speak to both ends of the design spectrum.
Maximizing small spaces
With the home office boom, people started getting creative. This trend continues today and won’t be slowing down. Apartment renters and homeowners alike are looking for ways to improve the look and functionality of their smaller spaces, and need ideas for how to do it.
Smart homes getting smarter
Tech doesn’t stop. Smart home technology – like sound systems, security cameras, and even light fixtures – is a growing trend. If your home brand offers tech-enabling products and services, influencers can spread the word about their firsthand experience.
The kitchen refresh
The kitchen is often thought of as the heart of the home and people are revamping this family space more than ever. Kitchen-related search terms such as ‘kitchen renovation’, ‘dining room table’, and ‘barstools’ have seen triple-digit growth in LTK App searches. If your brand calls for it, you can tap into this trend and live at the heart of the home-obsessed consumer.
Minimalism
Many consumers today are doing more with less. Minimalists make statements with unique, eye-catching pieces (specifically greenery, open storage, and wall decor). Any home brand can act on this trend, with the help of the right minimalist-minded influencers.
Casting the most effective home decor influencers
Casting influence creators is a complex process, with millions of available content creators. From our experience as an influencer marketing hub, with a decade of influencer data, we’ve helped countless brands get more visits through the right influencers.
Here are some best practices for casting the best home decor influencers for your brand.
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1. Consider these tips for a successful home decor campaign strategy.
✓ Don’t stretch your budget too far.
Allocate enough of a budget to meet all your long-term and short-term goals. Stretching a small budget across too many goals will likely yield an unsuccessful campaign.
✓ Create an audience-specific offer.
Give your influencers something of value they can offer their followers, such as promo codes, discounts, a free service – all incentivizing them to go from just dreaming of a renovation to putting it into action. Your brand could also offer a simple quiz or a helpful guide that consumers can use to envision their space with your products.
✓ Be generous with gifting.
Homeware brands should be as generous as possible when gifting or lending items to influencers. This sweetens the influencer’s experience and what they share with their audience.
✓ Set campaign expectations.
Be direct with your influencers about what you expect from the campaign, especially about anything your brand does and does not want included in stylized content. This keeps everyone on-brand.
✓ Grow influence
When managing your influencer marketing campaign, return on ad spend and results don’t always happen instantly. Influence and reputation, just like with other marketing media, is built over time with home decor influencers.
The LTK team goes above and beyond to identify progress and areas for improvement to reach optimal performance. The LTK Score™ is a benchmark that compares how influential your brand is vs. others in your category. The LTK Score™ shows brands how to best GROW (Gather, Reach, Optimize and Win!) influence with insights and best opportunities to improve.
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2. Work with niche or micro-influencers.
The micro-influencer has between 1,000 to 100,000 followers. While they’re often underestimated by brands, they are highly effective in their niche.
A mega influencer with 1M+ followers could have low engagement and few conversions, while a nano influencer with 10,000 or fewer followers may have higher engagement for their niche, and stronger influence for conversion.
When casting, don’t ignore the impact of home decor micro-influencers.
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3. Celebrate milestones.
Many influencers and brands have seen success with content that marks certain life milestones. Whether the influencer is getting married, moving in with a partner, or having a baby, their audience is invested, and your brand can benefit by having products as part of the occasion.
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4. Leverage user-generated content.
Work with home decor and lifestyle influencers who inspire followers to repost, share, and tag content. This social proof creates a steady flow of organic content that validates your brand in the eyes of the design-inspired homeowner or renter.
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5. Leverage revenue-producing influencers.
It’s always been a challenge for brands to determine influencer pay. Do they base dollar values on impressions, engagement, followers, or other metrics?
Brands need visibility into audience worth and a deeper understanding of metrics and attribution to make payment decisions. Gain the highest level of influencer transparency by working with an influencer marketing management platform.
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6. Be diverse.
People buy things they can relate to and see themselves using. In such a diverse world, brands must work with influencers of all gender identities, races, and backgrounds to truly relate to the world we live in and not alienate consumers from all walks of life.
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7. Branch out to many formats and channels.
On top of influencer diversity, home brands should work with influencers who live on various platforms and use a variety of content formats. While a static post may be perfect for a before-and-after kitchen reno, an Instagram story may be better for demonstrating a new sound system or a cozy, live fireplace. Pinterest and LTK have both been successful social media platforms for home decor influencers.
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8. Think local.
While ecommerce is the key to retail success today, local influencers for close-to-home success via local online orders for quick delivery and convenient in-store purchases.
Taking an independent approach to influencer marketing can lead to:
The wrong influencer relationships
Inconsistent influencer outreach
Unclear influencer-brand communication
Lack of ROI
Messy influencer contracts and proposals
Lack of campaign focus
Wasted time on the wrong metrics
The right home decor influencers can help you reach home decor buyers and design partners, foster customer loyalty, spread brand awareness, build brand identity, and create a fresh narrative around your brand in the marketplace.
Facilitating communication and creating an influencer proposal template can be a challenge. Work with an expert enabled by the most advanced influencer marketing software.
Creating successful influencer marketing campaigns
1 — Don’t stretch your budget too far
Allocate enough of a budget to meet all your long-term and short-term goals. Stretching a small budget across too many goals will likely yield an unsuccessful campaign.
2 — Create an audience-specific offer
Give your influencers something of value they can offer their followers, such as promo codes, discounts, a free service – all incentivizing them to go from just dreaming of a renovation to putting it into action. Your brand could also offer a simple quiz or a helpful guide that consumers can use to envision their space with your products.
3 — Be generous with gifting
Homeware brands should be as generous as possible when gifting or lending items to influencers. This sweetens the influencer’s experience and what they share with their audience.
4 — Set campaign expectations
Be direct with your influencers about what you expect from the campaign, especially about anything your brand does and does not want included in stylized content. This keeps everyone on-brand.
5 — Grow influence
When managing your influencer marketing campaign, return on ad spend and results don’t always happen instantly. Influence and reputation, just like with other marketing media, is built over time with home decor influencers.
The LTK team goes above and beyond to identify progress and areas for improvement to reach optimal performance. The LTK Score, (Gather, Reach, Optimize and Win!) provides insights into how your brand’s influence ranks and best opportunities to improve.
6 — Use branded and trending hashtags
Make branded and trending hashtags a part of your homeware brand’s influencer strategy. Branded hashtags are valuable for brand awareness and make it easy to find content created by you, your influencers, and your followers. Trending hashtags, like #handmade, #cottagecore, and #plantparent, can put your content in front of consumers who are currently looking to execute certain trends in their space.
7 — Stay adaptable
Roll with the punches as you work through your influencer campaign. As powerful as influencers are, unexpected things happen. Should any issues arise, the LTK team goes above and beyond to troubleshoot and find a solution during an influencer campaign.
Benefits of an influencer marketing management platform
Influencer marketing campaigns can be complex. You need 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
At LTK, we help you and all of your departments every step of the way and amplify your in-house efforts. As an influencer marketing platform designed for creator management, we help you do it all in-house, so you have the influencer intelligence to run effective influencer marketing campaigns without completely outsourcing to an agency.
Where to start your influencer marketing journey
New to influencer marketing? Start with a test campaign, guided by influencer data to get a strategy going strong. As the leading influencer marketing hub for the last 10 years, LTK has solved influencer marketing challenges through:
- Amplified distribution through the largest creator shopping channel: shopLTK.com with 8M+ shoppers
- Full-service creator programs that deliver on your unique objectives
- Strategic planning based on historical brand performance data
- Expert brand consulting, planning, executing, and reporting
- End-to-end campaign execution and influencer casting
- Access to the most successful influencer platform in the world
- Licensed imagery from premium creators for your own marketing channels
- Conference and event integration to build long-term relationships
- Access to real-time measurable results on the top influencer campaign management software
Use your test campaign as an opportunity to discover best-match home decor 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.
GROW with the LTK Score
LTK Score™ is an industry-first benchmark to show where brands are with influence amongst peers and the best strategy to GROW influence.
Gather the right curated creators with Advanced Audience Insights
Reach with automated influencer management tools and payments
Optimize with simplified creator communication and integrations for better execution
Win! Advanced Audience Campaign Reporting to achieve better result