The ultimate guide to influencer marketing for luxury brands

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:

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.

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.

Instagram: reaching luxury global consumers

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 percent of luxury global consumers use Instagram to track lifestyle trends, and 56 percent 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, as Millennials and Gen Z make up about 60 percent 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 8 million+ 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 billion 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 percent year-on-year revenue growth.

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.

Connect with Creators to grow your business

LTK Connect is a self-serve product specifically designed to help brands of all sizes connect directly with LTK Creators to drive traffic, sales, and increase brand awareness.

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:

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