How to use influencer marketing for a luxury brand

If you sell luxury products or services, getting brand recognition from organic mentions might not be enough. This is when brands turn to influencer relationships and try to reach out to fans and connect with them while producing high-quality content.

To put it simply, influencer marketing for a luxury brand is a goal-driven marketing collaboration between a content creator and a high-end brand. With luxury influencer marketing, you can solidify a loyal community around your brand, gain more followers, and boost sales.

Here are a few tips that you need to keep in mind for your next luxury marketing campaign.

As with any collaboration, working with a content creator requires a certain level of negotiation and communication skills. By partnering with a third party, you need to strike a balance between giving them creative freedom without suffocating them with brand guidelines and yet making sure that any initiative and project is aligned with your luxury brand guidelines.

You can choose a great creator that will perfectly fit and complement your plan but you still need to keep in mind your brand. No matter how well-thought your campaign is, it should easily be associated with your luxury product without distorting its image.

Modern analytics platforms offer a variety of tools and in-depth analytics reports. You can get granular reporting on almost any question you have about an influencer and whether they are a good fit for your brand. But don't let data blindly guide you. Planning and development are much more effective when a brand knows what type of data they want to get.

For example, looking at followers and their engagement rates might not be enough to choose the best influencer for your luxury brand. You need to dig deeper: where these followers come from, their interests, if these accounts are legit, and so on. Advanced analytics can help you answer these questions.

Luxury brands are no strangers to creativity but so are the influencers. Working with them means that you need to offer them an opportunity to create content on their own terms and add their own voice to your luxury campaign. Ideally, you'd want them to complement your brand story.

While it might look scary at first, try giving your influencers some room. Let them come back to you with suggestions based on your brief and brand requirements. After all, they are the ones who know best what their audience needs. Through collaboration and proper communication, you can get remarkable results from your luxury influencer campaign.

If you see that the collaboration is not going smoothly or if there's only a little cooperation going on, you might want to consider partnering with a different influencer.

In influencer marketing, it's important to stay in touch with the luxury influencers you've already worked with. One-time campaigns are great for experiments or testing new ideas but if you want to reach a specific audience regularly and build a deeper connection with them, consistency is key. A long-term relationship with an influencer, or even several of them, can help you keep your brand on top of the minds of luxury consumers.

Scaling a luxury influencer campaign is one of the most important steps that is often overlooked. Ideally, you'd want to have a healthy mix of influencers from different tiers. Working with celebrities is not feasible in every case, and even a celebrity campaign can benefit from a little synergy. Try to get a list of high-performing influencers from different tiers and categories, no matter how big or small they are. By mixing them together and incorporating them into your campaign, you'll be able to increase reach and strengthen the positions of your luxury brand.

Influencer marketing is all about relevance. You don't want your campaigns to target an irrelevant audience who is not ready to buy the luxury products you promote. Make sure you are not wasting dollars on paying for impressions that are targeting people who are not interested in what you have to offer. If you choose the wrong social media channel or partner with the wrong influencer, your message won't get good results even if all other components of your campaign are perfect.

To yield the best results, influencer marketing needs to be part of the strategy and complement it and your sales plan in a meaningful way. If you run your campaign in isolation, you won't be able to see whether it contributes to your company-wide goals.