How 3 Home Brands Elevate Their Digital Strategies with Influencer Marketing

As a home goods brand, you likely want to evoke feelings of comfort and happiness when it comes to your products. However, it can be difficult to replicate these warm feelings in studio-shot creative on traditional ad channels, such as magazines and billboards. 

That’s why today’s savviest home brands are investing in influencer marketing to drive impact. Why?

• It’s more cost-effective. Recent studies show that running an ad in a traditional magazine can cost up to $700,000. Meanwhile, working with influencers — especially smaller creators like nano- and micro-influencers — usually costs a fraction of the price. Many creators may even be willing to work with your brand for just free products, since home goods often cost a pretty penny. 
• It’s a great way to source a diverse array of content. By working with a handful of influencers, you can easily source a goldmine of content that features your products in a variety of spaces, styled in different ways. Then, you can use this creative to personalize your ads and target your various audience segments. 
• It adds a human touch to your brand. Because influencers are master storytellers, they can seamlessly integrate your products and brand message into their content. Plus, by working with creators who are well versed in interior design, it can often feel more approachable for the average consumer to transform their space with your brand’s products. 

Still don’t believe us? Let’s take a look at how industry-leading brands like Outer, Behr Paint, and Rugs USA are approaching influencer marketing to supercharge ROI. 

Outer

Outer is revolutionizing the outdoor furniture industry, from their eco-friendly products to their influencer marketing strategies. 

With a focus on community and sustainability, the brand has a unique retail model called Neighborhood Showroom™, through which over 1,000 customers have become advocates for Outer by turning their backyards into accessible showrooms. Prospective customers can meet their neighbors and check out Outer products in action, reducing the need for brick and mortar showrooms and the unpleasant “salesy” experience that often comes with furniture shopping.

Since seeing the payoff of this kind of third-party validation, the brand turned their focus to scaling their influencer community online. In order to drive full-funnel impact, the brand activated a multi-pronged digital strategy:

• Product seeding: The Outer team works with a wide range of influencers, from interior designers to local moms and lifestyle bloggers. Many of these creators receive free products from Outer and post about their honest experience using the products on their own social channels. Product seeding has proven to be incredibly successful, not only because Outer’s products are high-value, but also because creators are producing highly authentic content that provides social proof.
• Affiliate marketing: Outer created a new revenue stream by building an affiliate program, where each affiliate is compensated with commission every time they drive a conversion. Because affiliates are paid on a per-sale basis, they’re motivated to post about the brand often and help push conversions.
• Influencer content in paid ads: While Outer repurposes influencer content across multiple platforms — including their website, organic social, and email — the team has seen the most impact from using the assets in paid ads. These IGC-based paid ads are selected using a scoring process created based on adQuadrant’s guidelines and then fine tuned and managed by the agency’s team.

Check out the astounding results Outer achieved from these efforts:

• 2,100% increase in affiliate sales
• 1,489% lift in ROAS
• 3x drop in CPA
• 4.3 million engagements
• 32.2 million impressions

Learn more about Outer’s ingenious strategies in our customer feature. 

Behr Paint

To boost awareness and sales among millennial home buyers, Behr Paint launched a competition series on TikTok last fall in collaboration with popular influencers in the home and interior space. The series, cleverly named “To DIY For,” highlighted various do-it-yourself projects where creators showcased how to bring new life to old objects using Behr’s paint. 

In the TikTok series finale, 2 top contestants demonstrated their skills redecorating an entire room. Many of the projects involved using Behr paints to add accents or bring elements of the room together. Each contest video was followed by step-by-step instructional TikTok videos on how to get the same look, allowing Behr to provide value to millennial and Gen Z audiences. 

According to Jodi Allen, global CMO at Behr Paint Company, the “To DIY For” series was a massive success. Although the brand put spend behind paid influencer promotions and social media ads to boost initial awareness, most of the buzz was built through its influencers’ participation in the competition series. In fact, the cheeky “To DIY For” series allowed Behr to achieve over 108 million video views and increase its follower count by a whopping 66%. That makes Behr Paint the most-followed and most-liked brand on TikTok in its industry. 

Rugs USA

Rugs USA takes influencer co-creation to the next level — partnering with creators to produce not only branded content, but also entire product lines. 

In fact, Rugs USA recently launched a new product line in collaboration with Arvin Olano, a well-known interior designer and content creator. The rug collection was developed with Arvin’s input in each step of the way, from deciding the fabric and patterns to the colorway. By co-creating the collection with a trusted expert in the home and interior space, Rugs USA was not only able to create beautiful products, but also build excitement with Arvin’s loyal audience and beyond. 

To promote the Rugs USA x Arvin Olano collection, the brand also activated many other creators in a highly successful product seeding campaign. Although no content was required, the excitement surrounding the campaign was enough to generate impressions and engagement from followers who were eager to share the news.

As a result, Rugs USA was able to garner over 40 million impressions and more than 2.7K posts — all without breaking the bank. 

Learn more about Rugs USA’s campaign in our customer feature. 

Download our guide, The Secret to Efficient Growth, to learn more about how brands are achieving impactful results through influencer marketing.

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