The post Ready to shape your influencer marketing strategy for 2025? appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

The home and garden retail sector saw huge growth during the Covid-19 pandemic and despite many things returning to ‘normal’ over the past couple of years, there are some important changes to the way we live that look likely to be permanent. While many people who worked remotely during pandemic have made some kind of return to office-based working, the latest ONS data shows that around 44% of people still work from home some or all of the time, and this looks to be the ‘new normal’ across many industries where home-working is possible.

This means that millions of UK adults are working from home regularly, spending more time in their homes than they probably would have done pre-pandemic, which is expected to correlate with continued spending on the home environment, even in the context of the current cost-of-living squeeze on many household budgets. More people may be likely to stay at home rather than holidaying elsewhere, have fakeaways or takeaways at home rather than eating out and entertain friends and wider family at home to help save money.

We’ve compiled some tips for ecommerce brands in the home and garden space working with home influencers in the UK to help ensure that you get the most possible from the partnership.

Setting objectives for your home influencer campaign

Having a clear idea of what you want the campaign to deliver is essential before you go into any of the details. Influencer marketing can have a variety of different benefits, but determining the most important for your business in this particular context is key.

For example, is this primarily a brand awareness activity, or is your priority to deliver sales of a certain product or line? While influencer marketing can deliver on more than one front at a time, ensuring that your expectations are aligned to your business goals will help keep the campaign on track in every aspect.

Setting an appropriate budget for your influencer campaign

While you might have a budget in mind before you even begin, it’s important to set objectives first so that you have a business case for the budget that this activity will need. If your primary objective is about increasing brand awareness, what is that worth to your business? If you want to sell a particular product, how many of them do you need to sell to recoup your spend on this activity? If you have any specific influencers in mind already, what are their rates for the kind of activity you are looking for? These are all things that will play into setting an appropriate budget for the campaign.

Doing your research here will definitely save time and effort further down the line.

Choosing the right platforms and home influencers

A major factor in helping you get the best possible return for the campaign is to choose the right influencers on the right platforms. Whether you focus all your attention on home influencers on Instagram or also incorporate TiKTok or another platform will all depend on where your target audience are and the circle of influence and levels of engagement of the individuals you choose to work with.

Of course, a huge part of working with influencers is finding people who are a good fit for your brand identity and ethos and whose creativity aligns with what you stand for. Their audience size is important, but the level of engagement they get with their followers gives a much better idea of the potential benefits of working with them.

Your campaign specifics and your budget will have an impact on who you work with, but the below checklist might also help.

Evaluating home influencers metrics

• Number of followers
• Engagement rates on non-sponsored content they publish
• Engagement rates on sponsored/ad content they publish (usually lower than the above metric)
• Amount of sponsored content they produce as a percentage/ratio
• Whether they have or currently work with any direct competitors of yours
• Reach (this will need to come from their own stats)
• Fake follower percentage (there are many free online tools for this to check influencer’s Instagram profiles)
• Rates (available from influencers directly or their agents/agency for larger influencers)

Scoping out the influencers that you like to see if they would be open to working with your brand on a campaign is important – they need to see it as a good fit too. Choosing influencers that already have a clear identity and style of their own means you can have a good idea of what they will bring to the table. Take a look at some examples of established home influencers and their content below:

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A post shared by Anna | Affordable Decor, Hacks & Styling | UK (@our_home_style_)

Communicating a clear brief to your home influencers

Giving influencers all the creative freedom they need is an important part of ensuring you get an authentic campaign, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give them a clear brief as a starting point. They need to know who you’re trying to reach, why and what you want the outcome(s) to be. If the campaign is product-led then they need to know about any features, benefits and USPs of the product(s) and why their followers should choose your brand rather than one of your competitors.

Of course, you’ll need to include the deliverables you want from them and respective timescales, which can be key if you’re running several marketing activities concurrently with the influencer campaign.

If there are any brand no-go areas, make sure these are also outlined in the brief. For example, specific topics they want to stay away from.

Providing hashtags, links, affiliate codes, discount codes, or whatever other methods you want to use to encourage sales from the campaign, is also important to make sure that the results of the activity can be property tracked and measured.

Tracking every element of the influencer campaign

Influencer marketing has a reputation for being difficult to track, but that certainly doesn’t have to be the case. Ensuring that you have prepared personalised trackable links or coupon codes will mean that you can see if an influencer directly drives ecommerce sales, social listening while the influencer posts their content will help ensure you can track online conversations about your brand/products. Alongside this, keeping an eye on organic brand impressions (through Google Search Console) means you can correlate increases with influencer activity.

Evaluate the results and learn for future campaigns

Tracking and reporting on how an influencer campaign worked is always important. Using the data you gather to gain insights on how things could be done better or differently next time is even more useful.

Don’t just evaluate the end result; evaluate every step of the process.

• Did the campaign achieve your original objectives?
• Was your brief clear enough?
• Did you make the right choices of influencer?
• Were there any issues with communication or the deliverables?
• Were you able to track everything that you needed?
• Were there any unexpected benefits that came from the campaign?
• Did parts of it underperform vs your expectations?
• What would you change about the campaign if you could?

Taking some time to do this properly will help you to run more effective influencer marketing campaigns in the future and help maximise your return.

If you’d like some help with influencer marketing for your home or garden brand, our team would love to hear from you. Contact us using the form below.

The post Getting the best marketing return when working with home influencers appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

Bold patterns and colours

As an antidote to the neutral greys and pop of bright colour that have become the staple of many homes in the last decade, 2022 could well see a move towards bolder and stronger looks that give spaces in our homes a more individual look and feel.

Search trends back this up, and although greys are still in demand, blues and greens are beginning to climb. Home decor brands can take advantage of these trends with inspirational and how-to content on their websites – including variations of “top green paint”, even smaller challenger brands could create data-led campaigns around top sellers and their application to boost traffic and grow market share on search. 

Making the most of small spaces using levels and storage solutions

Millions of people have turned small areas of their home into work spaces or multi-functional zones during the pandemic, whether for home working, home schooling, a home gym or to give a dedicated place to hobbies, side hustles or family activities. While we’re not all going to move into tiny homes, taking inspiration from this movement can help provide great ideas of how to make small spaces perform several functions and how to do more with less.

Leading some of the top searches around small spaces are hallways and bedrooms. Marketing teams should continue to showcase great ways to use these kinds of spaces, keeping things organised and simple – leveraging key platforms to bring it to life. TikTok, Pinterest and Instagram are great platforms to drive ecommerce traffic (depending on your audience of course) – using short and snappy videos that are “hands-on” or “before and afters” will drive traffic, especially if you link directly to key products highlighted.

The outdoors indoors

If there’s one thing that lockdowns and pandemic isolations have taught us, it’s the importance of the outdoors to our mental and emotional health. Bringing some of that indoors is looking to be a key trend for the next few years, whether that’s with clever use of wallpaper, houseplants or even living walls.

Sustainability and upcycling

Upcycling existing pieces or furniture might seem to be anti-retail in the sense that people are using what they already have rather than buying new, but retailers can still jump on this trend by showing shoppers options for accessorising and making the most of upcycled home items.

Everyone wants to shop sustainably when possible, so retailers that can effectively communicate how certain products have sustainable credentials can certainly stand out.

Very Peri

The Pantone colour of 2022, Very Peri is a blue/violet shade that is expected to be showing up in everything from mugs and rugs to sofas and ceilings. Even if you don’t sell anything in this shade, creating visual content to show how what you do sell can complement and enhance home products of this colour can help to inspire shoppers to make a purchase from your ecommerce site.

Cottagecore

Cottagecore was big in 2021 and this looks set to continue throughout the next year at least. Floral prints and organic textures abound in this look that gives countryside vibes even if you live in an inner-city high-rise apartment. Another way to bring some of the outdoors in, cottagecore is backed up by huge amounts of content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, so brands getting in on this action using these social channels can certainly drive sales directly this way too.

Shades of green

An alternative way to get a feel of the green outdoors inside your home is to use shades of green within your home. The great thing about a green sofa is that it doesn’t need watering like a houseplant does! Green is a colour that goes really well with a wide range of other tones and shades, so you can play it down for a calm and neutral feel, or easily play it up for a more striking look by choosing different colours accents.

Unexpected wallpaper

We all know the impact of a feature wall but using wallpaper in less usual places is certainly also a trend at the moment. How about a wallpapered section within a larger wall or even a ceiling? Or perhaps consider lining the inside of cupboards and other storage with wallpaper for some additional interest and colour – there’s plenty to play with for home-decor brands to capitalise on this.

Different textures for touchabilty

A trend that seems to be gathering pace is using different textures on walls, furniture and accessories to increase the tactile appeal of spaces. Whether that’s a cork wall in your living space, a rattan room divider, a textured headboard in your bedroom, or some hessian used on cupboard doors or in your soft furnishings. With soft and neutral tones but a surface that adds variety to the textures in your home, products like this can bring a whole new dimension to a bedroom, kitchen or living area.

Making the most of these interior trends with your marketing activity

Inspirational interior visuals

Whether you sell paint, wallpaper, art, furniture, lighting, houseplants or soft furnishings, creating aspirational visuals of your products in the context of finished rooms with complementary decoration or furnishings can be absolutely key to driving more sales.

Trend pages to group products together

Consider developing trend pages containing these visuals, product details and optimised content to help bring organic traffic in. Carrying out marketing activity such as digital PR campaigns that link back to these pages can help with ecommerce SEO performance.

Cross-sell during checkout

Showing related and complementary products during the checkout process can also help nudge up the average order value and maximise the revenue generated by every transaction. Delivering this in the context of showing the product in their basket in the same scene as the other products can help shoppers visualise how this will look in their own home. Using your own unique images, which are also properly optimised for search engines, will also help bring in search traffic.

Make the most of visual social media channels to drive traffic

Pinterest is still a top platform for home inspiration and traffic driving to product pages, so don’t neglect this channel even if you also want to focus on Instagram and Facebook audiences for generating sales. Home inspiration content is also still hugely popular on TikTok, with transformations of rooms, homes and furniture provides good opportunities for ecommerce brands to create their own content or work with content creators on the platform as part of their influencer marketing strategy.

If you would like some assistance with your ecommerce SEO or wider marketing strategy, our team would love to hear from you. Contact us using the form below.

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Influencers are no longer the “girl next door” who’s “just like us”. They’re running multi-million-pound empires and have huge TEAMS of people working for them. And an industry with such growing influence over us needs some kind of policing to keep things in check.

The Competition Markets Authority (CMA) and Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have made multiple attempts to protect consumers from misleading and ambiguous posts across social media.

However, as more and more regulations and laws come into effect for influencers and bloggers, some state that they’re simply not clear enough. Guidelines from the CMA state that content should be “transparent, easy to understand, unambiguous, timely and prominent” and “apparent without the need for people to click for more information, no matter what type of device they’re using to view the post”.

But is the CMA guilty of not being clear enough?

See what you think of the latest set of rules;

The rules

• Influencers must disclose when they have been paid, gifted or loaned products

In the past influencers were required to disclose a paid partnership with a brand but these new guidelines state that any form of compensation (i.e. moneys, gifts, clothes, services) must be clearly disclosed.

Because of their high following, influencers receive goods from brands in the hope they’ll feature them on their channels and under these new guidelines, if it’s not been bought, it has to be made clear.

• Being completely transparent about relationships with a brand or business

Sometimes influencers have access to discount codes and run competitions and giveaways alongside a brand in order to gain followers for themselves and brand exposure for the company.

Under these new rules, influencers must be completely clear about their relationship with brands (even if it’s a past relationship) and clearly state when and how they’ve worked/are working with the brand in question.

• Don’t be deceptive

It’s no secret that influencers have been caught misleading their followers by implying they’ve bought a product or service they are endorsing when it has been gifted or loaned.

New laws are cracking down on all misleading posts and some influencers have taken these new laws incredibly seriously.

Here’s how to post under the new laws.

(Clearly states “AD” at the start of the post and details which products featured in the image have been gifted at the bottom of the post.)

How not to post under the new laws;

(Brand partnership has not been clearly stated).

The new laws have seen a whole host of influencers taking to social media to discuss the new rules asking for clarification amongst themselves. Consumers and viewers have also taken to the channels to air their gripes:

So, as a governing body for the industry, is the ASA guilty of not adhering to one of its own rules by simply not being clear enough? Are the rules ruining what Instagram used to be? And are these new rules simply not clear enough to be taken seriously?

Let us know what you think! twitter.com/nobraineragency.

The post More rules and regs for influencers announced, but is it all a bit too much? appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

Even though we’re only a year old, we’ve been asked countless times to help companies who need a PR, a Social or a Marketing strategy. It’s usually one of those. But, more often then not, we come out agreeing the path forward is a very different one.

How we do ‘Converged’

In our opinion – and I’m sure we’ve bored people to tears about this in our first year of operation – the very best communications campaigns are converged. That’s why we live and breathe Bought, Owned, Shared and Earned (BOSE) principles – have a look at our infographic on this page to see exactly what that is and how they work together.

Put simply, great storytelling should work across your bought, shared, owned and earned channels. The content we produce with our clients is interesting, sharable and usable across all the channels at our disposal. Ensuring business stories are delivered through clients’ owned channels like websites, shared channels like blogs and social handles and earned activity (new-world PR, online and offline) can deliver results you wouldn’t believe. The good thing is, we can measure it. We can prove it works.

We help our clients choose the right channels to reach the people they want to connect with. They know they can trust us to recommend the best approach and, together, we are able to hit our shared objectives simply by telling their story better…. to the right people, in the right places and at the right times.

The circle in the middle of the infographic is No Brainer and our clients, collaborating to create a calendar of stories that give us the chance to showcase their company to the world – both on and off line and through channels that make sense.

If you ever want to speak to us about how we can help you deliver integrated communications across your organisation, please feel free to get in touch.

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