Influencer Strategies to Acquire Customers for Home and Living Brands

April 10, 2025

Influencer marketing has become a powerful tool for home and living brands, allowing them to showcase products in real-life settings and connect with consumers in an authentic way. Whether it’s a cozy bedding setup, a beautifully styled dining table, or an inviting outdoor furniture arrangement, influencers help bring home products to life.

However, many brands struggle to turn influencer campaigns into actual customer acquisition, not just engagement. A common mistake is partnering with influencers based solely on follower count rather than audience alignment. Others rely on one-off sponsored posts that generate temporary buzz but fail to drive long-term sales.

To make influencer marketing a true growth channel, brands must focus on selecting the right influencers, building long-term partnerships, and leveraging influencer content across multiple channels.

This article will break down how home and living brands can optimize influencer marketing for real conversions, focusing on the most effective product categories: furniture, bedding, and kitchenware—while also explaining why home decor can be challenging to promote with influencers.

Choosing Influencers Who Actually Drive Conversions

Many home and living brands make the mistake of selecting influencers based on follower count rather than their ability to drive real sales. A large audience might generate likes and comments, but if that audience isn’t aligned with your ideal customer, those engagements won’t translate into conversions.

How to Identify the Right Influencers

The key to a successful influencer partnership is audience alignment. Instead of just looking at an influencer’s numbers, brands should dig deeper into who their followers are and how engaged they are with home and living content.

Look at audience demographics – Are their followers homeowners, renters, DIYers, or interior design enthusiasts? If your brand sells high-end kitchenware, an influencer whose audience skews toward first-time apartment renters might not be the right fit.
Prioritize engagement over reach – Micro-influencers (10K–100K followers) often have a higher trust factor and stronger conversion rates than mega-influencers. Their audiences tend to be niche and highly engaged, making them more likely to take action on recommendations.
Evaluate content fit – Influencers who already talk about home styling, renovations, or entertaining will have an audience that is naturally interested in furniture, bedding, and kitchenware. If their content aligns with your products, their recommendations will feel organic and credible.

Where to Find Influencers

There are several ways to discover influencers who are already engaging with home and living audiences:

Social media platforms – Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube are the best platforms for home and living content, offering highly visual, shareable content formats.
Hashtag searches – Searching for relevant hashtags like #HomeInspo, #InteriorDesign, #CozyHome, #KitchenGoals can help identify influencers actively posting about home and lifestyle.
Influencer marketplaces – Platforms like Upfluence, AspireIQ, and Impact.com allow brands to filter influencers by niche, engagement rate, and audience demographics.
Leverage brand advocates – Some of your best influencers might already be customers who organically post about your products. Look for user-generated content featuring your brand and consider reaching out for a partnership.

Tailoring Influencer Partnerships for Maximum Impact

Not all influencer collaborations are created equal—especially in the home and living space, where customers rely on both aesthetics and functionality before making a purchase. The best-performing campaigns align influencer content with how consumers actually experience home products in their daily lives.

Here’s how brands can craft strategic influencer partnerships across different home and living categories.

Furniture

Full room makeovers – Influencers integrate multiple brand pieces into their space, showcasing how they work together.
Before-and-after transformations – Shows the real impact of a furniture upgrade, making it easier for potential customers to visualize the product in their own home.
Long-term partnerships – Influencers share updates on how the furniture holds up over time, reinforcing durability and value.

Bedding & Blankets

“Nighttime routine” content – Influencers incorporate the product into their evening wind-down routine, emphasizing comfort and relaxation.
Comparison videos – Influencers test different brands, highlighting softness, durability, and breathability—key decision factors for bedding shoppers.
Seasonal campaigns – Cozy blankets for winter, breathable sheets for summer, ensuring year-round relevance.

Kitchenware

Cooking demos – Influencers use branded kitchenware while making a recipe, providing organic product placement and demonstrating functionality.
Unboxing & first impressions – Showcasing high-quality materials, craftsmanship, and unique product features.
Gift guides – Positioning kitchenware as a great housewarming or wedding gift, increasing its appeal for special occasions.

Home Fragrances

Morning & evening routines – Influencers incorporate candles, diffusers, or essential oils into their self-care rituals.
Stress relief & relaxation – Demonstrating how certain scents create a calming home environment.
Seasonal scent swaps – Promoting candles or diffusers for different times of the year, like pumpkin spice in the fall or fresh florals in the spring.

Smart Home Technology

Smart home tours – Influencers showcase how tech enhances convenience, security, or entertainment at home.
Product comparisons – Reviewing different smart thermostats, security cameras, or voice assistants.
Energy-saving tips – Highlighting how smart appliances help reduce electricity bills and improve sustainability.

Laundry & Cleaning Products

Product demonstrations – Influencers test high-efficiency washers, eco-friendly detergents, or robotic vacuums to showcase effectiveness.
Cleaning routine content – Featuring influencers’ step-by-step deep-cleaning routines using branded products.
“Mess to fresh” transformations – Before-and-after cleaning videos highlight how well the product works.

Bathroom Essentials

Luxury towel & bathmat reviews – Influencers showcase plush, high-quality towels and mats in their morning or nighttime routines.
Spa-like experience content – Positioning bath accessories (aromatherapy diffusers, bath caddies, rainfall showerheads) as a way to upgrade a home bathroom.
Storage & organization tips – Demonstrating how bathroom organizers can declutter and enhance small spaces.

Organization & Storage Solutions

Closet transformations – Influencers document before-and-after makeovers using storage bins, shelving, or modular closet systems.
Small space hacks – Showing creative ways to maximize storage in apartments, dorms, or tiny homes.
Decluttering challenges – Influencers commit to a “30-day declutter” using the brand’s storage solutions.

Outdoor & Gardening

Backyard makeovers – Featuring patio furniture, fire pits, or decorative planters in a full outdoor transformation.
Gardening tutorials – Influencers plant herbs, flowers, or vegetables using branded gardening tools and accessories.
Seasonal outdoor styling – Showcasing porch decorations, holiday lighting, or weather-resistant furniture.

How to Structure Payment & Incentives

The right payment structure can transform influencer partnerships from simple brand awareness campaigns into performance-driven strategies that generate measurable sales. Instead of relying solely on upfront payments, brands should consider compensation models that align influencer incentives with real business outcomes.

Affiliate commissions – Paying influencers based on actual sales ensures that their content is focused on conversion rather than just engagement. This model allows brands to control costs while giving influencers an incentive to create persuasive, results-driven content.
Exclusive discount codes – Providing influencers with unique discount codes allows brands to track their direct impact on sales while also creating urgency for followers to purchase. These codes make it easier to measure ROI and encourage influencers to actively promote the product.
Product gifting combined with paid collaborations – Allowing influencers to use and experience the product before posting leads to more authentic, enthusiastic recommendations. This approach works particularly well for furniture, bedding, and kitchenware, where firsthand experience adds credibility to their reviews.

For high-ticket items like furniture or smart home technology, brands may also consider tiered commission structures, where influencers receive a higher payout for multiple sales or higher-value purchases.

Additionally, offering long-term partnerships instead of one-off posts helps influencers build deeper trust with their audience and keeps the brand top-of-mind over time.

By structuring influencer collaborations around measurable results and authentic content, home and living brands can increase brand trust, maximize exposure, and drive sustainable customer acquisition—rather than just chasing short-lived engagement.

Maximizing Influencer Content Across Channels

Many home and living brands limit the use of influencer content to organic social media posts, failing to maximize its full potential. While social media is a powerful discovery tool, relying solely on an influencer’s audience caps the reach and impact of the content.

Instead, brands should repurpose influencer-generated content across multiple channels to extend its lifespan, drive conversions, and get the most out of their investment.

Website & product pages – Feature influencer testimonials, review videos, and high-quality photos to provide social proof and increase purchase confidence.
Paid social ads – Use influencer content in TikTok Spark Ads, Instagram Ads, and Pinterest Ads to extend its reach beyond the influencer’s audience and drive conversions.
Email marketing – Incorporate influencer reviews and recommendations into newsletters to nurture subscribers and showcase real customer experiences.
In-store displays – Display influencer-generated images and testimonials in showrooms or retail locations to bridge the gap between online discovery and in-person purchasing.
Affiliate marketing – Have influencers use trackable links and promo codes, ensuring the ability to measure their direct impact on sales.

Measuring Success: How to Track Real Customer Acquisition

One of the biggest mistakes home and living brands make with influencer marketing is focusing only on engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares.

While these indicate audience interest, they don’t necessarily translate to actual sales or customer acquisition. To ensure influencer marketing drives real business impact, brands must implement data-driven tracking methods that measure traffic, conversions, and long-term customer value.

Key Metrics to Track

To determine whether an influencer partnership is truly driving customer acquisition, brands should track:

Engagement metrics – Likes, comments, shares, and saves indicate how well an influencer’s audience is responding to the content.
Traffic metrics – Click-through rates from influencer links show how many people are actively visiting the brand’s website.
Conversion metrics – Sales generated through unique discount codes or affiliate links provide direct proof of revenue impact.
Long-term impact – Measuring repeat purchases and customer retention from influencer-driven traffic helps assess lifetime customer value.

Best Tools for Tracking Performance

Using the right tools ensures brands can accurately measure and optimize influencer campaigns:

Google Analytics – Tracks website visits, conversions, and user behavior from influencer-driven traffic.
UTM Tracking – Tools like Google Campaign URL Builder, Bitly, and UTM.io help create trackable links to measure which influencers drive the most site visits, engagement, and conversions.
Affiliate Platforms – Services like impact.com, Refersion, and Rakuten track influencer-driven sales, manage commission-based payouts, and provide performance insights.
Social Listening Tools – Platforms like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Meltwater monitor brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and influencer impact across social media.
Influencer Marketing Platforms – Tools like Aspire, Grin, and Upfluence streamline influencer discovery, campaign management, and performance tracking.

By leveraging these tools, home and living brands can track influencer effectiveness beyond vanity metrics and focus on actual customer acquisition.

Case Studies: Home & Living Brands That Used Influencers to Drive Sales

Many home brands struggle to turn influencer content into real conversions. The brands below successfully leveraged influencer partnerships to increase sales, trackable conversions, and customer engagement.

Branch Basics: Scaling Influencer Partnerships to Drive Sales

Branch Basics, a non-toxic cleaning brand, built a two-tiered influencer program to drive authentic product recommendations. They combined an affiliate model (commission-based influencers) with paid influencer partnerships to scale their reach and drive measurable sales.

Execution:

Sent free products to influencers before signing them to ensure authenticity in content.
Transitioned top-performing affiliates into paid partnerships.
Repurposed influencer content across email, paid ads, and website landing pages to maximize ROI.

Results:

100-150 active affiliates per month generating trackable sales.
25 paid influencer partners per month driving consistent high-performing content.
A 30x increase in their influencer roster, enabling faster growth and wider brand exposure.

Key Takeaway: A tiered influencer strategy, where affiliates prove their value before transitioning to paid partnerships, ensures that brands invest in high-converting creators.

Superfeet: Scaling Influencer Marketing & Boosting Engagement by 87%

Superfeet, a premium insole brand, aimed to expand its influencer marketing efforts to build an engaged community and drive brand awareness. However, managing influencer partnerships manually through spreadsheets and email chains was inefficient and time-consuming. To scale effectively, the brand turned to a more structured solution.

Execution:

Identified and recruited 76 influencers who aligned with the brand’s mission and values.
Automated campaign management using the creator management platform, GRIN, to simplify onboarding, content approvals, and performance tracking.

Results:

87% increase in engagement year-over-year, demonstrating stronger audience connections.
76 new creator partnerships, expanding Superfeet’s reach and credibility.
109 pieces of creator content, reinforcing brand visibility across social platforms.

By focusing on authentic influencer relationships and streamlined campaign management, Superfeet successfully transformed its influencer marketing into a powerful driver of brand growth.

From Engagement to Sales: Putting Your Influencer Strategy into Action

Influencer marketing for home and living brands is only as effective as the strategy behind it. Finding the right influencers, structuring partnerships for long-term impact, and repurposing content across multiple channels are the difference between a campaign that generates fleeting engagement and one that consistently acquires customers.

The next step? Take action.

Audit your current influencer strategy—are you working with creators whose audience aligns with your ideal customer? Are you building partnerships that go beyond one-off posts? Are you tracking conversions, not just likes? If not, it’s time to adjust.

Start small by identifying engaged micro-influencers who truly resonate with your brand. Build long-term relationships, experiment with different content formats, and use data-driven tools to measure what works. The home and living space is visual, personal, and built on trust—so let your influencer strategy reflect that. The brands that get this right won’t just see more likes; they’ll see more customers.

About the Author: As the Director, Marketing at adQuadrant, Nick Grant leverages more than 20 years of experience working across a variety of tech verticals. Nick grew up in California and earned his BS in Business with a concentration in Entrepreneurship. After college, he relocated to Seattle to pursue his passion for startups, where he worked at various dot-coms before co-founding a successful visual strategy agency in 2010. Now back in California, Nick spends his time hiking around San Luis Obispo County with his wife and son, honing his talent as a concert photographer, and perfecting his handstand skills.