As social media plays a bigger part than ever in the strategies of retailers and brands, LTK co-founder and president Amber Venz Box talks to Retail Week about the power of influencer marketing and how personalisation and trust are vital for success.
Global technology platform LTK (formerly known as rewardStyle and Like To Know It) was founded in 2011 by Amber Venz Box and Baxter Box, offering an innovative way to shop products from retailers and brands via content creators.
The largest influencer marketing platform in today’s market, LTK hosts 7,000 retailers and more than one million brands on the platform, generating £3.2bn in online annual sales. With around 40 million shoppers in 140 countries every month, LTK remains on a mission to pave the way for the future of retail.
Venz Box sat down with Retail Week to talk about the inspiration behind LTK, what’s next for the platform and why content creators and retailers truly do go hand in hand.
What inspired LTK?
“I’ve always worked in the fashion industry and in 2010 I created a website to market my offline personal shopping and styling business. I had a relationship with several retailers and would collect clothes for my clients, bring them to their home and dress them. Anything that they kept, I would get a commission on from those stores.
“I found that people really liked going to my website. At that time, it was really expensive to have a custom website and hire a photographer. That was why we launched LTK – because my customers started to shop online and I needed a way to be able to earn a commission from the things they were buying.
“Our mission has always been the same: to make our creators as economically successful as possible. Today, we are the largest monetisation platform for creators globally.
“At the time, Shopbop and Net-a-Porter were two of the only businesses that were online, so those were the first retailers that we worked with. We have spent the last 14 years educating retailers on what a creator is, their value to retail and how we can not only provide branding but drive traffic and boost retail sales.”
How important is social media and influencer marketing for retailers today?
“Back in 2010, bloggers were definitely thought of as a really strange subculture. Brands wanted to spend their money with the institution rather than people, and, of course, we’ve seen that change over time. We were really early in the era of social media and ecommerce coming online. Many of the retailers that we work with today didn’t even have an online presence at that time or their teams weren’t investing in it if they did.
“I think we are entering the third era of ecommerce. My intent is not to come in and disrupt what’s happening; I have a deep passion for retail of all kinds. It’s more about how to make this a much richer experience for everyone involved.
“I think with retailers, brands and manufacturers, their goal has never changed: they want to sell a lot of things to a lot of people. Ultimately now, with social media itself, what it comes down to is the content that’s on it. Either the content is personalised for what [shoppers] like or they choose to follow someone that they like. It’s a self-designated thing either way.
“Personalisation and trust are key. Without trust, this industry is no more efficient [than before] – it’s really the reason why people buy. It’s not necessarily that social media is important; mass distribution is important. So creator trust is what’s really changing retail.”
What’s next for LTK?
“It’s interesting because we pioneered a space, had a vision for what we want to create and we’re at the front and defining what that is. There are people coming behind us, but they’re not doing what we’re doing.
“I see the largest opportunity for creators in maintaining a high trust relationship with their followers. On the shopper side, we want shoppers to have the most efficient online experience at LTK. I hope that shoppers are in and out in five seconds and find exactly what they want, so we’re investing in those tools.
“On the brand side, it’s making sure that every spend has a high ROI (return on investment). This means we’re casting the right creators and making the right decisions. We’re continuing to introduce new tools for our retailers and brands to do this.
“We’ve also been doing social media advertising, so brands can take their budget and run it through LTK, putting that budget directly behind the creators’ profiles that are talking about them. The results of that are tremendous. It means our creators are making ad spots for our retailers, so there are more and more ways for brands to leverage creators and get real efficiencies in their business.
“We are the largest digital marketing platform powered by creators and I want to continue with the way we help businesses by leveraging these high trust individuals.”
No comments yet