7 Influencer Marketing Lessons from Best Western, Naturepedic, and Little Sleepies

Influencer marketing is on track to become a $40 billion industry over the next five years, which is why today’s savviest brands are rebuilding their marketing strategy around creators.

We recently sat down with 3 marketers running very different programs to talk about how influencer marketing is reshaping the way modern brands operate:

• Bryan Perleberg (Associate Director of Brand Marketing at Best Western Hotels & Resorts) has watched his program grow from working with five or six influencers to a database of 600 creators. 
• Allison Love (Senior Director of Brand Development at Naturepedic) oversees a program that turns creator content into a primary conversion driver for a highly considered, high-price-point product. 
• Maeher Bawa (Influencer & Partnerships Manager at Little Sleepies) is building a full-blown influencer program from scratch at a brand whose community has always run on word of mouth.

Here are 7 takeaways from their conversation that every marketer should be thinking about right now. For more insights, watch the full webinar on demand. 

1. The shift from experimental to essential is real.

Across every brand on the panel, influencer marketing has moved from a scrappy, top-of-funnel awareness play to a full-funnel strategy that earns its keep at every stage of the buyer's journey.

For Allison, the unlock was looking past awareness metrics. "Influencers are a unique marketing channel because they run the gamut from the top of the funnel to the bottom," she said. Naturepedic now plans to embed influencer content directly into product detail pages on their site, because that content has been one of the biggest drivers of conversion purchases on a $5,000-plus mattress.

2. Non-traditional creators are where the growth is.

When you've been in this space for a decade, the obvious creators stop being the most interesting ones. Best Western's biggest content wins over the past 12 to 18 months haven't come from couple's travel accounts. They've come from vegan chefs, furniture flippers, Funko Pop collectors, and bird watchers.

"Everyone travels," Bryan pointed out. "Most people are traveling two to three times a year, so wherever there's audience overlap, we can get our brand in front of consumers when they're not expecting it."

Mae echoed the same approach at Little Sleepies. The brand has had success working with athletes who recently became parents and chefs who've evolved into the parenting space. The unexpected pairing is the point. It earns attention because it's a little bit out of the box, but the connection still makes sense.

3. Trust the creator’s instincts on their own audience.

Allison shared a principle that came up again and again: creators know their audience best.

That trust shapes everything from platform selection to creative direction. At Naturepedic, the team treats channel choice as a conversation, not a directive. At Little Sleepies, Mae's process is to study a creator's profile, identify two or three concepts that fit their existing content, and then ask which feels most natural to them. Nobody's asking a chef to film a generic morning routine. They're asking for a Sunday baking session, with the product showing up the way it would naturally.

In other words, a great brief gives creators direction without taking the wheel.

4. Long-term partnerships compound.

Every panelist preferred long-term creator relationships over one-off campaigns, and the reasons stacked up. The onboarding investment pays off over multiple activations. Authenticity gets stronger as creators speak more fluently about the brand. And there's a human payoff, too.

Bryan has worked with creators who started as solo travelers, then partnered with Best Western through getting married, having kids, and traveling with growing families. Allison has seen the same arc at Naturepedic, with creators coming in for an adult mattress, returning for a baby campaign, and circling back years later for a kid's bed.

Long-term partnerships also unlock first right of refusal in a competitive category. If a creator is going to partner with a hotel brand, you want to be the one they call first.

5. Social listening and AI is the secret to finding the right creator at the right moment.

Allison shared one of the most powerful examples of the entire panel. Her team set up an AI workflow that scans TikTok for keywords like "mattress," "organic," and "non-toxic" to surface conversations Naturepedic should be part of. One result was a creator talking openly about cystic acne and health issues she'd traced back to her mattress. Naturepedic reached out, sent her a new mattress, and is now partnering with her on a sleep tracking series with Oura Ring data.

Another standout moment had nothing to do with workflows. The Naturepedic team had been following a couple who lost a baby late in pregnancy. When the couple announced a second pregnancy, the team sent a thoughtful, deeply personal package and donated $5,000 to a pregnancy loss organization in their first son's name. That outreach turned into a larger macro partnership, but more importantly, it was the right thing to do.

Lead with empathy and be genuinely useful to a creator's life. That’s the foundation of every great long-term partnership.

6. Quality always beats quantity (but quality means different things).

When asked the million-dollar question of quantity versus quality, all three panelists landed in the same place: quality wins, every time.

Allison made a sharper point on top of it. Quality isn't one definition. For a polished product launch, quality might mean production value. For a brand awareness play, it might mean reach and audience fit. For a Best Western activation, it might mean how naturally the brand integrates into a creator's existing storytelling. The challenge is figuring out what quality means for the goal at hand and then refusing to compromise on it.

7. Translate performance into the language your C-suite speaks.

Reporting impressions and engagement rates to executives often falls flat. What does land is media value translated into ROI. 

Both Bryan and Allison have rallied their leadership teams around Aspire's impact value, which factors content value, awareness, engagements, and sales into a single number. Naturepedic's current impact value is 36, meaning $36 of value for every dollar spent on the program. That's the kind of number that makes a CFO lean in.

Layer on business activation values (signups, bookings, sales) and you've got a story your C-suite can act on.

For more insights, watch the full webinar on demand.

Want to see how Aspire helps brands like Best Western, Naturepedic, and Little Sleepies run programs like these? Book a demo with our team to see the platform in action.