A Woman of Influence

photos courtesy of Lauren Steele

FALL 2018 | DIVIDENDS

A Woman of Influence

By Alexandra Brasher

Homecoming Queen, Diamond Girl, Miss Maroon and White, Pom Squad member, Alumni Delegate. These are just a few of the accolades Lauren Cobb Steele picked up during her time at Mississippi State.

Steele is adamant about seizing opportunities.

One could say Lauren has a knack for utilizing hard work and talent to inspire others. Although many MSU students have this quality in common, it has taken Steele down a unique career path.

A dual major in Spanish and business with an emphasis in marketing and a concentration in international business, Steele is a proud Starkville native, having attended MSU events from a young age. Upon graduation from Mississippi State in 2010, she attended law school at the University of Mississippi, where she one day received an email touting free counseling services.

“I’ve never done counseling,” she thought. “It’s free. I wonder what I would even say. Would it be awkward? It’s free. What would I talk about? It’s FREE.”

“I’m the kind of person who when faced with whether to know or not know, I usually choose to know, to say yes, to walk through the door, to try things,” she remarks. “And it was free. And it was amazing.”

Once Steele began counseling, she realized she was talking a lot about social media and how it made her feel. She would spend the whole hour obsessing over how people were choosing to portray themselves online and how that presence did not correlate with reality.

“Social media was integrated [into] my actual feelings,” she says. “My real world, real-life feelings. Social media made me feel bad. Because yes, comparison is the thief of joy. And social media was stealing some of mine.”

Steele came to realize that social media is different for every person. She believes everyone posts for different reasons, and everyone feels different upon seeing a post, based upon their own interests and, often, insecurities.

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It was during these counseling sessions that Steele decided to start her own blog as a way of taking back the reins of social media. Her goal was specific. She wanted social media users to feel empowered rather than question their value or importance.

Viewing social media as a form of empowerment rather than a crutch changed Steele’s life in more ways than one. She began posting her daily fashion looks online. Even as she graduated and

got married, Steele continued to maintain her online presence, posting often about fashion and other life musings.

Her blog quickly evolved into her most time-consuming hobby, and she was rapidly gaining followers along the way.

Meanwhile, Steele had passed the Mississippi Bar Exam and was preparing to move around over the next few years as her husband completed medical school and entered his residency. She decided that it was not beneficial to retake the bar exam in every state where they would live, so upon moving to Chapel Hill, NC, in 2013, Steele got a job helping Duke Medical School with its reaccreditation process. All the while, she continued blogging.

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Around the same time, Forrester Research released a report that 70 percent of consumers trusted brand or product recommendations from friends of family, while only 10 percent trusted website ads and nine percent trusted text messages from companies or brands. The advertising industry had seemingly hit a road block, as social media usage was only escalating – and marketers were seeking an answer.

By 2014, Instagram had become wildly popular, and Steele was right on trend as part of the first crop of users to employ the app for a fashion/lifestyle blog. The combination of advertising mistrust and social media’s popularity led to the burgeoning of Steele’s career today: influencer marketing.

Undeniably one of the most impactful marketing developments in the last 15 years, influencer marketing involves corporations or other entities paying a popular social media figure to publicly endorse a product or concept. According to international influencer marketing agency Mediakix, global spending on influencer marketing reached $500 million in 2015. By 2017, this number had risen to $4.4 billion.

Four years and 173,000 Instagram followers later, Steele was a legitimate influencer, profiting enough from her blogging to make a living. As Steele and her husband made another move – this time to Birmingham, AL – she decided the time had come to make blogging her full-time career.

“It’s funny to even say that because I truly don’t look at this as a job,” Steele says. “I look at it as a way of connecting with other people and scrapbooking my life.”

Steele earns money through two methods: affiliate links and sponsored content. With affiliate links, Steele posts the link to a product that her followers may then click to buy, leaving Steele with a portion of the profit. Sponsored content, a more traditional concept, occurs when Steele partners with a brand to promote a product.

Steele spends around 50 to 60 hours a week blogging. When she began, her photos were taken with a DSL camera; now, Steele uses an iPhone to take her photos, which she then edits in Adobe Lightroom.

While marketing’s evolution afforded Steele the opportunity to be financially stable as an influencer, her success did not happen instantaneously.

She has made an effort to post something every single day since she started blogging. She has spent countless hours documenting her lifestyle on social media and asking friends and family to photograph her along the way. While Steele’s elegant, yet achievable style is what initially draws viewers in, one quickly realizes the true reason for Steele’s success.

The same qualities that led to Steele’s accolades on Mississippi State’s campus are what drew in

DIVIDENDS | FALL 2018

Lauren Cobb Steele (center) as Miss Maroon and White 2006.

photo by Russ Houston

FALL 2018 | DIVIDENDS

her mass social media following. She is undeniably genuine, and she has been since the beginning. As Steele’s brand has evolved and she has been able to foster this influencer lifestyle, she presents herself and her ideas as authentically as she did back in 2013.

You can often see Instagram stories of Steele’s husband, David, lounging on the couch in his scrubs at 10 p.m. Or their small yellow lab, Nilla, snuggled nearby as Steele types away on her laptop. She did not set out to become a popular social media figure, but with her work ethic and her affinity for interacting with others, it is a natural outcome.

With Steele, what you see is what you get. She will never publicly endorse a product unless she believes in it, and she still “speaks” to her 173,000 followers as if they were the original 100. She is real, and people can tell. Year by year, more choose to follow.

Steele’s favorite part about her career is not receiving freebies or recognition. Through blogging, she has come across some of the most empowered, hardworking and authentic women she has ever met. She says that this is what has made her the most grateful – along with being able to determine her own schedule, especially with a husband completing a medical residency.

As for the future of influencer marketing, Steele believes that it is not going away anytime soon.

“As long as the Internet exists and people are using it, and you can have a window into other people’s lives, influencers will exist,” she states.

In terms of her own future, Steele intends to keep up her original goal: simply doing something she loves while positively interacting with social media and her followers.

“As soon as you think you’ve made it, that’s when your business starts to decline,” she remarks. “I intend to continue living my life authentically both in the real world and on the Internet.” For more on Lauren Cobb Steele, visit her Steele’s advice to those who want to follow in her footsteps is simple. website, lc-steele.com, “Be consistent. Be patient. Be yourself.” or follow her on Instagram, lc_steele.

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