Lifestyle marketing and New Year's resolutions are the perfect partnership for starting your 2022 marketing plan with a bang. When the holiday shopping season has rolled to a stop, people are ready to pick up new activities, new healthy habits, and new hobbies — and you need to be prepared to meet them by offering a whole lifestyle transformation.
In lifestyle marketing, you position your product as essential to gaining (and keeping) the ideal lifestyle of your core target market. If their new lifestyle is a busy professional who effortlessly manages to keep to a workout schedule, your water bottle, app, or food meal plan should be crucial in making it happen. If their new ideal lifestyle is cozy comfort and making more time for family, you need to convince them that your satchel, bookshelves, or subscription service is what will make or break their achievement of that dream.
Your product isn't just beneficial — with strong lifestyle marketing strategies, that in-demand lifestyle simply can't happen when consumers don't have your product.
Let’s discuss what lifestyle marketing is, the benefits of taking this approach, and how to get started.
What Is Lifestyle Marketing?
Lifestyle marketing approaches focus on connecting your brand to a way of life rather than directly touting the features, benefits, and value of the product or service you're providing. The messages sell the aspirations and aesthetic of a certain lifestyle, so audiences crave this way of life; implicitly, your product or service becomes the key to achieving that lifestyle.
This style of marketing requires a lot of research and market segmentation. You have to know your core audience down to a fundamental level. What lifestyle are they craving? What hallmarks of that lifestyle — freedom, comfort, vitality, or luxury, for example — will hook them? Lifestyle marketing approaches may not even feature your specific product anywhere in the commercial or message — you're just selling the lifestyle you want your brand associated with.
Why Do Brands Choose Lifestyle Marketing?
With this approach, you gain long-term customer loyalty. When your brand is associated with a certain lifestyle, your buyers won't compare your product's specifications and prices to competitors. They're buying the feelings around your product along with the product, and the more shoppers buy from your brand, the more entrenched they become as a lifetime customer.
What Are the Benefits of Lifestyle Marketing?
Some of the core benefits of lifestyle marketing are:
- This targeted approach lets you focus on engaged markets where you get a better rate of return instead of trying to appeal to everyone at once.
- You get more repeat shoppers.
- You can create a novel niche for your business, even in a hyper-competitive market where it's hard to differentiate products.
Why Is Lifestyle Marketing So Effective?
Lifestyle marketing campaigns reflect insight into your target market's motivations and desires when done correctly. Your audiences can form an immediate emotional connection to the message and your brand. While this makes your brand unforgettable, it also creates a relationship that spans beyond just one product. Instead of starting fresh with each new product, your lifestyle marketing audiences are already sold on your brand and require less work to sell to.
What Are Some Examples of Great Lifestyle Marketing Brands?
Some examples of lifestyle marketing brands include:
- Apple: Ever since their historic Superbowl commercial, they've positioned their brand as the right choice for rebels, artists, and free-thinkers.
- Patagonia: This brand has combined lifestyle and cause marketing to position themselves (and their shoppers) as eco-friendly adventurers.
- Lululemon: This fitness brand has created an image of successful, attractive athleisure lifestyles.
How to Implement a Lifestyle Marketing Campaign
Hitting just the right note for lifestyle marketing is crucial. Follow these steps to get there:
- Research your target market: You need complete insight into your core audience's aspirations, goals, and aesthetic preferences.
- Create a knowledge base: Before you launch your lifestyle marketing campaigns, you need to be specific hooked audiences who can research your products and make their way to the checkout without any questions or hesitations.
- Choose the right marketing platforms: Lifestyle marketing requires specific channels. For example, you might work with influencers on your target market's preferred social media platforms or sponsor their favorite podcasts. You can even buy airtime on your audience's select lifestyle television channels or shows to incorporate your brand into their ideal image further. Focus on engagement and relationship building, not sales.
Work With a Media Partner to Get Your Lifestyle Marketing Campaign Ready for the New Year
Lifestyle marketing comes with a lot of rewards — customer loyalty and repeat sales among them — but it takes a lot of work and expertise to get it just right. At KCTV5 Marketing, we can help you research your target market, use time-tested approaches to refine your brand, and help you communicate to your audiences.
