Lifestyle Brands: A Guide to Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms and social media strategy have provided marketing teams from companies of all shapes, age, sizes and industries the power to run successful, finance-friendly marketing campaigns. With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you don’t need a million-dollar budget – but you do need creativity and to know your audience.

This is something that plays to the strength of lifestyle brands . Lifestyle brands have an in-depth understanding of their target audience’s way of life; their demographics as well as their psychographics.

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Why is Social Media Marketing so Important for Lifestyle Brands?

Lifestyle brands offer products, services and – critically for social media – stories that reflect the lifestyle its consumers want to live. These are the brands that guide our opinions, desires, and emotions. They build communities of followers, whether they have made a purchase or just want to make a purchase.

Users of social media often seek lifestyle models, and lifestyle brands can illustrate (and commodify) those aspirational lifestyles. If you know your audience and the content – the stories – that will resonate with them, you can engage your consumers, create a community they want to belong to and will contribute to, and ultimately grow revenue.

Using social marketing, a lifestyle brand can set itself apart, reinforcing its message and story. Additionally, engaging existing consumers provides social proof to the aspirational members of your community.

A key feature of social media marketing, especially for a lifestyle brand building a community, is not to sell – or at the very least not to seem sales-driven. Sales content won’t garner the likes, shares, comments, or subscribes you need to build a community or brand presence on social media. Think videos and vlogs, feature lists, guides, reviews, opinion, and comment. Content that is useful and relevant to your audience.

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Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Lifestyle Brands

We’ve touched on why lifestyle brands have social media strategy and use social media, and there are real benefits of doing so:

• The aim isn’t to increase followers, it’s to build a community. Members of this community don’t just like your content, they interact with it – and with each other – allowing your brand to drive conversations around your desired action: purchase.
• A hallmark of a lifestyle brand is its deep understanding of its consumers, and social media is a great way of getting to know your target audience
• Social media is an influencer’s home territory. Lifestyle brands can work with influencers to provide content to consumers who trust someone living the lifestyle the consumer aspires to
• You can directly appeal to your ideal consumer base by positioning your brand as an integral part of, and means to achieving, this desirable lifestyle

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Should Lifestyle Brands Be on Every Social Media Platform?

The short answer is no, not necessarily. As a lifestyle brand, you don’t have to use every social media platform in order to be successful. Quite the opposite – figure out which ones work for you and focus on those (or maybe there’s only the one). Tempting as it might be to try and cover all bases, it’s much more effective just to use the platforms that your target audience also uses.

If you do use multiple platforms, it’s a good idea to tweak the content you create to play to the strengths of each platform. For example, you may find that longer videos work better on Facebook than Twitter, where bite-sized chunks of content are more successful. Above all, make sure your content is relevant and authentic, and your community (and therefore your revenue) will grow.

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Tips for Doing Social Media Right As a Lifestyle Brand

So you know which social media platform(s) work for you, and you’ve started building some brand awareness. What then?

• Get to know your target audience. A good place to start is through social listening, using tools to track conversations related to your industry, keywords, relevant topics, and competitors. You can then use the information you gather about your target audience to inform your social media marketing plan and content because you can tap into what you know engages your audience.
• It’s a good idea to pay attention to how much you’re posting – too many posts and you’ll overwhelm your followers and turn them away, too few and they won’t have the opportunity to really connect with you.
• As for the posts themselves, they should be relevant, useful and interesting. Informative and entertaining content will attract your target consumers – and they will bring others by sharing your posts. Over time, you will build credibility and trust. In turn, this will mean increased engagement, repeat visits, and more customers.
• Make use of videos. This medium has exploded in popularity and use and is only set to rise. It’s a great way of quickly reaching your audience – and it’s also a great way for your influencers to do the same.

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Examples of Lifestyle Brands Who Are Getting Social Media Well

These three lifestyle brands are killing it with social media marketing, but how are they doing it? Adapting content and messages to specific audiences is key.

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Strava

Strava is an online community of athletes, mainly runners and cyclists, who share their workouts and compete to beat each other. Strava is connected to Facebook, so users can share and promote their workouts and challenges. They can also ask questions, upload photos and send messages. This has enabled Strava to build a highly engaged online fitness community which continues to grow.

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Essie

Nail brand Essie promotes user-generated content in a big way. Encouraging social sharing is a great tactic for lifestyle brands who have a striking visual product, helping to create a community of brand lovers. Essie gets their Instagram followers to tag the brand to be in with the chance to be featured to the two million followers on the Essie Instagram feed.

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WeWork

WeWork operates shared office space in cities and countries worldwide and their Instagram (currently with over half a million followers) is just as cool as the spaces they provide. Why? Because their photography is fab, highlighting their cool workplaces in interesting, unique ways that make you want to jump into the picture and be right there. They also do a great job of showcasing their many events, and the #DogsofWeWork hashtag is as adorable as it is shareable.

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Check out our marketing for lifestyle brands resource for more content on all aspects of lifestyle brands, or get in touch if you’d like to chat through how LimeLight Marketing can support your brand in social media marketing.

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