The current trend in online marketing is the focus on the intent of the visitor, user, customer, or client. Intent-based marketing, in fact, is going to gradually take over the internet. But, what is intent based marketing? It is a marketing technique that focuses on the overall intent of the potential lead more than technical specifics such as keywords. This marketing technique emphasises on understanding the nature of the target audience in question so that their specific psychographic nature can be deduced. Resultantly, intent-based marketing almost always incorporates lifestyle content.
Lifestyle content is kind of a new thing in the annals of online marketing. As of now, the big players have already adopted the technique but the medium and small scale players are only becoming aware of it. Lifestyle content is not only connected to intent based marketing but also branding. As a matter of fact, branding incorporates intent based marketing in many ways. Since it requires considerable investment, branding, intent-based marketing, and lifestyle content strategies haven’t been adopted by small to medium scale players.
Still, it is very much possible for these smaller players to adopt lifestyle content strategies into their marketing campaigns, at the very least. All it requires is a certain scaling down of efforts. The results will still be worth it and the methods would nearly remain the same. Here is a small primer on lifestyle content to set you on your way.
What Is Lifestyle Content Really?
Lifestyle content is a term that is typically used in opposition to traditional content. Thus, defining traditional content will shed some light on a key feature of lifestyle content. Traditional content is based on traditional marketing technique or telling the target audience why a certain product or service is good for them. Traditional content, hence, revolves around the relevant product or service and emphasises on their unique features and benefits.
Lifestyle content marketers shy away from listing features and benefits of the products or services they’re working on. Instead, these individuals dig deeper to find out the lifestyle that is most common amongst their target audience. In fact, many times, lifestyle content can be segmented if the target audience patronises multiple types of lifestyles.
A good example of lifestyle content in action is Nike. Nike focuses on the “active” lifestyle of its target audience. So, they make their content about running, sports, gyms, adventure sports, and even independence.
How Is Lifestyle Content Related To The Brand Strategy?
There is only so far that a business can go by pushing its products or services. The growth begins to stagnate after a certain stage and the sales start to plateau or shrink. Once a business has established itself and captured a share of the market, it needs to evolve itself into a brand.
The branding exercise is designed to improve customer retention of the business as well as gradually grow its market share. The way to do branding is to make the business represent something greater than just the products or services it is offering. Branding is done to make the business represent an experience.
This ties in particularly well with lifestyle content because lifestyle content is about pushing content that dovetails with the kind of experiences the target audience prefers in life. In effect, branding and lifestyle content almost always go hand in hand.
How Should You Implement A Lifestyle Content Strategy?
If your business has been using traditional content till now, you can’t switch to lifestyle content immediately. You need to gradually move towards it so that the shift is not jarring for your audience. This means that you’ll need to display lifestyle content along with traditional content. In fact, there will never be a time when you’ll switch to lifestyle content directly. You’ll always need traditional content, albeit at a lower frequency.
When planning to move towards lifestyle content, you need to get your brand personality down. You can’t be selling action adventure to divas and fashionistas. The two simply don’t meld well together. The right way to incorporate lifestyle content into your marketing campaign is to pinpoint a few specific personality based subjects and then develop a lifestyle content strategy around them.
Pinpointing specific personality based subjects is ideally done by identifying buyer personas or specific target audience stereotypes. Identifying buyer personas will mean identification of various key metrics such as age, gender, income, interests, pain points, likes, and dislikes.
When it comes to delivering lifestyle content, the best strategy is to create a circle of influencers. This circle of influencers will share the actual lifestyle content with their own inputs and end up influencing the final target audience indirectly.
What Ratio Of Traditional Content To Lifestyle Content Should You Consider?
As mentioned above, you can’t have a content strategy purely focusing on lifestyle content. The reason for this is that lifestyle content is typically shared for engagement and interaction. It will rarely have any sales focused Calls to Action (CTAs).
However, the purpose of any marketing strategy is to improve sales and boost profit margins. Without the right CTAs, this isn’t possible. Since it is advisable to not have any sales message in lifestyle content, the need for a mix of lifestyle and traditional content becomes evident.
At the same time, the question of the mix ratio becomes evident too i.e. how much of lifestyle content and how much of traditional content can be used together. There is no certain answer since every industry is unique in its own way. However, researches and studies by various marketers have shown that the 60-40 ratio is good wherein 60 percent is for lifestyle content and 40 percent for traditional content.
What Tone Is Ideal For Lifestyle Content?
The tone of lifestyle content is always informal. Lifestyle content strategies require the brand or business to approach its audience as a friend or someone that holds the same interests. When influencers are involved in delivering the lifestyle content, the recommended tone stays informal with the business and influencers acting as a circle of friends having conversations amongst themselves.
Not only informal, the right tone to share lifestyle content is friendly, conversational, and affirming wherein the brand creates a sense of association for the receiver of the marketing message. The inherent idea behind lifestyle content is for the business to make the target audience feel like they’re understood by someone.
Tips For Creating Great Lifestyle Content
Creating great lifestyle content involves more than just putting words on a page. It requires a combination of time, effort, creativity, and a deep understanding of your target audience
To engage readers and drive traffic to your website, here are some helpful tips.
1. Write With An Authentic Voice
When writing lifestyle content, it’s important to write with an authentic voice. Your readers desire a personal attachment with the website, one that appears to be more human-like than mechanical or corporate. Writing with an authentic voice means writing in a tone that is natural, relatable, and conversational.
To achieve an authentic voice, you need to know your target audience well. Understand their values, beliefs, and lifestyle choices. Generating content that emotionally resonates with them makes them feel like a part of the conversation, and this personalization makes the content appealing.
If you’re writing about healthy eating habits, for example, use a tone that is conversational and relatable. Instead of using medical jargon, you could write in a way that feels like you are giving advice to a friend. The ultimate aim should be to generate personalized content that emotionally resonates with your target audience.
2. Break Your Content Up With Lots Of Headers
Breaking your content up with lots of descriptive headers is an effective way to keep your readers engaged. Headers create an easy-to-read structure that allows readers to skim your content and get a sense of what it’s about.
Additionally, Make sure the headers are relevant to the content they precede, and they describe what the content is about. This will help readers understand what they are about to read and help them find the information they need quickly.
For example, if you are writing an article about fitness, you could use headers such as “The Benefits of Exercise” and “Common Fitness Mistakes to Avoid.” These headers make it easy for readers to find the information they need, and the content is broken up into easy-to-digest segments.
3. Try To Keep It Evergreen
Evergreen content is crucial since it remains useful and relevant to the public for extended periods even after publication.
The purpose of evergreen content is to guarantee that your content remains useful for a long time, allowing you to continue to acquire traffic to your website for several years to come.
It’s best to generate evergreen content that is timeless and not susceptible to shifts in trends and passing social media crazes for it to be useful.
For example, an article about the benefits of meditation would be considered evergreen, while an article about the latest fashion trend would not.
It’s also important to avoid references to dates or times in your content. This will help ensure that your content remains relevant and useful long after it’s been published.
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