Promoting Lifestyle Brands using Public Relations

PR for lifestyle brands seeks to demonstrate an understanding of the lifestyle of the target consumer and the relevant products to that lifestyle. With the burden of the global pandemic, things are a little more complicated. Pitching products and services effectively can be challenging. The landscape is dizzying with consumers engaging with different platforms like social media and interactive versions of magazines that digital PR agencies have focused on.

Having a strong online communication strategy can help boost practically any business. With the right strategies in place, companies can quickly improve their performance on the market and increase their bottom line.

However, to employ those strategies, companies have to create concrete marketing campaigns which will help them in bringing more customers, as well as retaining any new ones. Here are the most important aspects for a brand to dial in; to make the most of their marketing campaigns:

01. Influencers – Influencer PR helps to affect lifestyle choices and purchasing decisions. Lifestyle is a domain in which influencers marketing can make a huge impact on consumer decisions. The term lifestyle embraces everything from home decor to travel, food to fashion. For instance, Amanda Stanton is an influencer who has her Instagram feed filled with photos of her in fashionable outfits. There are also photos of her daughters. She frequently partners with lifestyle brands like Third Love and Fab, Fit, Fun. She has constructed a huge social networking fanbase of 1.19 million followers on Instagram, and her content has a great interaction rate.

02. Virtual events – With the future of in-person events being unclear, virtual events are here to stay. With audience fatigue setting in, to run an engaging online event, compelling content is necessary. Google SheetsCon hosted a contest that gave participants the opportunity to win a swag bag that contained branded event shirts and stickers. To win, the participants had to share something about the event on their social media platforms using the event hashtag.

03. YouTube – YouTubers who are not restricted by a specific niche fall into the lifestyle category. They discuss current events, share their interests with viewers, and disclose information from their personal lives. Lifestyle marketing on YouTube makes it possible to target groups by attitude. Many types of YouTubers are becoming popular, like YouTubers specializing in makeup and skincare, tech YouTubers, gaming experts, DIY and many others. Bethany Mota and Alison Mare are successful lifestyle YouTubers. Mota has published a book and Mare has partnered with Hollister and Michaels stores among other lifestyle brands.

04. Building a community – It is crucial to build a brand community or a group of customers who are invested in a brand beyond what is being sold. Many popular lifestyle brands have been putting community building to the test for years. Starbucks has been synonymous with community for quite a while. When you are entering a Starbucks cafe, you are greeted not by mere employees, but by Starbucks partners, the term used by Starbucks to refer to their baristas. This small but important detail helps to strengthen a company’s sense of  community. Besides this, Starbucks continues to strengthen its community with a number of social initiatives which elevates member interaction and engagement. The pumpkin spice latte photos customers post every fall shows how the brand utilizes user-generated content to build a community. Some of their best tagged customer photos are reposted on their corporate social profiles.

05. Aligning with similar brands – Co-branding can also boost sales and reach. Partnering with or referencing similar lifestyle brands will strengthen a consumer’s association of a brand with a given lifestyle. The shared values of BMW and Louis Vuitton led to a co-branding campaign. The BMW i8 was a sports car model for which Louis Vuitton designed an exclusive range of four-piece luggage that fit perfectly into the car’s rear parcel shelf.

Although plenty of business owners don’t really think about web design as an important marketing strategy, it’s one of the things that influences the attention and amount of time visitors will spend on the company’s website. Additionally, since the company’s website should be the core of all of the company’s marketing efforts, if there’s no effort put into the website, the business will end up losing customers. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much time and effort is put into developing great marketing strategies when the core elements don’t work.

Another core piece of the marketing success equation is optimizing the website for search engines. Creating SEO content is what helps companies appear higher on the search engine result pages. This is also the way that companies can become associated with some of the more competitive keywords that potential customers use to find the solutions they’re looking for. This is what increases a company’s chances of being the top company customer chooses to purchase from, after doing research online.

Not everyone is well-versed in the marketing industry, which is why business owners that don’t have the expertise can easily find someone who does and work with them. There are thousands of different PR experts or agencies, that are available and can help any business improve its promotional efforts. In fact, working with an expert is especially beneficial to smaller businesses where the business owner should be focusing on other aspects of the company than public relations. This way, someone else will be handling a part of the business that’s essential to his growth.

Although public relations is an industry that’s not completely connected to marketing, there are still some strategies that are intertwined on both fronts that can help companies promote themselves better. Some of the top strategies that can be utilized for both marketing and PR purposes are press releases and media coverage. When it comes to press releases, companies can get essential information out in a formal setting to the target audience. This type of effort can work closely with media coverage because publications can easily pick up a story from a press release, aside from different types of promotional efforts, and talk about the business with a larger audience.