Guide to Producing Impactful Lifestyle Motivational Content

How to Create a Lifestyle Video to Inspire Your Audience

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Do you wish to show your brand or product to inspire your audience with the lifestyle that they aspire to have? Are you on the lookout for innovative ways to earn intensely loyal and interactive followers for your business? Creating a lifestyle video that appeals to a niche demographic and helps your audience visualize how your products fit into their way of life is the ideal way to motivate them to take action and become your customer.

Whether you are a lifestyle brand or not, you need to offer content that educates and informs your audience and stands out amongst the best in the industry. Videos are an excellent way to connect with the audience, especially for brands that wish to engage their customers with meaningful content.

Today, businesses of every size tend to favor lifestyle videos that better appeal to the audience and communicate the brand’s values. Creating an attractive lifestyle video can thus be the ticket to reach a wider audience and upgrade the digital presence of every business.

• Part 1: What is Lifestyle Video?
• Part 2: 6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video
• Part 3: How to Create a Lifestyle Video?
• Part 4: How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

What is Lifestyle Video?

Lifestyle content exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’ behind a product or service and appeals to the demographic that you are trying to reach. It is a form of video marketing that pushes products and services to customers by showing the quality of life associated with a particular brand.

The principal objective of lifestyle content is appealing to a specific demographic, culture, or subculture. With these videos, you can focus on your products and services, using stunning visuals and action shots to portray a beautiful picture of what your brand’s potential customers’ lives will be like if they become the consumer of your product and services.

6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video

1. Informing & Educating

One of the most significant benefits of lifestyle content is that it helps customers understand products. With a plethora of choices out there, marketers today are no longer taking the pitching kind of approach. They want to approach their audience with a value-based offer instead of sales. And with lifestyle videos, you can excel at giving customers a close-up look at your products and services.

2. Caters to Your Audience’s Interests

Lifestyle content caters to the target audience. Since these videos define your market and your brand, it carries a specific style that’s based on your aesthetics or looks. What makes video marketing so effective is that they can introduce your story and brand in an interesting way to potential customers.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love high-quality content like videos. Using lifestyle videos in your web pages and other types of content can thus work wonders for search engine optimization. As long as your lifestyle video is well-optimized with the right keywords, a solid title, and a good meta description, your video content can increase your web traffic.

4. Great Promotional Tool

Brands can distribute lifestyle content on different channels for reaching your target audience right away. Once you post the video on your website, you can share it on your social networking platforms or promote it with paid ads. This way, you can get customers excited about what you are offering them.

5. Taps into Emotions

Emotions are a significant component of the purchasing decision of consumers. Studies have found that ad campaigns with only emotional content perform about twice as well compared to those with only rational content. So, creating lifestyle video content that makes your audience feel good can put your business in a positive light.

6. Boosts Conversions

Lifestyle videos are excellent for conversions on websites as they influence visitors by promoting the lifestyle a customer can achieve if they patronize the product or service. What makes such content more compelling is that they excite customers about what you offer them.

How to Create a Lifestyle Video?

The most stunning lifestyle videos are polished, sleek, and visually appealing. Developing a lifestyle video content that exceeds your target audience’s expectations is vital to appeal to your customer’s perfect lifestyle. Creating these videos is easy if you follow the step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Pre-Production

The pre-production stage is when the planning happens for a video. From creative brainstorming to innovative storyboarding, everything happens here. Pre-production begins with experts getting a feel of your product, who it appeals to, and how it works. Next, is the stage of scripting out your video, writing down the visual ideas, and the product features and dialogue that go alongside it. Finally, you need to round up talents like actors, voice-actors, locations, and extras needed to film.

Step 2: Production

Once your lifestyle video is meticulously planned out, your next step is to film it. While shooting an average video takes eight hours, some videos with several locations can require two full shooting days or more. The exact shooting schedule depends on what the script demands.

Since these videos are meant to capture a particular way of life for appealing to a specific kind of person, you should not cut corners in terms of quality. Remember, the better the quality of the footage, the more appealing the end product will be.

Step 3: Post-Production

It is the stage where you need to gather the footage you have shot so far and put them along with voice-over or music depending on your script demands. The main goal in this stage is to put the visuals together in a captivating way to promote your service and product. Here, using a powerful video editing tool seems necessary because you need to make your lifestyle video stand out from the crowd.

How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

A lifestyle video is one of the popular marketing tools for businesses of every size today. These videos are more memorable, more engaging, and much more popular than any other kinds of content among consumers. But, are you curious as to how to promote your lifestyle content to gain maximum exposure? All you need to do is distribute your lifestyle content on the proper channels to grab your audience’s attention and engage with new consumers.

Social Media

Lifestyle videos are aspirational, enlightening in nature, and made to appeal to specific demographics. It makes them great content for sharing on social networking platforms – an active digital marketing channel. Share your lifestyle content across various social media accounts. Ensure you attach a call-to-action for your friends and followers to share.

Your Company’s Website

Hosting your promotional videos on your website, particularly your homepage is an excellent way to immediately introduce incoming web traffic to your products and services, thus increasing your site’s SEO ranking. Besides the homepage, sharing the video content on your blogs is another unique way of re-purposing your content.

Media Outlets

Find out related media outlets that your potential customers read and follow daily. It would help if you also pitched journalists who take an interest in your brand or consider purchasing advertising space on their website. Since there are both correct and incorrect ways to do so, ensure you conduct thorough research on how to pitch media outlets beforehand.

Paid Advertising

You can also pay for featuring your lifestyle video on popular blogs and social networking sites. This way, you can take advantage of hyper-specific tools for reaching your target audience. Advertising on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach the right demographic.

Niche Groups & Forums

When targeting a particular demographic, you will want to reach out to where your audience hangs out online. Do research on the industry chat rooms your target demographic frequently uses. While sharing your video content on these channels, just ensure that they are relevant to your potential customer-base, regularly updated, and also includes active users.

Conclusion

Lifestyle videos allow brands to connect with their consumers better. Whether you are a start-up, an SME, or an established company, lifestyle videos may be just what you need to create a unique brand statement or get people excited about your product or service. So what are you still waiting for? It’s time to create content that resonates with your target market and establish your business as a top choice!

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Channel Branding Mastery: Securing a Loyal YouTube Subscriber Base

How to Brand Your YouTube Channel to Get More Subscribers

Shanoon Cox

Nov 01, 2022• Proven solutions

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Epic Meal Time. Michelle Phan. Peter McKinnon. When you think of each of these YouTube creators, what comes to mind? The feelings and thoughts you have are vastly different because each one of these channels has its own unique branding.

Epic Meal Time’s YouTube brand is in-your-face and intense. It pumps you full of adrenaline and increases your heart rate.

Michelle Phan’s YouTube brand is calm, whimsical, and aspirational.

The color palette she chose is pleasing to the eyes and doesn’t evoke any of the stress we get from Epic Meal Time.

They have different branding because they want to reflect different feelings for different audiences.

Bad Branding Causes Mistrust

When a branding element does not align with the message or the tone does not match with the material, then the audience is not going to trust what you offer. Without trust, you won’t be able to get the advocacy that is essential for a YouTube channel to grow.

Imagine Michelle Phan using the aggressive colors of Epic Meal Time or vice versa. Pretty weird, huh?

What is YouTube Branding?

You might think that branding simply comes together while making videos, but that’s not true. Branding takes a bit of preparation and foresight.

YouTube branding is the idea your viewers have in mind and the emotion they get when they think about your channel.

Here are notable elements of your channel’s branding:

- Channel name

- Channel art

- Video thumbnail

- Video title

- Icon

- Watermark

- Catchphrase

- Style of video

How to Start Branding Your YouTube Channel?

Before you start designing thumbnails and coming up with a catchphrase, the first step in branding is understanding the purpose of your channel. Once you have a purpose, you will know how you want your viewers to feel.

Here is a quick exercise to find your channel’s purpose:

Draw a 3 circle Venn diagram.

In circle 1, write down everything you consider yourself an expert in.

- What do your friends know you for?

- What can you give advice on?

- What did you go to school to learn?

In circle 2, write down all the topics you are passionate about.

- What can you talk effortlessly about for hours?

- At a party, where do you lead conversations towards?

In circle 3, write down everything that people will pay for that you can supply. Here is where you find the demand of the audience.

- Can you give me travel advice?

- Can you make people forget about their stressful day?

- Do you have experience in a specialized field?

Understanding what people will pay money for will help guide you in creating content that has true value.

In the center, come up with all the ideas that can be associated with all three circles. This will be the ideal purpose for your YouTube channel as it harnesses your expertise, your passion, and the demand of a viewership.

Examples:

Epic Meal Time

Expertise = Eating

Passion = Fast Food Culture

Demand = Unique Meals

PURPOSE: Showcase a unique combination of fast food people won’t make at home.

Michelle Phan

Expertise = Beauty Products

Passion = Makeup and Fashion

Demand = Beauty School

PURPOSE: Give people more confidence in beauty products.

Click here

## How Is Your Channel Different From the Others?

Now that you have your purpose, it’s time to separate you from others with similar purposes. YouTube is a crowded space for content creators. If your channel is mimicking another more successful channel, you will be in the shadows.

Good branding allows you to differentiate from others .

Pick a Unique and Memorable Name

If your name is Michelle Phan, and you are not the Michelle Phan, I’m sorry, but you will need to pick another name for your YouTube channel:

If you do have to pick another name or if your channel is an ensemble with multiple members, make sure the name you choose is original, memorable, and short (4 words max).

Picking an Icon

Not every YouTuber needs to design an original logo for their brand. In fact, if the channel is about you — the YouTuber — you are the brand, so using a high-quality picture of yourself as the icon is okay.

However, if your channel has a specific theme or topic and you want your branding to convey it so it sticks in the viewers’ heads, especially if it’s their first time viewing your channel. A clear logo will help in amplifying your message:

Create Video Thumbnails That Stand Out

The power of good branding is that your viewers will be able to spot your brand in a crowded space. On YouTube, the crowded space is the suggested video section.

Epic Meal Time thumbnails standing out amongst other loud thumbnails.

Once you have the feeling you want to evoke, test out different thumbnails. Go incognito, search up your videos, and see how the visuals appear beside your competitions. Do they all have the same style or is your far more impressive?

Good branding doesn’t happen in the first try so keep experimenting.

Designing Your Icon, Thumbnail, and Channel Art

There is a lot to consider when designing all the visual elements for your channel. I won’t get into all of it, but here are some tips that you should always keep in mind.

- Less is more: Don’t clutter your icons, thumbnails, or banner.

- Have a single focus: A channel and a video can have a lot of different topics, but the image can’t show everything a video can. Pick one important area and highlight that in the image.

- Quality matters: Your audience is savvier than ever. If they see a pixelated image, they will judge your channel poorly. That’s bad branding. Always use high-quality pictures.

- Make sure the color pops and the text is visible: Use eye-catching colors and visible text. This is a billboard, you have milliseconds to get people’s attention as they scroll past.

Want more resources for creating your channel’s visual elements? Yes? Well, we made this for you:

- How to Make YouTube Video Thumbnail

- How to Make YouTube Icons

- Free Youtube Banners

How to Make Your Visuals Consistent?

When a viewer finds your video and considers it pretty interesting, they will then go into your channel page to learn more. Here is where they make their decision: subscribe or not subscribe?

Consistent branding affirms the viewer that they are in the right place. Peter McKinnon’s brand is built upon his amazing photography, it only makes sense that his visual elements are awesome.

Peter McKinnon is best known for his photography and cinematography, and his branding amplifies that.

But Branding Is Not Designing, It’s A Feeling

Don’t get too caught up with a design.

Look at PewDiePie’s branding. You can argue that it is inconsistent and the design is not professional, but actually, his branding is spot on, because he is making you feel a certain way.

PewDiePie’s brand highlights its upbeat and unpredictable personality.

PewDiePie wants you to laugh. He is not branding his expertise like Peter McKinnon is, he’s branding his personality.

Consistent branding is about making the elements of your channel: channel art, logo, thumbnails, titles, etc. all harmonize together to evoke a sensation.

The humor in PewDiePie’s brand is consistent, even though his thumbnails don’t look like Philip DeFranco’s. It is up to you how you define consistency, and that will happen over time.

Philip DeFranco supplies commentary on current events with a satirical flair. Like a news broadcast, his branding and video format are consistent, while the daily news is different.

Inserting A Watermark

The main point of a watermark is to let the viewers know when they are watching your video that it is in fact your video.

Let’s be honest, YouTube content can all look the same, especially if you are making content that is quite general (like beauty or tech), so a watermark helps differentiate, so when viewers are ready to subscribe, they have an extra branding element connecting them to your channel.

Improvement Pill is a YouTube channel focused on inspiring and motivating its viewer to live a better life.

Above we see an example of a watermark from the YouTube channel Improvement Pill. You can see the watermark in the lower right-hand corner.

Improvement Pill is not the only channel that uses whiteboard animation to illustrate their story, and because of that, they need to set themselves apart. A watermark helps do that.

When a viewer lands on their video, the watermark gives the viewer another way to get more familiar with the channel, and if they are to scroll over the watermark a subscription button pops up.

Want to set up your subscription watermark? Here is a quick tutorial:

Coming Up With A Catchphrase

A catchphrase can be your greeting or sign off, but it doesn’t have to be an original line, it can simply be the way you say “hello.”

Check out some of the popular YouTuber’s catchphrases:

When coming up with a catchphrase that is connected to your channel’s branding remember how you want the viewer to feel. Do you want to leave them with a smile? Or do you want them to take action?

Final Thoughts On YouTube Branding

As you build and grow your YouTube channel, you can expand your purpose while still sticking within the overall theme. You might have started a channel that focused on the topic of nutrition, but as you grow, you will discover that your audience may also be interested in fitness tips or workout accessories as well. Take it slowly and grow with purpose.

Your branding doesn’t dictate the content you create, but it does affect how you go about making it.

Got more questions about branding your YouTube channel? Let us know in the comments below.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox