This article explores how you, a talented Indian copywriter, can learn lifestyle copywriting, offer your services to American lifestyle brands, and earn a six-figure income by charging premium rates for your specialization in writing for this high-growth industry.
Table of Contents
My cousin lives in San Jose, California. He told me on a call that he recently had to order a hammer for some housework. He figured a hammer would run him about $4 to $6. I mean, how expensive could a simple hammer be, right?
When he opened Amazon to look for a hammer, he was sucked into a crazy carnival of hammers.
While there were $4-$6 hammers, there was also a plethora of hammers costing upwards of $400! His mind was reeling. My poor cousin works in Walmart’s marketing department. All he knows is selling affordable items. He had no idea people were paying hand over fist for hammers.
What kind of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world had he stepped into?
I was not surprised and said as much. Actually, I said, “I’m surprised there are no $1000 hammers.”
He told me I was crazy and why anyone would pay that much for a tool to push nails into walls.
I had to explain to him that the dude who buys the overpriced hammer is different from him. I said, “Look, you hate housework. You are talking to me on the phone instead of doing the housework. Everybody is not like that. Some people take pride in DIY stuff, some people give hammers as gifts to their family members, and some just like showing off their shiny tool collection. They are paying for the feeling, not for the hammer.” “Paying $400 for a feeling?”
My thoroughly middle-class Indian cousin was having none of that. So, I had to explain with examples.
I said, “Look at the reviews of the premium hammers. Here’s one for a $168 brass hammer. Being brass, it’s even bendable and breakable. It doesn’t make sense.”
But Ryan loves it. Notice that he says, “Everyone borrows it.” His neighbors can’t get enough of it. He’s the talk of the town because of that hammer.
Here’s another example. Phillaby loves a $299 hammer because his “tough as nails” father loves it. He’s paying for his father’s happiness even though he doesn’t know much about hammers.
Notice that Arianna loves that her husband loves the hammer. He’s “raving about this hammer.” This one’s $295, by the way.
“So, people will pay fifty to a hundred times more because it makes them ‘feel’ something?” My brother asked in disbelief. I thought back to my ₹500 Superman underwear from my childhood and said, “Yeah, they will, and so will you. And not just 100X. They will pay 1000X, too. Remember you bought four roses for your girlfriend for ₹1500 in the first year of college just because it was Valentine’s Day and cried about it for the rest of the month? When feelings are at stake, people pay disproportionately larger amounts. It’s called lifestyle marketing.”
My cousin’s brain had begun churning. He said, “Bro, I need to get a lifestyle marketing job.” I agreed with him and decided to write a lifestyle copywriting guide for you guys.
Now, everything I wrote above was a lie. I don’t have a cousin in San Jose, and he’s not looking for a lifestyle marketing job.
Don’t make that face.
You loved that story, didn’t you? It made you feel something. So, storytelling is the first skill you have to learn to get lifestyle copywriting clients, ok? It makes even hammers sound life-changing. We’ll come back to this.
The US market is ravenous for lifestyle copywriters
Lifestyle markets like fashion, wellness, home goods, and travel have been enjoying robust growth in the last decade and show no signs of stopping. In fact, it might just be the beginning. The health & wellness market in the US alone is geared to hit $2.2 trillion in revenue by 2033. Athleisure? Projected to surpass $842 billion by 2028. Wellness tourism is on track to reach $2.1 trillion by 2030. The next three to five years will be a gold rush for lifestyle brands, and you, dear reader, can sell them the picks and shovels.
The internet changed marketing. Social media and YouTube have nitro-boosted marketing departments all over the world. Gone are the days when marketing was a tiny department tucked away in big companies. Marketing departments are growing. How much?
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that marketing recruitment will grow by 8% annually by 2033, which is higher than the average for all professions. Over 80% of American companies plan to increase their marketing budgets in the coming year.
That’s all fine, but there are brands that do nothing but content. Many lifestyle brands are essentially media companies that create content to wring your heartstrings and then sell you things. BuzzFeed, PopSugar, and Tastemade are just a few of the lifestyle brands that are media content creation companies at their core. You know what that means? The marketing department is the whole company!
All this content needs to be written. And there’s more and more content every year. Guess where that content will come from? You.
You might be thinking, “That’s all well and good, but there must be other growing industries, too. Why shouldn’t I use my talents elsewhere?” Here’s why.
Why do lifestyle brands pay through the nose for good copy?
Lifestyle brands operate at huge profit margins, and lifestyle copywriter salaries are higher for that reason. For example, Burberry, a luxury fashion brand, pays $87,168 per year to the average copywriter on its staff. This is 45% higher than the average copywriter’s salary in other industries.
You know the fundamental insights of economics, where usually, when you increase the cost, people buy less? Well, that’s not the full story. There’s a category of goods called “Veblen goods” where if you increase the cost, people buy more. Lifestyle products fall under this category. The more you charge, the more attractive your product gets. For Veblen goods, the price is not a barrier but a part of the attraction.
And copywriting makes that happen.
Remember the hammer story? If lifestyle branding and copy can enable those hammer companies to charge up to 100 times higher markup, then why would they mind paying you twice or thrice as much as other copywriters?
You might think, “Ok, it’s a nice industry, but why specialization? Why shouldn’t I taste all the fruits of the US garden?”
Here’s why.
Why specialize and not improvise?
Nicheing down in any specialization gets you better results than being a general-purpose copywriter. It’s like standing under one tree and collecting all the fruits from that tree instead of running around catching different fruits from faraway trees. You get tired and get fewer fruits by running around. Yes, it’s a visual metaphor for carving a niche for yourself. Painting a picture with your words is another skill you will have to develop. For now, the benefits of specialization:
Better pay: Experienced copywriters in niche areas are making $200-300/hour. You, a talented beginner from India, could easily make $50/hour in these high-paying niches.
Steady work: Specializing makes you the go-to copywriter for brands in your niche, so you don’t have to struggle to find work constantly.
Expert cred: When you spend some time working in a niche, you understand the ins and outs of that niche in granular detail. You stop being a generic writer. You bring your niche expertise to every project. This creates a virtuous cycle. You write excellent copy. It brings you credibility. More credibility brings better-paying work. And that means louder and more frequent “cha-ching” sounds in your bank account.
Not only can you niche into fashion, wellness, luxury automobiles, etc., but you can niche further into, say, plant-based nutrition, luxury commercial real estate, or vegan skincare. The more niche you get, the more authority you command within your niche.
Clients also prefer specialists because they need less onboarding. For example, a vegan skincare brand will prefer a niche specialist because a cruelty-free beauty specialist copywriter already knows its values, buzzwords, and nuances.
With that, it becomes easier to collect social proof. You get referrals, testimonials, and word-of-mouth – all slow to come otherwise.
Convinced? Curious to know about the market you will serve? Let’s find out.
Understanding US lifestyle brands and copywriting for them
How to spot an American lifestyle brand?
While wellness, fashion, makeup, home supplies, luxury real estate, etc., are officially known as “lifestyle,” pretty much any brand can position itself as a lifestyle brand. Remember the hammers? You have boring old housework hammers, and then you have fancy, highly priced “lifestyle hammers.”
So, what defines a lifestyle brand if nothing is inherently “lifestyle”?
Here are some ways to recognize a lifestyle product, brand, or positioning strategy:
Identity: This is the big one. If you take home anything, it needs to be this. Lifestyle brands sell a desired identity. “Desired identity” is what you want to be for your customer. 
Aspiration: Being free is not enough, though. We all want to “be free.” That by itself isn’t an ad strategy. We also want people to see us being free. That’s a social aspiration. That’s where Nike comes in. It’s telling you, “Let everybody know you are free.” How do you let everybody know you are free? By visibly using the products that help you be perceived as free. Which products? The lifestyle products that have spent billions of dollars over many decades cultivating those associations of freedom in people’s minds. In this case, Nike. They’re selling the desired perception.
Community: Birds of a feather flock together. In Nike’s case, Nike customers and fans gather together on their running apps, training apps, sports competitions, various marathons organized by Nike all over the world, and so much more. Lifestyle products become calling cards for customers to recognize each other, and the customers prefer to hang out together. You might think this is an exaggeration, but a report says iPhone users prefer to date each other rather than Android users. That’s how strong the brand loyalty of lifestyle brand customers is. This is fostered by community building and maintenance.
By looking at these markers, you can spot lifestyle brands, and if you have a strategy in place, get them as copywriting clients. Yes, I’ll get into the strategy soon. Let’s find out the types of lifestyle brands first, shall we?
Luxury vs. utility lifestyle
You’ve probably seen luxury brands and wanted to buy them. These are the brands that cause stampedes among the well-to-do, the lines outside the iPhone stores on launch day, and women fighting for the last exclusive Louis Vuitton bag on the shelf. These brands feature high price points. They are exclusive and limited. They provide status through the label and quality through their craftsmanship.
Here, the label is bigger than the product itself.
While Louis Vuitton is a leather products company, what it sells is status and belonging to the high society. In an apocryphal anecdote, the CEO of Rolex was asked how the watch business was going. He replied, “I have no idea. I’m not in the watch business. I’m in the luxury goods industry.”
Utility lifestyle brands have utility but are positioned as lifestyle accessories for the high disposable income market segment. Fashion brands like Zara, cosmetic and wellness brands like Goop, and the fancy hammers we talked about earlier all fall into this category.
So, the price point, manufacturing quality, packaging, and exclusivity in terms of availability are other strong signals of a lifestyle brand. They can be well-known luxury brands, where the brand name is the whole point. In other cases, they are expensive utility goods that are well-made for the discerning consumer, ready to pay a premium for the guarantee of the best quality product. These are known as utility lifestyle brands.
Emotional and aspirational
Another sure-shot way of knowing you’re dealing with a lifestyle product is the way it’s marketed. As we discussed earlier, the three markers of lifestyle branding are:
- Identity,
- aspiration, and
- community.
If you learn to spot them, you will spot a lifestyle brand in a crowd of brands and learn lifestyle marketing tricks in the process.
Just as an exercise, we’ll try to spot a lifestyle brand in an industry that’s not usually considered a lifestyle industry.
How about software? Isn’t software all about features and utility?
- You want to write a document? MS-Word.
- You want to make a spreadsheet? MS-Excel.
- You want to make a presentation? MS-Powerpoint.
The only emotion I feel is boredom. I definitely don’t want anyone to see me using them. How embarrassing! No emotional connection and no aspiration.
Enter Notion. It’s not just a notetaking app. It’s a lifestyle. Its aesthetic design makes you want to come back to it. For a change, a fun productivity software! Their philosophy of “Software should be beautiful” is shared by developers and users alike. Its Lego-like nature provides for endless personalization, so Notion becomes part of your identity. Notion users share their Notion templates, and it helps them be perceived as productive, creative, and aesthetics-savvy. Notion has merch that their user base wears with pride. With its worldwide community of notetakers, designers, developers, and users displaying their Notion usage online for everyone to see, it has transcended the software category. It has become a lifestyle brand.
When you see this kind of marketing, you know you’re dealing with a lifestyle brand. Not just Notion but many other design-led software products like Arc, Attio, June, beehiiv, Linear, and Raycast have amassed fiercely loyal user bases because using them says something about who you are.
Remember, a lifestyle brand says something about who you are, and its marketing enables that.
Prestige and status
Does the brand you’re investigating add to the prestige and status of its customers? Lifestyle brands have the function of elevating the social standing of the buyer. A lifestyle brand is usually something that will be seen in public. It needs to be admired by an adoring crowd. It needs to be appreciated by an audience.
Always look for the social element of the brand. How recognizable is it? Does it elevate the user? In what way?
What can a copywriter do?
Now that you know how to spot the brands you want to work with, it’s time to know how exactly you can help them. It’s mainly by helping them create and maintain a consistent brand identity and making emotional connections with the consumers with your writing. Let me explain.
“Once there was a brand”: brand identity through storytelling
Every brand needs a unique identity. I’m not talking about the visuals of the brand identity, like the logo, the fonts, and the colors. I mean the voice of the brand, how the brand “talks.”
Imagine a puppet. It has its own style. But the puppet says what the puppetmaster wants it to say. A brand talks through you, the copywriter.
As a copywriter, you will often have two main responsibilities. Coming up with fresh, unique ideas and keeping a consistent voice. Since you will be writing for American brands, you will have to ensure that your copy is written specifically for an American audience.
Within that huge demographic, you will have to understand which particular type of person you’re talking to.
- Are you talking to a business decision-maker?
- Are you talking to housewives?
- Are you talking to Gen-Z content creators?
You will have to tailor the copy accordingly.
If you like Superman, you probably value moral behavior. If you like Batman, you probably value human ingenuity. The stories we prefer signal something about us. That’s why every lifestyle brand has a story.
Nike’s story of high performance through perseverance and iPhone’s story of innovation and creativity through technology are brand stories that allow us to make a statement through the ownership of these products. You will create these stories for many brands and continue the story for many other brands through fresh ideas.
“I’m feeling good”: Emotional connections through storytelling.
Stories are quite literally a mnemonic technique. Since the dawn of time, we have used stories to remember important teachings of the sages. A story makes things memorable by evoking strong emotions, and a brand that doesn’t evoke strong emotions does not become a lifestyle brand. Therefore, you will have to learn how to evoke strong emotions through your storytelling. The emotions you generate could be nostalgia, pride, or competition, but they have to come through the brand story consistently and repeatedly.
Imagine CCTV footage from a supermarket. People come, they purchase things, and they get out. Realistic. But no story. Suddenly, an armed robber enters the frame. Low probability, doesn’t happen too often, but now it’s a story. Suddenly, you feel something.
“Am I special?”: Differentiation through storytelling
To differentiate your brand, make the story realistic and your characters relatable. As if the reader has met them in real life. You can give them attributes that resonate with your audience. But make the events unusual.
There can be dozens of brands selling basically the same products. You need to alleviate the sameness.
A fashion brand can just be “great clothing,” or it could be “an expression of individuality for the urban professional.” One approach lets the brand be lost amidst clones, and the other makes it shine in a sea of sameness. As a copywriter, you will elevate their copy from feature listing to identity-based, benefit-focused stories.
Career-building in lifestyle copywriting
Like my cousin (who doesn’t exist) looking for a lifestyle marketing job, you will also need some client-hunting strategies (which definitely exist). In this section, we talk about how you can find clients, keep them, and build a lifestyle copywriting career for yourself.
Let’s first see how you can choose a niche for yourself. What are your options?
The Holy Trinity: Fashion, travel, and wellness
These are the usual suspects in the lifestyle business. They have experienced immense growth in recent years.
The global fashion industry is rising from $2.5 trillion in 2019 to $3 trillion by 2030.
From 2023, global tourism is going from $8.88 trillion to $12.31 trillion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 3.7%.
The wellness industry? With a projected market valuation of $6.6 trillion in 2024, growing to $7.2 trillion by 2025, it’s experiencing an 8.5% annual growth rate.
With this kind of explosive growth, it’s no wonder these industries are looking for good copywriters, and this demand cannot be fulfilled by the American population alone. This is where you come in. Having learned lifestyle copywriting, you can approach these brands and offer excellent services at a price point that’s much higher by Indian standards but still attractive to American brands.
Wondering where else you can use your skills for a lucrative return?
Niche into high-ticket lifestyle goods
These are luxury appliances, much like the fancy hammers we talked about. They provide utility. They also offer social status and prestige through the premium label.
High-ticket appliance brands can afford to pay you higher rates because of:
Complex brand messaging: Writing effective copy for high-ticket goods requires storytelling that emphasizes quality, heritage, craftsmanship, and technological innovation. The messaging is multilayered and needs niche expertise. And obviously, it’s hard to find them. So when you turn up with your well-honed lifestyle copywriting skills, it’s hard to say no, even at premium rates.
High-net-worth consumers: A high-net-worth customer base also means that these brands only work with the best copywriters and aren’t afraid of paying top dollar for their services.
High margins: Since the bulk of the profit comes from the brand identity itself, high-ticket goods often carry larger profit margins. Guess what that means. Well-crafted copy that drives even a small increase in conversions can deliver significant ROI. Guess what that means. Higher copywriting budgets.
Case studies and portfolios for lifestyle clients
You might reach out to clients via Upwork, LinkedIn, cold outreach, or warm outreach, but they will still want to see proof of work and your ability to craft emotionally resonant, identity-elevating copy. Seeing your creativity, writing range, and results in their niche gives them the confidence to hire you for projects. So you need a banger portfolio. What makes a banger portfolio? A great portfolio is a story. A narrative arc of challenge, solution, and execution.
Introduction: Introduce a client you’ve worked with and the challenge they faced. You could say something like, “A premium coffee brand struggled with email open rates.”
Execution: This is the time to showcase your deliverables, which in this case will be email copy.
Results: Use numbers and the percentage increase across engagement metrics. Use visuals like before and after images with low and high engagement.
Here are some tips and tricks to make your portfolio irresistible to clients.
Curation: Include your best work relevant to or adjacent to the client you’re pitching to. No generic, outdated, or irrelevant copy in the portfolio.
Versatility: Display your range. Use many formats. Let every good project you have done in or around that niche shine through, be it web copy, email, blogs, or social ads.
Visuals: Lifestyle brands are heavily invested in their aesthetics. So incorporate visuals to show that you understand their aesthetic sensibilities.
Testimonials: Quotes from satisfied clients prominently displayed in your portfolio will sell you like nothing else to prospective clients. A satisfied customer is your best salesperson.
Lifestyle storytelling techniques that sell
Now you know how to impress lifestyle clients and get work-from-home copywriting gigs as an Indian copywriter. In this section, we’ll find out how you can deliver outstanding results to these clients.
The who: Identifying high-spending demographics
High-income buyers have significantly different preferences and aspirations from mass-market customers. To represent their aspirations in your copy, you must be able to separate them and study them. Here are some ways of segmenting them.
The people who buy expensive lifestyle products are unique in many attributes. The audience that you will be writing for identifies differently and has a different social circle. To write for them, you need to study them like your life depends on it. The audience you’re writing for will have some common features, like:
Income: Audiences with upwards of $100,000 in annual incomes often invest in lifestyle design, so they seek high-end appliances, luxury couture, and upscale wellness options.
Location: Certain upscale regions and neighborhoods have a higher concentration of high-net-worth populations. These regions are also aspirational for many upwardly mobile professionals working in high-paying ecosystems like Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Age: Millennials and Gen Z are indulging in much of the spending on high-ticket fashion and lifestyle staples. Think Yeezy sneakers, Stanley Cups, and Balenciaga bags.
Behavior: Past purchases are as close to a crystal ball for future purchases as you’re going to get. You know iPhone buyers will be the first to buy AirPods. People who are hitting upscale gyms? You know premium protein powder is on their shopping list. You also know when that protein powder will be over, and they’ll need a new one. Maybe offer a new flavor?
Use social listening tools such as Google Analytics and purchase behavior data to refine your segmentation.
The what: Crafting emotionally resonant messaging
As we discussed before, aspirations, social ambitions, or desired identity are the keys to lifestyle copywriting. Always think about what this product says about the customer. For example, Nike’s customer base is NOT athletes. More than 80% of their customers are nonathletes. The big-name athletes get Nike, Reebok, and other athleisure products for free anyway. The real profit comes from high-spending non-athletes who want to signal athleticism. In the eyes of your social circle, the Nike logo sends a message. Nike allows you to be identified by your social circle and strangers alike as someone pursuing athletic excellence. They know you are a part of the sports lifestyle when they see you wearing Nike products.
If you’re a copywriter, you know the “benefits over features” rule already. In lifestyle products, the benefit is the desired identity. The desired identity or social aspirations derive from the following:
Status: Take the example of Rolex. For them, the copy emphasizes legacy and prestige instead of functionality. All watches have the same functionality. They tell time (duh!). But a Rolex tells everyone you’re “old money.”
Experiences: Luxury travel brands like Four Seasons focus on bespoke experiences over standard room and board amenities. The unique treatment a customer gets at Four Seasons property is their biggest draw. So, it must be reflected in the copy.
Transformation: A huge part of lifestyle copywriting is transformation stories. Do you watch Reels? Transformation reels are some of the most common ones. Changes in look, style, weight, muscularity, and vitality are common themes.
Sportswear and fitness brands use this technique to the hilt. They show their customers how to become physically and mentally better. The copy reflects their journey of self-improvement and empowerment. These brands inspire and support the user’s commitment to achieving all-around excellence.
Each identity is tied to certain emotional anchors. To invoke this identity, you must invoke these emotions in the customer’s mind. Some of the most important emotional anchors are:
Pride: Remember Onida’s famous line, “neighbor’s envy, owner’s pride”? It demonstrated that owning this TV set enhances the customer’s pride and causes envy among the neighbors.
Belonging: This is what community-building is for. Community copy emphasizes membership in a unique and aspirational group of like-minded rebels. Harley Davidson uses this to the hilt, making the customer feel part of a global community of trailblazers.
Freedom: To generalize, lifestyle copy emphasizes “freedom to” instead of “freedom from.” Utility products often use “freedom from,” for example, “freedom from blackheads” in the case of beauty products, but premium beauty products will use “freedom to shine at the workplace” or similar images.
The how: Case studies, testimonials, and social proof
We are social animals. Lifestyle brands are social signaling mechanisms. Obviously, social proof will be a powerful selling technique for lifestyle brands. It makes the customer think, “Well, if so many people love this brand, then they must be doing something right.” The customer is validated for their judgment in buying the product, and the perceived risk of buying is minimized through social proof.
Case studies: A case study is a story (see? Once again!) that empathizes with the pain points, concerns, and challenges of and provides solutions to your ideal customer profile (ICP).
If a premium fitness brand promoting a meal plan wants to communicate the effectiveness of its solution to its ICP, you can just write down the emotionally resonant story of a client who faced meal prep issues, protein target issues, or nutritional issues and achieved optimum nutrition using your client’s meal plan. You can also use this technique with before-and-after comparisons and tangible data to make the transformation feel authentic and achievable.
Testimonials: Customer testimonials are powerful weapons in a copywriter’s armory. Think back to the hammer example. The price points were contextualized by the gushing praise of adoring customers.
User-generated content (UGC): UGC creates community. The shared connections and trust build customer loyalty. For example, Starbucks uses UGC through campaigns like #RedCupContest, where customers share photos of their holiday drinks and cups.
Weaving these social proof elements together in your copy will enable you to create a narrative that drives conversions and deepens customer loyalty.
Selling your value to lifestyle brands
While lifestyle brands offer higher copywriting rates anyway, you can also offer lifestyle copy to a brand to enable them to charge higher prices. That way, you can expand your client base by turning non-lifestyle brands into lifestyle brands. If you communicate your value with data and connect your copy with results, you can charge 2-3 times what others are charging in the same space.
Justifying premium copy rates
Just like the premium products you are writing for, your price point is not decided merely by a per-word calculation. You are not a word vendor but an emotion vendor. What emotions would you evoke in prospective clients so that they are happy to pay you higher rates? Ambition, of course. This is how to do it.
Connecting copy to ROI for lifestyle brands
Show how your copy boosts sales and conversions. Show results like, “My optimized product pages increased conversions by 25%.” They are looking for ROI. That’s what you will show them.
Showing increased customer lifetime value (LTV)
Lifestyle brands value customer loyalty, and your copy should reflect that. Personalized copy in follow-up emails or loyalty campaigns boosts lifetime value (LTV). Brands like Athleta and Lululemon keep customers engaged through community-building newsletters and upsells. Explain how your retention-focused copy creates long-term relationships and higher repeat purchases.
The important thing to remember is that established brands will attach outsized importance to LTV, so show them your retention copy. Newer brands want to get those early quick wins, so hit’em with your best sales copy.
Getting clients that stay
Submitting excellent copy is only the first step in establishing long-term business relationships with clients. It will require a little bit of extra effort on your part, but it will pay off in continuous, secure, and highly paid work. These clients also give you more referrals and spread the word about your skills among their contacts.
Upselling from one-time to ongoing content
For a steady income, pitch retainers for ongoing content. Brands need regular email sequences, blog posts, or social media content to stay current. Offer package deals like monthly newsletters or seasonal campaigns. Highlight the benefit of having a dedicated writer who understands their brand voice and can evolve with their needs. This way, you get your foot in the door with a one-time offering, and then you’re on your way to regular content provider services.
Becoming a brand storytelling partner
You are a freelancer, but it helps a lot to familiarize yourself with the company culture, buzzwords, mission, and vision so you can position yourself as an indispensable partner by focusing on their long-term brand story. Based on your deep product and company knowledge, offer strategic ideas to reinforce their narrative across all platforms – web, email, and social media. When clients see you as a brand storyteller instead of just a writer, they’re more likely to offer ongoing collaborations and premium partnerships. Remember, you’re not just a writer. You’re a sales writer. So, always be selling your services.
Highest-value lifestyle copywriting projects
Lifestyle marketing is a high-paying field of work, but within lifestyle marketing, some projects are even more high-paying than regular lifestyle copywriting. Isn’t that awesome? Let’s find out which specific projects you can look for to maximize your earnings in lifestyle copywriting.
Writing product launch copy for luxury brands
Launch day is a big moment for any brand. Many lifestyle brands keep launching new products, product bundles, sale months, and special promotions. This means many opportunities for writing that all-important launch copy. Launch day copy is heavy on anticipation and scarcity. You’re trying to create a stampede, and knowing how to do this makes you the go-to launch copywriter for lifestyle brands. These are the skills you need to develop and display in your portfolio to get product launch copy assignments:
Scarcity: Products that are available to fewer people or for a short time are perceived as more valuable, boosting sales by up to 25%. Your copy should be able to communicate the exclusivity of owning the product with authentic urgency.
Experience: How does the ownership of the product enhance the customer’s lifestyle? Hermès emphasizes the artistry behind each Birkin bag, ensuring that the customer comes off as a connoisseur of quality. This will be a key skill that will apply to everything you write in the lifestyle space and doubly so for launch copy.
Culture: Align with cultural moments to position launches as trendsetting events. A successful lifestyle product becomes part of the culture. Xerox is not just a photocopying machine but part of office culture. Balenciaga is not just selling clothes but participating in the culture of high fashion. Your copy must elevate the launch to the status of a cultural event.
Creating premium content
Apart from launch copy, there are premium content pieces every brand regularly publishes that become the cornerstones of their product quality and positioning. Fashion brands publish lookbooks. Software brands publish documentation. Everyone recognizes annual Spotify Wraps as a major cultural event. Identify these content types for the brand you’re eyeing and pitch for them.
Always be on the lookout for luxury home décor guides, fitness editorials, luxury travel blogs, beauty & skincare editorials, and fashion editorials.
Right! Now we know what to do to find lifestyle copywriting work, how to create a great portfolio, how to write lifestyle copy, how to create relationships with clients, and how to maximize your income in lifestyle copywriting. Let’s discuss what not to do to have a long and profitable career in lifestyle copywriting.
Common mistakes to avoid in lifestyle copywriting
Overusing lifestyle jargon
You know when all copy starts looking the same? Every product starts using the same buzzwords, and marketing content becomes a boring soup of meaningless repetition. If you just avoid that, you will immediately make it to the top 10% of copywriters easily. Originality in ideas and execution will be your long-term ally in this career.
Failing to connect emotionally
I know, I know, I’ve said this before, but I’ll keep repeating it until I’m hoarse. Never write emotionless copy. This whole business is about evoking emotion. Never send in copy that doesn’t evoke some feeling. To make sure you never fail to deliver emotionally resonant copy, always pay attention to your emotions when you read an ad, a blog, or a social media post. Take note of what emotions it generated in you and which part of it did that. Keep a swipe file of the best copy you have come across. Take inspiration and keep getting better and sharper at generating emotions through your words.
Underestimating visual-text synergy
An important thing to remember is that your copy will, in many cases, go out with visuals. Have a working relationship with the visual artists on your project. Make sure your copy and the visuals go together. It goes without saying that you need to know the general aesthetic of the brand in mind before writing the copy anyway.
Your words should evoke imagery. Your copy should paint a picture that brandishes itself in the reader’s mind. Don’t write, “Wear a watch that reflects your success.” Instead, write, “As you shake hands at the board meeting, the polished stainless steel of your Omega Seamaster catches the light, the deep blue dial mirroring the sharpness in your eyes. Every tick of its chronograph is a reminder of the countless hours spent perfecting your craft.”
That’s all from me for now. I will bring you more lifestyle copywriting insights soon. Keep pitching and pursuing that cha-ching!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I differentiate myself?
First, you must choose your niche. Within that niche, specialize further in a sub-niche and then specialize even further in certain content types. For example, you could say, “I’m a fitness tech lifestyle copywriter specializing in crafting high-converting landing pages for premium exercise equipment brands.”
What are the best-paying lifestyle brand niches?
Here are some of them:
- Luxury fashion & accessories
- Wellness & health
- Travel & hospitality
- Home decor & design
- Sustainable & eco-friendly brands
What’s the best way to showcase lifestyle brand work in a portfolio?
To showcase your lifestyle brand work in a portfolio:
- Include case studies
- Show emotional range
- Highlight your niche expertise
- Before-and-after samples
- Display visuals alongside the copy
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