Kim YazziIn today’s digital era where social media has dominated the digital landscape, live streaming is one marketing tool that has helped businesses to gain more exposure while generating more leads and sales. Many businesses are inclining more towards social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach a large user base without any geographical boundaries. To survive in the competitive business space, you need to differentiate yourself in the market and that is where live streaming can help you.
If you are running a business that relies on people being at your physical location, you probably might have experienced a challenge in taking your business forward during the current Coronavirus pandemic. Local businesses are seeing a dramatic decline in sales with a lot of industries becoming duller.
In this situation, many people think about what to do to save your business. The current pandemic is causing a significant rise in the use of live streaming tools by both individuals and businesses for different purposes. Leveraging live streaming for business purposes is a realistic way to future proof your business and ensure you gain a competitive advantage in the industry.
Why Use Live Streaming for Business?
Being in real-time, live streaming offers a sense of excitement for your target audience. Live videos make your customers feel inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Besides broadcasting live, businesses have the opportunity to interconnect and promote their live videos later on social platforms.
Your viewers would be pleased to watch the richer content your live videos can produce especially if you allow your audience to submit questions and interact with your brand. Live streaming has an unlimited range and it opens up the possibility for a global audience to participate regardless of any geographical limitations.
So what are the other benefits of live streaming for businesses? Let’s look into it.
Grows Your Audience Base
The internet is a large place and reaching out to a global audience there is no easy task. While marketing can help you grow your audience base, not all strategies are effective in crossing geographical boundaries. Whereas, live streaming is capable of achieving it.
Live videos help you reach customers who otherwise won’t participate in interacting with your brand. Due to its real and authentic nature, live videos definitely get an advantage over pre-produced videos.
Unique Interaction with Viewers
Brands can interact with viewers without any limits during live broadcasts, unlike other marketing tools. Live streaming helps to establish a personal connection with the audience and gives your audience a personal experience with your brand.
In the past, businesses were impersonal and didn’t employ strategies to captivate the interest of their audience on a deeper level. However, the audience of today and their preferences have completely changed and it becomes important for brands to connect with their audience personally to grow their business. The audience of today loves to know the business and the team behind it. Live streaming is a perfect way where you can showcase the real side of your brand to your customers. Moreover, now the social live streaming platforms are coming up with many important features that make it convenient for businesses to go live.
More Engagement
There is no better way to interact with your customers than interacting with them live. The real-time interaction facilitates a conversation with your audience which is the next best choice to personal interaction, but much more scalable than that. The live aspect also pushes your customers to engage personally with your content. During live broadcasts, viewers want to be a part of it, and they are more likely to share it too with their peers and friends.
Building Trust
Building trust is one of the critical success factors of every business. Your customers will only prefer to do business with you if they have trust in your brand. The interactive feature of live streaming allows the audience to create a connection with your brand. If they like what they see, the connection will help to build trust.
Another benefit of live broadcast is the freedom offered by it. There are no limitations. You can choose the time frame to go live according to your convenience and the choice of topic. The content can be educational, commercial, promotional, the possibilities are limitless.
Repurpose the content
If you want to create more content for marketing purposes, you can choose to repurpose your live videos afterward. Once your live broadcast is finished, you can share it with social platforms as on-demand videos which increases the exposure and reach further.
However, not all live videos can be repurposed in the same way. For example, if you are running a live product demo with a promotion, it might be beneficial even if you repurpose it. But, if you edit it, the product demo can be an educational piece that can benefit your audience even long after your live stream ends.
How to Use Live Streaming to Grow Your Business
Now that you know the advantages of live videos, let’s look into some and the live streaming trends and different ways to use live streaming to grow your business.
Product and Brand Promotion
You can use live streaming to showcase a product update or release and exclusive behind-the-scenes clip to your users. For example, if you are a fashion brand, you can give your customers a glimpse of your new product collection and can show the test drive of your models live.
Generally, customers are used to watching post-production and edited content. So if you can make your live videos more interesting and engaging, it can help with your brand and product promotion. For instance, Vogue conducted a live broadcast during the Met Gala to show the behind the scenes which bagged a lot of views and engagement.
Live Blogging
If you have been into blogging, you know how important it is to watch a post after publishing it. This offers a great level of engagement with the brand as the readers ask queries about the blog and express their feedback. You can use live streaming to continue the conversation with your readers in real-time.
For example, if you are doing a product review, you can broadcast live as a continuation to answer the questions of your customer’s live. When professionally using live streaming, you also need to ensure you cover the essentials and best practices for better results.
Deliver Brand Presentations
If you are looking for effective ways to deliver brand presentations, there is no other way than live streaming. It helps you answer customer questions live as they view your product presentation.
If you are conducting a small scale or big scale event, you can stream your presentation, then go backstage and respond to the questions of your followers. Conducting live streaming of such events is a great way to activate your social media following base. But when you are live streaming, understanding how to set up live streaming events on a big scale can help as it requires multiple cams and a professional set up.
Broadcast Special Sessions and Seasonal Offers
By announcing special offers on special days in real-time, your business gains a lucrative opportunity to bring in quality traffic to your website and social media. A simple social media post may just engage your viewers for a very short time. But, a live video can increase the reach of your message.
For example, Dunking Donuts live broadcaster live tour of their DD test kitchen on valentine’s day along with a big announcement.
Conclusion
Compared to content marketing strategies, live streaming is one of the cost-efficient marketing strategies out there. With live streaming, there are lots of possibilities to explore and your customers will appreciate the effort.
Regardless of the content, you create, you must focus on your live streaming strategy to build a personal relationship with your existing and potential customers. Once you test different strategies, continue with what gives you a better performance in live streaming platforms, and ditch what doesn’t perform better. Happy live streaming!
Himanshu Patel
