Once the internet went public back in the early 1990s, it transformed the way the world works. It brought about evolutions in learning, working, shopping, and many other aspects of our lives. Of course, it also revolutionized entertainment and the way people communicate. It completely altered marketing for businesses across the globe as well.
Within only a few years, live streaming came into play. In the beginning, it was a little-known niche with a minimal audience. It was mainly used for concerts, sports, and other major events. Today, though, companies can use live streaming marketing to their fullest advantage. With this increasingly popular tool, they can make virtually any occasion a major event whether it’s a product launch, a demonstration, or simply an attempt to stay fresh on customers’ minds.
Bringing the Benefits of Live Streaming to Your Brand’s Marketing Strategy
Today’s businesses are on a constant mission to find new, more effective ways of reaching the public and promoting themselves. Several options are available at this point from paid ads and email marketing to SEO and conventional print mail. Social media and content marketing are also essential components of any solid strategy.
All that being said, live streaming marketing helps take those channels to entirely new levels. It can benefit your brand in numerous ways. Consider some of the reasons you should start live streaming now to take advantage of this incredibly effective marketing outlet.
Building Connections With Your Audience
Building stronger connections with your audience is one of the key reasons to add live streaming to your marketing strategy. People can only read so much into your brand’s personality and values through your website and social media. Even pictures and recorded videos can’t fully showcase what makes your company unique.
Live streaming can highlight those aspects, though. It lets you get your story out there. It gives you a chance to promote not only your products and services but what your company is all about. It makes your brand seem more human and allows people to get to know your company on a deeper level.
Beyond that, it lets you do all that in real time where viewers can interact with you right there in the moment. You can answer their questions, address their comments, and take in their feedback as it’s coming in rather than waiting until after the fact to respond to them. All that creates personal connections between your brand and its customers and prospects.
In turn, it builds trust, helps you make conversions, and leads to repeat business. According to recent reports from the marketing sector, live streaming can boost conversions by up to 30 percent or even more in some cases. Sales spurred by live streaming reached an estimated $25 billion last year, and they’re projected to soar even higher in the years to come. At the same time, the personal connections it creates can greatly increase customer retention and repeat business.
Expanding Your Reach
Another advantage of streaming video marketing is the ability to greatly expand your reach. In-person events allow your company to connect with local customers, but even then, you’ll only reach so many people. Videos aren’t held back by geographical barriers, but again, they don’t create quite the same connections.
Live streaming, on the other hand, comes with many of the same benefits as in-person events, and it’s global. People across the planet can come together to view your live sessions as long as they have internet connections and you have the right streaming platform and equipment. Using live streaming in your marketing efforts could take your reach from a handful of people to potentially millions.
Greater Flexibility
Flexibility is also a major boon for businesses that incorporate live streaming into their marketing strategies. You can host live events on your company’s website where people will be right there with the products and services you offer. You can also host events on social media where more people are likely to see and share them. More than 22 percent of social media users watch live content, and that number is constantly growing.
Even better, you don’t have to choose just one. You can host different events on different social media platforms. From YouTube and Instagram to TikTok and Twitch, you’ll be able to reach all niches of your target audience. You can also tailor your live streaming marketing based on the demographics of the people who will be watching them on various platforms.
Aside from the flexibility of being able to choose your venue and customize content accordingly, streaming video marketing gives you opportunities to market in different ways. As mentioned earlier, you can use live streaming to spread the word about product launches. It’s also perfect for advertising upcoming sales and endless other occasions.
You can stream question-and-answer sessions about any number of topics, including your industry as a whole, how to get the most out of your products, and how your company operates. Use this marketing outlet to promote contests and giveaways. From there, use it to announce the winners of those events. Those are only a few of the possibilities.
That level of flexibility and versatility gives you countless ways to reach customers and prospects. You can use live streaming to target different segments of your audience and people in various stages of your conversion funnel. It’s a great way to speak to everyone no matter what they want to hear.
Practicality and Profitability
Live video streaming marketing is also a practical and profitable way to promote your brand. It’s not overly complicated or costly when compared to certain other elements of your marketing strategy. In fact, all you really need to get started are a camera, an internet connection, and a few other pieces of equipment. In fact, you could, technically, use your phone and a live streaming app initially.
Keep in mind, though, that using the bare basics for live streaming could hold you back. It’ll affect your video quality and may limit your reach. Once you start to gain more viewers, a phone and an app probably won’t be enough to give them the experiences they’re looking for. Additionally, you need to plan your live videos well to keep viewers coming back for more.
As your efforts start to pay off, you can always upgrade to more high-tech equipment. It’ll give you higher-quality streaming and provide your viewers a better experience. It’ll also give you added versatility so you can take full advantage of all the potential benefits live streaming marketing has to offer.
Regardless of where you start, live streaming is bound to pay off in the long run. It generates some of the highest ROIs in the marketing world. Those returns tend to cycle higher and higher as a company’s brand awareness grows. While you can’t expect to go global and see sales skyrocket with a few short streaming sessions, you’re sure to get back what you put into this portion of your marketing strategy plus far more.
Improved Visibility
Live streaming marketing will improve your visibility as well. On the most basic level, it gives you more content to showcase across a broader range of channels. That makes people more likely to see your content and share it.
As long as it’s valuable, high-quality content, Google will take notice. That’ll help improve your search engine rankings and make you more visible when people search for the products and services you offer. You can take that up a notch by tagging your events based on what’s trending and using the right keywords when promoting them.
Aside from that factor, social media sites promote live streaming over other types of content. When you go live, your events will be more likely to appear at the tops of people’s feeds. Those who follow you will receive helpful reminders of your events as well, so they’ll be less likely to forget about them.
That added visibility will keep you fresh and relevant in the eyes of your followers, which could further improve your search engine rankings. It’s a beneficial cycle if you approach it in the right way. Remember, though, that your live feeds need to benefit viewers in some way, such as entertaining them and giving them valuable information. Otherwise, your engagement rates could drop and take your rankings and visibility down with them.
Measurable Results
Live streaming gives you measurable results too. You’ll be able to see how many people attended your events. Some streaming platforms give you tools to use for determining viewers’ demographics. Those include their age ranges, genders, and locations. If you stream across multiple channels, whether at the same time or with different events, you can measure which platforms viewers watch your live streaming marketing from.
Certain platforms and analytics tools can give you information like how long viewers watched and how they interacted with your content. You can gain a great deal of insight from those resources, not the least of which speaks to the cost-effectiveness, visibility, and reach of your live video streaming. It’ll help you measure just how popular and effective this portion of your marketing strategy really is.
Improving Your Marketing Campaigns
You can also take the measurable results you get from live streaming to hone your entire marketing campaign. They’ll show you how to improve your live events to draw in more people, keep them interested, and encourage them to interact. They’ll also help you determine which social media platforms and other online venues are bringing you the most attention and which ones may not be quite so worthwhile.
Those metrics aren’t limited to your live streaming marketing, either. They can extend to all aspects of your marketing strategy. As such, they’ll help you better reach your target audience no matter where or how they find you. They may even prompt you to branch out into audiences you hadn’t thought of marketing to before. Using the analytics tools available from live streaming platforms will maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and budget.
It’s What the People Want
Finally, consider this: people are increasingly leaning toward live streaming as their content of choice. By some accounts, at least 80 percent of viewers prefer video over reading a post, and the majority of those favor live streaming over on-demand. That applies to people on social media as well as other channels.
On a global scale, people spend approximately 25 percent of their viewing time on live streaming versus on-demand video. People generally watch live content about 10 minutes longer per sitting than recorded videos as well. During the pandemic, live streaming views surged by more than 100 percent. Many analysts expected that figure to drop drastically after shelter-in-place mandates were lifted. Instead, it has continued to grow by anywhere from 10 to 15 percent per year.
Live streaming marketing is expected to give rise to more than $130 billion in sales within the next couple of years. Some sources say that consumers are up to 60 percent more likely to make purchases after watching live marketing videos than after seeing ads or reading about products.
People love this type of marketing because it highlights products, their uses, and their value. It also allows consumers to ask companies questions about their products and services directly rather than indirectly. Of course, there’s also the bandwagon effect to think about. That’s a powerful tool in its own right, and few things bring it out quite as effectively as a live event. In short, live streaming is what the people want, so why not use that to your advantage.
Making Live Streaming Video Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Several marketing solutions are available to today’s businesses. Companies can promote themselves in person, online, on television, and in writing to name a few options. Live streaming has risen to the forefront of the marketing sector. It’s an effective way for your brand to connect with customers and prospects, and it’s what your target audience is looking for. With all that being the case, why not harness the power of live streaming and make it part of your marketing strategy?