How Live Streaming on Social Media can Grow Your Business?

Brands continue to look to engage viewers faster and more efficiently. Video marketing is an interactive way to deliver your brand’s message to increase engagement on social media. Live streaming is the new trend in video marketing and is expected to be trending in 2020 as well. Live streaming is growing fast- Thanks to the rise of social media usage and increased use of smartphones to broadcast live to the audience. The benefits of Live streaming Live streaming has several benefits including being one of the most effective ways to reach your brand message to the audience with the whole setup is easy to implement. With live streaming, you can integrate a sense of engagement that pushes your customers to check out your products and services in an instant. Live videos also allow you to create more dynamic content. Branding yourself with a website and a few blogs is a great idea, but your potential customers want to see more from you and this is where live videos can help. Live streaming offers rich and tangible content that is highly interactive and a lot of fun to view, and informative at the same time. Not just that, the benefits of live streaming are many, which include the following. Attract a bigger global audience No matter what marketing tools you use, there is a limit to the global reach as many of them come with geographical imitations. This is when live streaming comes into play. Live streaming has the power to reach a bigger global audience, which other tools cannot achieve. This means live videos foster a unique user engagement that can surpass any geographical or capacity limitations a physical event has. Encourages online interaction Live streaming is a good way to boost active interaction between your brand and potential customers. By its very nature live streaming is interactive and if you want to take it to the next level, you can try incorporating unique content creation ideas to take it further. Social media live streaming gives you the advantage of getting real-time engagement. If you are targeting a specific piece of content, Facebook Live or Instagram Live can be a great experimentation space. Connect with your viewers directly One of the best benefits of using social media streaming for live streaming businesses is its personal approach to content. Using social media as a live streaming tool, you don’t need to have a big product setup behind live broadcasts. For example, the Weather channel often goes Live on Facebook to answer real-time questions of viewers. This not only makes their Facebook page a great source for news but also a great place for their audience to get their questions answered. Open new revenue streams Live streams will help you interact with potential customers and create new business opportunities while converting them to new revenue streams. For example, you can charge your viewers to access your stream, which can be an extra income source to power your live streaming efforts. Here are some of the ways to drive revenue with your social media live streams.

• Sponsorships

Your social media is a community or a target demographic you have created over a period through constant efforts. Based on your social page’s purpose, the audience would partner with you to access your community. Paid sponsorships are a great way to offer your community access to your live streams while generating revenue for your business.

• Affiliates

Partner with other brands to earn a commission for promoting their products to your community. You get a commission from sales originating from the affiliate links. It not just acts as an alternative revenue stream, but also adds credibility to your brand. For example, you can use affiliate marketing to share the equipment you have found for creating live videos. Keep in mind that in these types of marketing efforts, you need to disclose the details of affiliate partnerships or sponsorships. Tell your audience that you want to take a moment to talk about this in detail so that your viewers will get an idea about your affiliate networking.

• Selling merchandise

Selling merchandise in your live streams can bring in a significant amount of revenue. With live streaming, you can build a strong community offline so that you can sell your merchandise to your community to promote your brand. However, to build a community to promote your brand, you need to regularly stream great quality content on a consistent basis.

• Selling products and services

With your live streams, you can promote your products and services directly to your audience by offering rich information that is directly associated with your offerings. You don’t really have to wait till the end of the live broadcast to sell your products and services. Product demos are a great way to offer how-to information and useful tips to your audience to get them interested in buying your products. A cost-effective video strategy It doesn’t matter what your niche is, live streaming is a cost-effective video strategy considering the attention-grabbing nature of live streaming. If you are looking for cost-efficient social media marketing strategies, there is nothing better than live streaming. Most viewers enjoy the live nature and unedited approach of live videos which means you don’t need a professional camera, editing skills, or fancy frills to broadcast successful live streams. It is all about living in the moment. You can use a smartphone to post videos on your social media feed provided that you know how to set up live streaming on mobile devices effectively.  However, don’t let the low-budget setup of live streaming weaken the quality of your videos. That means when live streaming setup is cost-effective, you still have to offer great quality content the audience would love to watch. Drives more traffic to your site and social media pages One of the main benefits of live streaming is that it can be a true source of traffic to your social media pages and website. Live streaming simply drives more engagement and if you promote your content in the best way, it can keep your audience coming back. Facebook live videos drive 10 times more comments due to the real-time connection between the audience. For instance, Reuters leverages Facebook Live to announce breaking news on their channels. One of the great ways to bring in more traffic to your website is to constantly publish fresh content. The more you can bring in users to your website, the more likely you would be able to create a steady source of traffic. Gain a competitive advantage Incorporating live streaming to your marketing strategy could give your brand a competitive advantage in the industry. Live streaming events, whether its conferences, webinars, or generic product tutorials is not something commonly used by many businesses. If you could take advantage of this, you could set yourself apart from the competition and steer towards your marketing goals faster. Fosters excitement around product-related events Social media live streaming can be used for special events like product releases. However, live streaming doesn’t suit all events. One area where we generally see success from live streaming is hyping with product releases. For instance, Target used Facebook live to promote its new launch of affordable home decor themes which bagged in a lot of views and engagement. As live videos are unedited and real, brands can utilize the same emotion to foster excitement around new product releases. If you are successful in creating a hype around your live videos, customers will back to you to get more information on the product release. Creating a successful live streaming strategy The fundamental step of creating a live streaming strategy for your business is to have a look at your target audience and decide the message you want to promote. Choose a set of clear goals for the live streaming campaign and decide what to broadcast live. After setting goals for the live campaign, proceed to create a set of guidelines for the campaign. Regardless of the size of your live streaming business, there may be more than a single person involved in the project so everyone needs to be aware of the guidelines. Another significant thing to consider is to be aware of the challenges live streaming brings in. As with all live videos, there is a certain element of uncertainty. Creating a live streaming strategy will help to minimize the risk to an extent. To run successful live streaming campaigns, you will also want to consider the following aspects. How will you keep your viewers engaged? Live streaming offers multiple opportunities for viewers to participate. There is enough time to engage in real-time conversations with your audience and answer their questions as well. Engagement with viewers becomes difficult when your audience is spread across different locations. So, how to achieve the same level of engagement in physical events with live videos? Offer engagement opportunities like question and answer sessions, sharing data in real-time, polling the audience, offering resources to download, etc. Set a live streaming schedule Once you have got used to the live-streaming and how much it costs in terms of time, money and effort, it’s time to set a live streaming schedule. You shouldn’t be live streaming if you don’t have great content to share. In that case, it is recommended to stick on to a slow-paced schedule, but keep it fairly regular. You must also advertise ahead of time via social media before you go live. This will help your audience to know when you will go live so that they can plan to tune in to your social media accordingly. Extending the life of live streams The major attraction of live streaming is that it happens in real-time. Viewers from all over the world can join together and participate in live events to witness an event or a new product release. But if you don’t find effective ways to leverage live videos after the broadcast is over, you are missing out on something. At the time of live streaming, make sure you also record the videos to use it later. It is very important to create a post-live event promotion strategy to increase exposure. Capturing leads from live videos Best practice says that live streaming is the best spot to incorporate effective ways to capture the leads. At the time of live streaming, find different ways to capture leads from your live videos. Here are some of the ways to incorporate lead capture techniques. Pre-roll and post-toll lead capture– A pre-roll lead capture includes a CTA button or full form before or after the video finishes playing respectively. Teaser lead capture– In this method, you show a clip of an offer an in-video form to capture the information from viewers. Parallel lead capture– This type of lead capture refers to the method when a form is displayed along with the video as the video continues to play. Redirect lead capture– This refers to redirecting the audience to a landing page to complete the next step. The Redirect is typically placed at the end of live streams. Measuring the success of live videos The execution of live streaming campaigns is never complete with measuring the results. The first step to measuring the success of your live streams is to understand your goals. Yes, it is essential to look into the number of views but to measure success effectively, you need to dive into in-depth analysis to find the info about engaged users, active customers, greater purchase intent, etc. Conclusion Live streaming on social media comes with a broad range of benefits for businesses. Live streaming has completely transformed the dynamics of marketing and has emerged as an effective tool to grow your business. With its rising popularity, more brands are coming forward to adopt it to offer a real-time viewing experience to their audience. You can take advantage of this social media offering to connect with your potential customers and communicate in a unique way. Incorporating live streaming to your social media marketing strategy will help to build a more personal relationship with your audience. Have you tried using live streaming to grow your business? If yes, tell us the strategy you adopted in the comment section below. We would love to hear about your experience.