With the rapidly changing global business landscape and constantly evolving consumer preferences, live streaming has become a new paradigm in digital marketing. It has emerged as a robust marketing tool that can act as a gamechanger for your business. Thriving on real-time engagement, live streaming has perhaps inevitably become the cure for all ills – communication, social interaction, relationship building, information sharing, and marketing.
This blog explores why live streaming is destined to become the next big thing in digital marketing.
Live streaming is the process of broadcasting live video footage with audio over the internet to an active target audience that may be as geographically dispersed as you may imagine. Social networking platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram have embraced the new wave of innovation, which witnessed a significant boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while the pandemic is apparently becoming the new global norm, so is live streaming.
Almost every other social networking platform supports live streaming capabilities. Be it Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Telegram, you can conveniently broadcast real-time videos to a vast audience. You can multistream on all these social platforms simultaneously to bag a much larger audience and make headlines. Not only real-time, but you can also broadcast pre-recorded videos as live streams. All you need is a reliable live streaming platform like OneStream Live, and you’re in for a win-win.
Live streaming is not limited to social media alone. You can also embed live streams on your website to tap into a more extensive audience base, no matter the scale. This is a sure-shot way to gain quick traction and audience attention and promote your product offerings on a large scale. Imagine a new user lands on your website looking for a portable washing machine, and the first thing he sees is a live demo of the portable washing machine itself. You’ve caught this lead well, haven’t you?
Live streaming holds immense potential for business enterprises:
Hence, live videos have proven themselves as a gimmick to spur your target audience to action. So, how can you use live streaming for marketing your products and services?
You can host critical corporate events via live streaming. Whether product launches, the inauguration of a new assembly line, or die-hard promotional events, you’re booked for a massive audience. Spotify offers a classic example of this strategy. The music streaming brand is known for hosting impromptu music shows with leading musicians and live video coverage of music festivals.
Showcase Products
Showcasing your products over live streams is one of the most effective techniques for marketing new products, highlighting their USP, and pushing the viewers into impulsive buying. All big brands like Audible, Bonobos, Lynda, Pepsi, Zara, Marriott, and Sephora, are increasingly leveraging influencer marketing to promote their product lines over live broadcasts.
Host Q&A Sessions
Hosting live Q&As is incredibly effective in engaging with the audience in real-time. Wendy’s hits it well for promoting summertime drinks on its YouTube channel. Rhett and Link churn out 30-60 seconds long skits, and viewers chat with them in queues for their relative questions.
Show BTS
Behind-the-Scenes (BTS) marketing offers the audience a peek into what the brand is really like. You can humanize your company and build trust by sharing important company events with your consumers – product updates, upcoming product shoots and campaigns, team meetings, holiday parties, happy hours at work, etc. Isn’t it fascinating to see J.Crew’s BTS peeks at how they manufacture some of their most lauded styles!
Live Giveaways
Remember Doritos’ live giveaways on Periscope for its #DoritosRoulette digital campaign. Viewers were randomly chosen to participate in the contest where the host would spin the roulette wheel to give away prizes. The company used several social media for this campaign; a team game on Twitter, promotional videos on YouTube, and winner announcements on Vine. What a great way to keep the audience hooked on all these platforms.
It remains imperative for digital marketers to understand that the consumers today consume content on your time, not theirs. This is perhaps the most powerful benefit of live streaming that it lets you engage with your target audience in real-time and register your brand in their mind. You’re inevitably targeting content at the users who are most likely to convert as your customers. That said, live streaming also makes it commendably easy to reach highly targeted niches. It’s pretty unlikely that people who’re not interested in your topic will join your live stream anyway.
Moreover, while traditional marketing tactics are relatively expensive and time-consuming, live streaming is incredibly cheap. In fact, it’s completely free. All it takes is a laptop or a smartphone with a camera and an active live streaming account. But when you’ve got results coming in, there’s no harm in investing a couple of bucks in good equipment to enhance the quality of your live streams.
The potential benefits don’t end here. You can still squeeze a lot more value out of your live streams by repurposing them. Cut out a few short clips as product teasers, curate compelling social media posts, draft snippets for Twitter, or transcribe a whole blog post out of them; your choices are limitless.
To wrap it up, live streaming has the power to magnify your viewership. Using it for digital marketing can help you reach audiences at an unprecedented scale. You’re not limited to the realms of space and time anymore; anyone from any part of the globe can attend your event easily and conveniently. Leverage live stream marketing to capture a moment that will last a lifetime.
Author Bio: Saba Mohsin is Digital Content Writer at OneStream Live. She is a progressive researcher and an ardent blogger with a keen eye on ground-breaking technologies. She has a diverse experience of curating content for multiple leading high-tech firms.
