If you are targeting at increasing your customer engagement and outreach, live streaming is one of the most efficient ways to make it possible. As live steaming helps you reach out a large number of audiences from around the world, you will have a wider scope of improving your business. Live streaming of events can be an effective marketing strategy if you implement it carefully by following some criteria. Most of the businesses do not consider the option of live streaming after they try it once or twice and fail. But why do businesses fail in live streaming? It is because they aren’t focusing on some key factors which need attention before they start live streaming. Here are some tips you might want to make use of before you start live streaming:
FOCUS ON QUALITY OF THE VIDEO:
While you are streaming live, ensure that you are streaming it in high quality. High quality video implies clear visibility, synchronization of audio and video and proper internet connectivity. Poor quality video leads to poor customer engagement. It is also important for audio and video to sync, if it is not the case, it might lead to confusion among the viewers. Strong internet connectivity is also to be taken care of as this is highly important to stream continuously. The viewers will no longer be interested if there are too many interruptions in your live stream. To ensure good quality live streaming, you are recommended to use a HD camera or a web camera with USB connection.There are many live streaming software and live streaming providers which can assist you in improving the quality of video.
BE SPECIFIC WITH YOUR TOPIC:
Most of the audiences watch live streaming content that is related to their interests. And this makes them watch your live stream depending on the specific content you promised to deliver them. So stick to the content of the topic without diverting the audience. Discussing content not related to the topic might confuse the audience who might even stop watching out of dissatisfaction. This would affect not only your on-going live stream but also the next time when you schedule a live streaming, viewers might not show any interest.
KNOW WHEN TO SCHEDULE:
You must be careful about when to schedule live streaming too. Depending on the type of audience you are trying to engage, you must be choosing the right date and time to start streaming. To support this with an example, let us suppose that you are trying to deliver some professional content to the viewers. Doing this on Monday or Friday would be a wrong choice because, people will be busy on Mondays with their own things that they have left on Friday, and on Fridays they would be in a rush to completing things. Weekends are definitely not in our options. This leaves us with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday which are the preferable days to schedule live streaming work-related content. But this scenario might change if you planning to live stream content related to entertainment purposes like music concerts, comedy shows etc. Weekends are better options in this case.
LIVE TRANSLATORS:
Language might be a barrier when you are planning to reach global audience. With millions of languages spoken in different parts of the world, choosing to interact with audience in one particular language might create problems. However, this is no longer a problem these days considering the advancements in technology. You might choose to make use of services like InterpreNet that provide you options like streaming subtitles, close captioning and audio embedding etc. with the help of interpreters positioned in distant locations.
INTERACT WITH THE VIEWERS:
Even while you are streaming live, make sure that you interact with your audience. As live streaming has an advantage of two-way communication, make sure that you make the maximum use of it. Engage your customers during the live video by replying to the comments they make. It may not be possible to reply to every comment. Pick a few ones and acknowledge the commenters by replying to them or by liking their comment. This makes the audience feel that you are a business or brand which genuinely values its customers. You can even engage the audience by other attempts like asking questions and creating polls. This would increase the willingness of the audience to watch your streaming for a longer period of time.
USE A HASHTAG:
Hashtag is an efficient way of making people aware of your live stream video. Before you start live streaming, it is important that you make people aware of it so that you can have maximum possible audience while live streaming your content. And using hashtags can make this an easier process. Social media are widely associated with hashtags and if you choose to reach a wide range of audience, social media are definitely the suitable options. Be it Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, see that you associate your live streaming event with an appropriate hashtag, which is not being used for any other purpose. Hashtags also make it easy for the users to search for your live video on different platforms.
INVOLVE AUDIENCE IN YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY:
If the audience of your live streaming can themselves bring in more viewers, it would be highly beneficial to you. Encourage the audience to share your event on Facebook, tweet about it in Twitter or upload an Instagram story. Also organize online contests on your company’s social media pages and offer incentives like T-Shirts, discount offers and vouchers to those who win. Run marketing campaigns that would involve more users sharing the information about your live streaming event. In this way you are not only spreading the news but also gaining popularity among the audiences.
DURATION OF STREAMING:
The duration of your live stream video is another factor that contributes to customer engagement. Do not make it too short or too long. The video might not have any impact on the viewers if it was for a short duration. If it continues for a long duration, viewers might get bored with your content. Either way, it is going to bring you loss. In order to leverage your live streaming, make sure that you do not stream it for not less or not more than 45-60 minutes of time. However, if you are planning to stream an all-day event which would exceed 8 hours, be prepared to witness varied number of audience at different periods of time. However if you want the maximum possible number of audiences to watch your key note or any other important part of the event, you can inform your audience the same by making announcing it in the video or mentioning the same in the comments section.
You can even record these live videos and make them available to the users even after the event ends. Users who might have missed your video due to some problems or those who would want to watch it again would be happy if you provide them the recorded video. Doing so can even increase the user engagement with your brand. Live streaming can serve many purposes better if above mentioned points are taken care of before, while and after streaming.
StreamNow offers ads-free professional live streaming services. Audience cannot ignore ads for long enough or for one too many times. Sooner or later, they are bound to dump your live streaming channel for pestering them with unwanted ads, pop-ups and spams. StreamNow is known for its crackdown on advertisements. To know more about its professional streaming services, please visit StreamNow.
If you have any doubts or concerns, feel free to drop a line or two in the comments section. I shall reply in a day or two. Keep watching this space for insights on live streaming platforms and live streaming software. Cheers!
binesh
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