5 Audience Engagement Hacks for Live Video Marketing

It shouldn’t be a surprise by now that live video marketing is one of the hottest video marketing trends today, especially on social media. Since it gained momentum in the beginning of 2016, many businesses are using it across their branded platforms and social media networks to provide a raw look into their messaging.

A survey conducted by Livestream and New York Magazine have found that 80% of consumers prefer live video when viewing branding content.

A successful live streamed video can produce incredible results for your business’s conversion rates and brand awareness. If it isn’t already, live streaming certainly needs to have a role in your video marketing strategy.

Here are some key tactics, combined with appropriate tools, to try out in your next live streaming campaign to improve customer engagement.

1. Brand Your Video

Live videos tend to attract large audiences these days, but if you are not strategically placing your brand name throughout your content, then much of your efforts may be in vain. 85% of marketers agree that brand awareness is the number one goal for their content strategies, so incorporating it into your live video streaming should be a priority.

The Rule of 7 in marketing implies that most customers need to see your brand message at least seven times before they are ready to buy from you. With this in mind, it is imperative that you use the opportunity in live streaming to increase the number of impressions with your audience.

The most difficult part of including things like product placements or brand mentions into your live video is making it sound authentic without being overly “sales-y.” Nothing turns a customer off faster than an obvious self-promotion – in fact, an Ad Age survey claims you could lose up to 60% of your audience by doing this.

Branding your videos across all of your owned and paid media platforms is essential. Facebook Live is the live streaming platform to be on these days – and there are tools like BeLive lets you include a logo and customized color scheme to help brand your live streams or shows on Facebook. BeLive also has a view-changing mode that enables you to host up to three speakers per video, along with screen sharing capacities and on-screen updates, to create a professional talk show-like broadcast.

2. Educate with Webinars

People engage with messaging that teaches them something new.

That’s one of the psychological reasons people share content on social media, too.

If education is the goal of your video content, consider creating live webinar-style videos (visible only to invited people) over the standard live stream. Not only does it keep your audience engaged for a longer period of time (because they were targeted in the first place), it promotes two-way conversation and typically results in around 46% conversion rates.

Webinars tend require more planning and promotion, due to the longer streaming times (ON24 found the average is about 53 minutes).

ClickMeeting is an all-in-one tool that lets you plan a comprehensive webinar from start to finish. You can create customized email invitations for multiple customer segments, so all touchpoints are branded and targeted. Once your video goes live, you can use educational tools like white-boards, slide decks, polls, chat translation, and even customized programming to better interact with audience members throughout the webinar. After the webinar is over, ClickMeeting provides analytics to help you learn and optimize future meetings.

3. Try Simultaneous, Multi-Platform Multicasting

When it comes to live streaming on social media sites, engagement stats can vary depending on where your audience congregates. With its multi-billion active user base, Facebook reigns supreme as the largest platform in terms of live video audience numbers. About 20% of the videos posted on Facebook are now live broadcasts.

YouTube Live and Twitter are strong runners-up. YouTube Live video audiences have been hitting record numbers. With a massive audience of a billion and a half users a month, the site is still the most popular source for video streaming.

And then there’s Twitter, with its highly-engaged, highly-opinionated user base. According to Twitter’s report to shareholders, 31 million viewers logged on to watch live premium video in 2016 Q4. Twitter’s live-streaming has shown great engagement levels when topics are related to news-worthy events, with over half of the livestreams revolving around sports and approximately two-fifths being about politics.

Choosing the best platform for your next live video depends largely on your target audience. You should run your live streaming campaigns on the channels that give you the most eyeballs or loyal advocates, especially when you’re broadcasting events.

Crowdcast is a multicasting tool that solves the “which social network” question in the best possible way – it allows you to “multistream” on all of them at the same time.

Once you go live, Comcast will figure out where the action is happening by measuring engagement via comments and reactions, and tell you which platform is generating the maximum buzz.

4. Add Visual Elements in Real Time

Want to know the secret to increasing engagement, boosting brand recognition, and creating more interesting posts? Use more visuals. One of the best ways to boost digital presence is by adding in pictures and videos that catch the eyes of your followers.

Of course, live streaming is already the highest form of visual content. However, adding in additional features can lead to better engagement.

Thankfully, you don’t need to be a graphic designer or videographer to swiftly incorporate these design elements to your live stream. Lightstream is a browser-based tool which makes adding high-quality pictures, audio-video clips, design elements and overlays to your live videos quite simple. The straightforward layering system helps you create a custom design for a highly professional look. Adding content is as easy as dragging and dropping it right into the video stream.

5. Let Results Drive Improvement

One area where most marketing campaigns fail miserably involves the process of interpreting the analytical data after the fact. Studies on content marketing by HubSpot and Content Marketing Institute have repeatedly observed that accurately measuring the ROI of their content is the #1 challenge that inbound marketers face.

If you’re one of them, you should be worried. After all, it’s impossible to determine whether or not your video streaming is bringing in positive results if you are not keeping track of the proper data. But rest assured, an Adobe study found that among the marketers who do monitor their numbers, over half named video as the content format with the best ROI.

First of all, your business needs to set some goals before you start analyzing any numbers. Do you want to

• Increase website traffic?
• Boost conversions?
• Add more emails to your list?
• Spread brand awareness?
• All of the above?

Once you decide what kind of numbers you want to track, you will need a reliable analytical system to record this data for you. That’s where you need to step up your numbers game.

Livestream Analytics is designed specifically for live videos, which means it will only show you the numbers that really count. It generates easy-to-digest reports on audience demographics, devices, locations, times when engagement levels spiked or tapered off, and more, helping you determine the best approach for keeping viewers glued to your content.

The Wrap

Making sure your live streams go off without a hitch requires a great deal attention from planning, to execution, to optimization. Video marketing can be instrumental in setting your brand apart from the competition if you’re able to create innovative, one-of-a-kind engagement opportunities with your audience.

Making sure that you have the right strategies and tools in place to implement your campaigns is crucial in strengthening your messaging in the current marketing landscape and beyond.