Regardless of whether you’re a star on camera or not, don’t let your camera shyness stop you from leveraging one of the hottest tools to connect with your audience – live broadcasting.
It all requires one courageous step to let your business come into the limelight and create buzz around it on different social media platforms. With COVID-19, keeping businesses and people indoors, live broadcasting has seen a surge because it’s possibly the best way to provide a seamless brand experience and real-time connections.
What is live broadcasting?
Live broadcasting is the distribution or sharing of your audio and video content in real-time. For a long time, live streaming has taken the backstage in helping brands gain momentum, but in changing times like today, this medium is poised to explode and create rippling effects in your marketing landscape.
Today, this marketing tactic provides your brand a golden way to capitalize on endless monetization opportunities. Whether you’re a retail business or ecommerce platform, it could be a potential game-changer. Unlike live streams where people view the same event simultaneously, a live broadcast is more about creating connections than just watching a live-streamed football or cricket match.
In a live broadcast, the broadcaster is not only displaying their products or giving you makeup tutorials; they are interacting with your audience, asking them to participate by leaving comments in real-time. It can help in improving customer engagement and take your business to another level.
Read on to discover the numerous benefits of live streaming and how it can impact your bottom line.
How can live broadcasting help your business?
As live engagement and broadcasting continue to grow as a trending technology, it’s ideal technology for businesses of every size and shape. Here are seven reasons how this latest industry buzzword can help your business reach new heights:
Cultivates trust among the audience
Money can buy only tangible items, but trust is intangible, meaning you cannot buy it. Cultivation of trust requires time, patience, and the ability to fulfill customer’s requirements. Though technology cannot transport you to a customer for face-to-face interaction, live broadcast provides an opportunity to interact with customers in real-time.
As customers can see your talk, smile, and laugh, they know that they are dealing with real people instead of just a business providing some solution to their problem. It helps foster professional relationships with customers because live videos make them feel they are taking part in some genuine interaction.
Moreover, live videos have the power to change your brand perception from all businesses to warm and trustworthy within a few minutes of broadcasting. Once you cement a real connection, trust will automatically follow it.
Creates real-time brand engagement
While email interactions are good as a marketing tactic, this channel may fall flat on its face when it comes to communication. Why? It’s a one-sided conversation. Your customers send an inquiry or complaint email, and you take time to respond. In between this time frame, your customer may lose their patience irrespective of how beautiful and user-friendly your website and products are.
That’s why live videos and chats help you establish a fast two-way communication channel.
With 42% of customers preferring a live chat function because it doesn’t make them wait, conducting live broadcasting sessions now and then can help you create real-time brand engagement.
By hosting a live broadcast, you can answer customers’ queries, listen to their feedback, gain background information and laugh with them. It can help in increasing brand engagement in real-time, and you can understand your customer’s requirements. For example, when broadcasting your latest collection of exquisite jewelry, you can understand which product, design, and material resonate with them through comments your customers leave. It also decodes the price range your target audience is comfortable in paying.
This information you gather is as solid as gold and can help you make critical marketing decisions.
Provides more content for marketing
You don’t require Pulitzer Prize-winning content to grab your customer’s attention. A well-written, insightful and meaningful content piece will work its magic.
One of the biggest nightmares for business owners is searching for content topics that aren’t duplicate and will resonate with your target audience. That’s precisely where your live broadcast comes into the picture. You can repurpose content from your live video and share it on different social media platforms. It increases your online exposure and ensures your customers don’t have to read recycled or boring content.
For example, if you broadcast a makeup tutorial for a new cosmetic, you can repurpose the live video into a tutorial or a guide. Repurposing content is likely to give a boost to your marketing efforts and take your business to another level.
Help you reach a new and target audience
How many likes or shares did your last Instagram or Facebook post receive? If you’ve been struggling to increase your reach to connect with a new audience, going live might be a possible cure. When you go live, you bring the digital and physical landscape close to each other. As there is no geographical constraint, your live video is accessible across the globe.
It means that you can effortlessly reach a new audience and expand your customer base. Also, it’s unlikely that customers who are not interested in the broadcast will join it. So, a live broadcast gives you a chance to connect with customers whose probability to purchase from your brand is maximum.
Provides cost advantage
Given the many benefits of using live broadcasting, it’s an efficient marketing strategy as it helps in cutting down business costs. By using live chats in your business, you can free up the time of your customer service representatives. It helps them focus on important things rather than trying to understand the customer’s concern only to realize the complaint is appropriate for some other department. Instead of hiring an extra customer service representative, a business can utilize their money for other critical work.
Also, unlike brick-and-mortar space, where you can entertain a few customers due to lack of space or overcrowding, you can show a product demonstration to thousands of online users in a live broadcast. There is no limit on how many people can view your live broadcast at a single time. Also, it can help you save a bouquet of financial resources that you can utilize for other business purposes.
Ensures unique interaction with viewers
Unlike all other marketing tools, live broadcast provides a platform where you can interact with your customers without any limits. If you’re a fashion designer, you can showcase your latest designs to customers, receive feedback in real-time, and even book orders during the live video session.
Today, merely sharing product videos will not serve any purpose because your digital customer wants a brand to connect personally and expects to talk with people behind the brand. With every live broadcast session, you have a chance to showcase the real side of your brand.
As it creates unique interaction with viewers, you can reach customers who otherwise would not interact with your brand.
Furthermore, the authentic nature of live videos gives it an upper hand over pre-produced videos.
Easier to produce than pre-produced videos
Once you nail the basics of live broadcasting, shooting live videos is much simpler than pre-produced and on-demand videos. Your business can have a permanent studio step up to make this process smoother and simpler.
Furthermore, these videos don’t require editing or post-production work. It helps you save time and money that you might spend on hiring a professional video editor. When you get in the habit of streaming live videos, you’re likely to nail every aspect of it. After a while, the hardest part is not recording live videos; it’s searching for relevant content to share.
Go live today!
Live broadcasting is gaining popularity with each passing day, and it’s a technology that has excellent ability to engage your customers in real-time.
The flow of new live video content can result in incremental repeat traffic to your website or social media platform. With every live broadcasting session, you can differentiate your brand from the overcrowded social scene and fast-track customer engagement.
For businesses who don’t want to fall into the vicious trap of digital Darwinism, embracing live videos and live chats is the best possible way to cultivate long-term relationships. Also, live broadcast is not a temporary solution; it’s likely to bring a paradigm shift in your marketing landscape before becoming a mainstream marketing strategy.
So, surprise your audience by going live!
Are you planning to broadcast your live videos? How is it helping your business grow?
Please share your thoughts with us!
About the Author: Priya Jain is a professional copywriter with 8 years of experience. She has an MBA and engineering degree. When she is not writing, you will find her teaching math, spending her day running behind her toddler, and trying new recipes. You can follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter.