The world is increasingly going digital, and trade is drifting from physical stores to online stores. The number of ecommerce shoppers keeps climbing every year. At the moment, in 2021, the number of online shoppers is 2.14 billion, which means one out of the four people you see every day is an online shopper.
To pull these numbers closer to you, you need to constantly be abreast with the latest trends to stay updated on how your audience engages the most.
Live engagement is currently the hottest marketing trend to include in your digital marketing plan to revolutionize your business because it is presently the leading platform for audience engagement.
According to research, 80% of consumers will rather watch live stream videos than read a blog, and 82% of consumers prefer live stream videos to social media posts.
This article will show you what live engagement is, the effective strategies to include in your live engagement marketing plan, and the six core benefits of live engagement.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is live engagement?
Live engagement, also known as live streaming, is when a streamed video is delivered across the internet in real-time. Live streaming doesn’t involve pre-recording or producing content beforehand; rather, your audience can see your content simultaneously as you create it without delay.
Live stream videos are commonly referred to as live stream broadcasts because you can distribute your audio and visual content to several people simultaneously.
Live engagement strategies to add to your video marketing plan
To succeed at your video marketing plan, it is important to inculcate effective audience strategies to get the best results with your live engagements. Here are the most effective five that help you do an excellent job.
Make use of visual elements
Although your live video is already a visual element, you need to add other visual elements to make it more appealing to engage your audience in the best way possible.
Even if you have great, valuable content to dish to your audience in your live videos, you still need to make the visuals captivating to get them hooked.
To do this, examine the visual elements that suit your live video content and use them.
Some examples of visual elements that could work for your live videos are PowerPoint presentations, images and graphics overlays, and much more.
Add a call to action
Your live stream videos would be ineffective without the use of a good call to action. When you run a live stream video, it’s usually because you want to get your audience to do something.
For example, if the purpose of your live stream videos is to get your audience to buy a product, then you should tell them to do so in your live stream video. If the plan is to get your audience to subscribe to your mail, ask them to do so in simple and clear terms.
Don’t assume your audience knows what to do without telling them.
Use quality audio
Your live stream video’s audio should be great. Bad audio will only hamper the efforts you’ve put into your live stream video. If your audience can’t hear you clearly, they will get discouraged from continuing live streaming and leave your social media page.
To make this work, you can get a microphone to keep your audio loud and clear during your live engagement with your audience.
6 Core benefits of live engagement
Many digital marketers and businesses today use engagement because of the immense benefits it offers in helping them reach their digital marketing goals. Below are the six major effects that live engagement would bring to your business.
1. Direct engagement
Your customers want to get more personal with you online, they want to have an in-store experience, and live streaming is the best way to make that happen.
With live streams, you can directly and personally interact with your audience, which gives them the impression that they are having a face-to-face interaction with you.
The direct engagement you get from live stream videos has a tremendous impact on your business. Below is one major benefit of getting direct engagement from your audience.
Quick interaction
Live engagements help you interact with your audience in real-time.
Instead of waiting long hours to get them to respond to your DMs and emails, you can get instant responses from your audience through live engagement.
More so, your audience can also get answers to their questions in real-time.
Instead of responding to a bulk of emails and messages, you can give your audience answers to the questions they need on time, speeding up the sales process.
Because your audience responds quickly to live stream videos, live engagement is the most effective platform to advertise your new products and services, discuss promotional offers and get quick reactions.
With live stream videos, you can get your audience to view your content when you need them to view it, which increases their content consumption rate.
2. It helps you repurpose your content
Repurposing your content means re-using all the parts of the existing content you have to increase its reach. To repurpose your content, you change its format and the target audience to get the result you need.
For example, changing video content to text for users who prefer to read their content on the go or while relaxing. You can also repurpose live stream content.
You can easily convert your live stream videos into different forms, such as infographics, blogs, or YouTube videos, to serve other purposes.
See some of the different benefits of repurposing your live stream videos.
Get your content across different audience
Repurposing your live stream videos into other content forms like blogs, Youtube videos, or social media posts helps you get your content across to other audiences on other platforms.
The main idea of this is to expand the reach of your content to people who were not available during your live engagements.
Maximize your effort
Repurposing your live stream videos increases your content results because you can spread your content across several platforms and reach more people, making the most of the efforts.
3. Boost your conversion rate
Live engagement has a record of increasing the conversion rate in obvious ways.
Live engagement lets you connect with your audience personally, inspiring the trust they need to buy from you.
The direct response live engagement offers makes it easy for you to introduce your product and services in your live events and get your audience to make purchasing decisions in real-time.
More so, because more people tend to stream live videos than other video marketing platforms, there is a higher chance that your content will reach a wider range of people.
All of these factors work hand in hand to help you turn your audience into fast-paying customers.
4. They require less time to produce
If you produce different forms of content across other platforms, including live stream videos, you probably already know live stream videos are the fastest to make.
For experts, it takes about 2 hours to write a 1000-word article, while it takes about 3 to 4 hours to write about a 2,000-word article.
Other contents such as social media posts also take that much time too, depending on the amount of content you want to dish out.
While these forms of content take more time and barely generate high reach and engagement, live stream videos take little to no time to create and give your content high exposure and engagement.
5. They are cost-effective
You don’t have to spend your money to organize a live stream video.
You also don’t need to purchase any equipment; all you need is your smartphone or laptop, access to the internet, and a platform that enables live streaming.
The highlight of this is that while live stream videos are incredibly cheap, they reach a wider range of potential customers, which increases your chance of making more sales.
6. They give you access to valuable data
Live stream videos give you direct updates on your live stream data without the use of tools.
You can easily detect if your content is doing well based on your audience’s quick response in your live stream, which gives you insights on what content to improve on and what content to produce more often.
More so, you can easily figure out the number of people present in your live stream events and know when your audience leaves or are distracted in your live stream video.
This intimates you about what is working and what isn’t so you can re-strategize your content for better results.
Conclusion
Live engagement is the new big thing, and introducing it in your digital marketing plan would boost your sales goals exponentially. With the aid of live engagement platforms like Whisbi, you can effectively dominate the live engagement scene while producing excellent live video content to take your business to the next level.
Business Development Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Media and Digital marketing sector, Passionate about innovation and bringing the future into new business solutions.
