How to Develop a Live Streaming Strategy to Grow Your Business
Video content is more important than ever before for brands looking to catch the attention of potential customers from their competition.
But for brands to really stand out, it’s essential they go beyond the tried-and-true pre-recorded videos. Instead, more marketers are turning toward live streaming to help give their brands an edge with viewers. With a variety of tools at their disposal, 28 percent of marketers surveyed said they planned to invest more time, money, and resources into producing live streaming content in 2020.
With more than a quarter of brands saying they planned to boost their online video content, it’s become more important than ever for brands to take live streaming strategy seriously.
Instead of just taking shots in the dark when creating live video content for your brand, taking the time to think through how that content fits into your larger video content catalog, as well as how you can most strategically use live streaming to reach your business goals, is key to not wasting your time and money.
Why Video is More Important Than Ever
Exponential growth in the consumption of online video means it’s more important than ever for brands to leverage all the tools at their disposal.
Increasingly, users are making video content a key factor in their impressions of and the likelihood they’ll buy from a particular brand.
According to predictions by Cisco, global video traffic will make up about 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2021. That’s a lot of opportunities to build your brand’s audience at all levels of the sales funnel — awareness, consideration, and action.
But whether or not brands use video isn’t just about how much video content they create; it’s also about the quality of the video created.
Putting up a grainy, poor-quality live stream just to say you’ve done it, without any consideration as to how that video fits into the rest of the content your brand creates, can do much more harm than good. High-quality live streaming video — not over-produced content — that serves a clear purpose in your brands overall messaging is going to get many more watches, shares, and reactions than the content you just throw in because you feel you need to.
What is Live Video Marketing?
Live video marketing is a form of content marketing that focuses on the creation, distribution, and promotion of live video content and how that content can support business goals.
Like all marketing efforts, live video marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To be effective, you must have an idea of the types of live content you want to create, when and how you’ll distribute them and how those pieces of content fit into your overall marketing strategy.
Why a Content Strategy is Important for Video Marketing
An effective content strategy includes all channels you use to market your products and services.
Marketing a business online requires a careful, data-driven strategy when it comes to the content you create and use to promote your brand.
Without a strategy for your video marketing, you will expend a great deal of time, energy, and money producing content that your viewers may never watch or that actually do more harm to your efforts than good.
Think of your video marketing content strategy like the map you take on a road trip: You have clear start and endpoints, and you create a guide for how to get there, but you’re also flexible enough to adapt your itinerary as the mood arises.
Your business’s video marketing content strategy is what you’ll use to get you from your starting point — where your business is now — to your final destination — where you want your business to be in the future.
Each step of your video content marketing strategy is a waypoint along that journey, as you create and release a new video. But, your strategy has to be flexible enough that you can adapt it, adding, deleting, and moving video plans around, as the need arises.
What is a Live Streaming Strategy?
A live streaming strategy is the portion of your video content marketing strategy where you create the roadmap for your business’s live streamed content.
How to Create a Live Streaming Strategy
Your brand’s live streaming strategy must include the content to create, when to create it and how it should be distributed.
The way your live streaming strategy begins is with the end: Determine where you want your video content to take your business, and how you’ll measure your success at reaching that goal.
Perhaps you want your online courses to have more paid students. Or, you’d like to bring in more weekly viewers to your worship service, and you’ll measure that by the number of people who watch your live streaming Sunday service. Maybe, you want to increase the number of people who sign up for a consultation appointment to discuss your business’s high-end software product.
Once you understand the goals you have for your live streaming strategy, you need to create the overall plan for the videos you’ll create, when you will create them and how you will distribute and promote that content.
This strategy should include longer, more planned pieces of live streamed content such as live events, conferences, and podcasts, as well as shorter pieces such as contest draws, interviews, and other content. Each piece of content also needs plans for who will create it, how it will be promoted, whether it will be recorded for later on-demand streaming, and how the stream’s success will be measured.
When crafting your live streaming strategy, it’s important to remember that you need to create content that reaches people at all stages of the buyer’s journey for maximum effect.
For those who don’t already know much about what you have to offer, content that introduces your brand and what you do is crucial to your strategy. Viewers in the consideration phase who may know your brand or know the solution you provide need help understanding why they should choose you, so content that answers key questions, shows off your brand personality, and highlights the differences between your company and your competition. And for those who are in the process of making a final decision, sales-oriented content and content that shows them exactly what they can expect from working with you is key.
No matter how intense or bare-bones your overall live streaming strategy is, the key is to keep your overarching business goals in mind. As long as the content you create helps move you toward those goals, you can’t go too wrong.
Public vs. Professional Live Streaming Tools: Which Is Better?
Brands can use publicly available live streaming tools or professional platforms to distribute their live streamed content.
Because live streaming has become a much more popular method of content distribution, there are a variety of tools available to content creators.
These tools fall into two categories: public and professional.
Each type of live streaming platform comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, and the method you choose to distribute your content may vary even depending on the type of content you’re streaming.
Public Live Streaming Platforms
Publicly available live streaming platforms, including IGTV and Facebook Live (for shorter content pieces) and YouTube and Twitch (for longer live streams), are widely used by brands and individual creators across the globe.
These tools are generally easy to use, with very low learning curves. This makes them attractive to users who are new to live streaming.
However, what these types of platforms offer in ease of use and low cost, they lack in overall control of the content.
When a user uploads a video to Twitch, for example, that content no longer belongs to that user. Instead, it belongs to the platform.
That means the platform and its algorithms determine how that content is promoted, how it is monetized, and even whether or not it is accessible after certain periods of time.
When you include live streaming as part of your overall business growth plan, being able to control the content you share, as well as how you make money from that content, is important. Giving up control to another company means you miss out on something in the exchange.
These public platforms are best suited for:
- Businesses that don’t have any budget to give to live streaming
- Creators who only want to make short videos that don’t require a lot of bandwidth
- Companies that aren’t concerned with preserving their video content for future release
Professional Live Streaming Platforms
Professional live streaming platforms allow brands to stream content as it is created as well as record and distribute it down the road.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are professional live streaming platforms.
These platforms can range from easy to use and simplistic to feature-rich and complicated, and everything in between. They also cost money to purchase or gain access to, making them less accessible to small creators and startups than the public tools.
Professional live streaming platforms offer more bandwidth than many of the public options, allowing for longer live streams suitable for creators who want to stream events and lectures. Additionally, many professional platforms provide the option of recording a live stream, giving you the ability to preserve your live streaming content and offer it to viewers on demand through other means.
Choosing a professional platform that offers white-label capability also means that you retain control over your content and how you make money off it.
If you want to save your content and distribute it on your website, charging money for every view, you can do that with a professional platform. This means that content creators and brands have much more control over how the content they create is used and, ultimately, more control over their business’s success.
Professional streaming platforms are best suited for:
- Brands that have the budget to allot to live streaming and video hosting
- Companies that want extra features and tools to accompany their live streams
- Creators who want to be able to save their streamed video content for later
- Brands that routinely create long-form video content, including educational institutions, places of worship, and live event broadcasts
- Businesses who want control over how their content is stored, viewed, distributed, and monetized
Conclusion
Whether you create long-form or short-form video content, having a carefully planned live video strategy is essential to meeting your business goals.
With live video streaming on the rise — growing by more than 72 percent from the first quarter of 2018 to the first quarter of 2019 — it’s more important than ever for brands looking to break through to begin looking for ways to make live streaming work for them.
With the creation of a careful, calculated live video marketing strategy, businesses can go from clueless about live streaming to making the exclusivity and excitement of live video work for them. By taking the time to plan a live video marketing strategy, including the types of videos to be created, how they’re to be promoted, the right platform for distribution, and a connection to the brand’s overall business goals, live streaming can help skyrocket your brand.
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