Where Live Video Fits into Your Marketing Strategy

Live video is a hugely powerful marketing tool. It combines visual imagery with a unique form of urgency, two-way communication, and an appearance on popular social media channels. But like any marketing tool, it shouldn’t stand alone. Live video has to be worked into an overall marketing strategy in which different elements support and reinforce each other to build trust and desire, and guide leads to the purchase.

Using live video for your marketing at your launch is crucial.

Brands that release their products with spectacular, eye-catching shows have long used live broadcasts to attract as large an audience as possible. Apple’s product launches fill the company’s own auditorium with journalists but also go out to people watching at home at the same time. When designers like Michael Kors release their new collections, they offer live video feeds from the catwalk.

Smaller brands might have less splashy launches but they can still use live video.

The live video will also support the products immediately afterward. Once the product is out and available, hold an AMA or a live product demonstration. You will already have trailed the launch and generated interest. The live video that follows the launch will give you an opportunity to show the product’s benefits and value instead of only describing them.

Later, you can follow up that product demo with more broadcasts that help customers make the most of the product. Beauty firms like Schwarzkopf, for example, have built large audiences with live tutorials.

One powerful marketing strategy is for a brand to associate itself with a campaign for a good cause.

Starbucks, for example, has long taken part in voter registration drives. That association helps to raise the company’s profile and enables it to support a cause that all its customers, however they vote, should be able to support. When the coffee chain takes part in registration drives or helps to organize events to encourage voter registration, it often broadcasts them live. Viewers get to see a street party—often with celebrities—and they see the company’s logo.

Much of today’s marketing strategy is content marketing.

Businesses issue a steady stream of information to customers that help them to remain informed and educated about a topic they find interesting. Customers get to satisfy their curiosity, and the brand gets to show off its expertise, build trust, and create a connection with its audience.

That content comes in a number of different forms. It might take the form of articles, both original and shared. It could take the form of images or the release of data that reveal trends and the results of experiments. But it can also take the form of interviews with other experts.

A surf shop, for example, might interview a surfer about how they use their boards and find great waves. Those interviews could be published as text on the surf shop’s blog. They could be uploaded as video that’s cut and edited to include the best content and make both the shop and the surfer look their best.

But it could also take the form of a live video. That allows audience members to participate. They could use the comment form to ask questions, like a radio phone-in. The interviewee wouldn’t even need to travel to the company itself.

Businesses like BeLive.tv provide third-party plugins that create split-screen interviews, like in news broadcasts. The interviewer could sit in the office while the interviewee remains at home and talks through their webcam or their phone. It’s a very easy way to add interactive, visual content to a content marketing strategy.

Live video is the only marketing tool that combines immediacy, visual imagery, and interaction. Work it into your marketing strategy and you’ll give your sales efforts a powerful boost.

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