Learn why live streaming is beneficial for your business and why it should be added to your content calendar for 2021 and beyond.

When you’re trying to grow your business, creating a strong social media following is crucial. Social media allows you to engage with your customers where they are, growing those relationships and keeping them excited about your products. But how can you keep things fresh with your social media marketing if all you’re doing is posting text-filled graphics and still photos?

Live streaming can be a great way to build customer trust and show off the best parts of your company.

What Is Live Streaming?

Live streaming is communicating with your audience in real time, for example, going live and broadcasting to your social media platforms simultaneously.

Live streaming can be a great tool to announce new product releases, give facility tours, or conduct Q&A sessions. Use live streaming for tutorials on new products, demonstrate exciting features and updates, or promote upcoming events.

Builds Trust and Reciprocity 

Live streaming can be a powerful and effective tool to build trust with your audience. Once you begin interacting, you can show that you’re a trustworthy company with the expertise needed to tackle problems. But how do you get customers’ attention long enough to begin building that trust?

Though live stream isn’t the same as a personal interaction, it allows your audience to see more of your personality and expertise than traditional text or photo posts. You can engage with them on a more personal level while still reaching a wider number of people. This increased trust could lead potential customers to take the leap and make a purchase.

Stay Top of Mind

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have moved to working and learning from home. We’ve set up offices at home, learned how to navigate video calls, and begun to find new ways to connect from a distance.

A live stream can be a great way to stay connected with your customers from a distance. Seeing a live video creates more of the sense of being in the same room than a pre-recorded video or photo post does. Your customers can feel connected to your business regardless of where they may be.

Keep Customers Engaged 

One of the biggest ongoing struggles of social media marketing is keeping your customers engaged. You can create several social media posts, but if your customers aren’t engaged, you might feel like you’re shouting into a void. Live streams can be an amazing way to keep your customers interested and invested in what’s going on with your company.

Research shows that people are more likely to engage with video posts than either text or video posts. That will give you the chance you need to hook them with your excellent customer service and products and draw them into making a purchase. When you go live, it tells your audience that there is something in that moment that they should be a part of.

Keep a Sense of Excitement  

When marketing your product or service, you want to make your customer feel as though they have been missing out on something great until the moment they receive what you have to offer. Live streams can serve as a great tool for this sales approach as well by putting a real person on camera and showing excitement and urgency.

Curate Your Audience

It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the best things about a live stream is that it helps you to curate your audience for marketing efforts. In order to make your marketing more efficient, you want to make sure you’re only contacting people who have a real interest in your products. Otherwise, you’re spending money with investments that will never see any return.

Because live videos happen on your schedule, not your customers, it automatically curates your customer base. Only those customers who are most invested in you and your services will make the time to attend your live stream. Once you have your curated audience in place, you can speak confidently, knowing you’ve already won the hardest part of the battle by getting their attention.

Create Strong Content 

Maintaining a strong social media campaign is critical for any business looking to grow their bottom line. But you have to make sure you’re putting out high-quality content that provides real value to your customers. You’ll lose followers if you’re putting out fluff content for the purpose of filling a marketing checklist rather than creating quality content.

A live stream campaign can help you create strong content that your customers will value having on their news feeds. These videos give you a chance to show your customers the best of your company – the people and the products in action. This will capture attention and satisfy your customers far more than any reposted inspirational quotation could.

Recycle Content 

Creating quality content on a consistent basis can be a challenge for any marketing team. Even in an active, thriving business, there may not be news to share with your customers every day. But the good news is live streams can provide quality content coming to your customers every day.

You can recycle content from your live stream videos throughout your social media feed. For one thing, this gives you interesting information to discuss without feeling like you’re trying to pull content out of nowhere. And it can entice customers who may have missed out on your previous live streams, motivating them to make it a point to attend your next event.

Looking or a live streaming tool?

Live streaming can be an important marketing tool that allows you to engage with your customers and strengthen those relationships. You can create a sense of urgency and excitement for your new product launches and show off the best parts of your company. You can also create strong content to use across your social media platforms to keep your following and your bottom line growing.

If you’re exploring live streaming tools for your company, we want to invite you to start a free trial of Shoflo Studio, an easy-to-use live streaming tool that allows you to deliver a broadcast-grade production without the required experience.

Click here to get started and see for yourself how simple and beautiful live streaming can be.