Live video is a powerful, emerging marketing tool. Daniel Littlepage explains how businesses can plan and create engaging, high quality and measurable live video content.

Video is now the fastest growing content category on mobile devices, making live streaming video across social platforms a powerful marketing tool. According to Forrester research, live video receives three times more engagement than pre-recorded video, which means marketers need to understand how to leverage its power.

Live video gives brands the power to engage with their audience in a way that’s immediate, unscripted and highly authentic.

While some marketers are using video in their campaigns, they’ve traditionally been pre-recorded and available on-demand. With real-time streaming comes a whole new opportunity to engage with audiences in a more human way. Brands also stand to benefit from the increase in user generated content across Facebook and Instagram as fans start to broadcast their experiences through video.

 

What is live video?

Live video is captured on smartphones, tablets or professional cameras and streamed real-time to the internet, for viewing in mobile apps or on the web. Facebook Live is one example. The feature streams video captured using the Facebook mobile app to users’ followers in real time, similar to Instagram’s livestream broadcasting.

For more secure streaming for both internal/external teams the likes of Ustream, Viostream, and Brightcove are solid options.

 

How to leverage live video in your marketing campaigns

Brands and content creators are starting to understand the types of video content that perform best on different platforms, and therefore can do a better job at engaging the right customers for their products and services. Brands are starting to apply live video on social platforms to announce new products, the open new stores and cover events linked to celebrities – instead of posting photos or traditional text.

You can also train your social media team to to answer customer questions and engage in dialogue with fans through live video. This will make your brand appear more authentic, open and accessible. A very entertaining example of this is ‘Bodyform Responds: The Truth.’

How businesses can use live video internally

If your organisation is conducting events such as off sites, product launches and annual sales conferences, there are opportunities to maximise return by live streaming some or all of these events to those who can’t attend or are in remote locations, ensuring consistency of message.

 

What about quality?

Businesses may be tempted to rule live streaming out due to lack of quality; but don’t be fooled into thinking that live streaming consists of the internal marketing coordinator filming on their iPhone 7.

Broadcast quality live streaming is possible across most platforms, and can be accomplished by working with a professional production partner. Working with a production team will ensure quality audio and vision, using the appropriate equipment, and can assist with adding live graphics such as titles and logos.

 

How to present video metrics

The way engagement with video on social media has been contested recently, it’s important that marketers tie the return on investment to actual business results. It’s less critical how many views a single video gets compared to how many powerful conversions were made to drive traffic to your website, ecommerce store or physical location.

Video engagement is a much more powerful metric than video views.

Engagement refers to the length of time a viewer remains with your content. There’s a natural drop-off that occurs but engaged viewers will stay to the end. Generally, your call to action will be at or towards the end of your video, so if viewers aren’t making it to the end of your content they are missing this critical instruction or next step.

By monitoring engagement you can begin to make decisions about future content, for example adjusting the length if viewers aren’t making it all the way to the end of your video, or positioning calls to action and key information up front.

And don’t overlook the ROI through SEO. Facebook’s algorithm currently favours Facebook Live video content, while YouTube Live videos show up in search results.

Live video can also be downloaded and then uploaded to YouTube or placed on your website. This can help gain a greater audience when consumers search on Google for topics relating to your brand and services. It’s always worth embedding your own analytics into campaigns so that you can make sure you’re presenting more than social feed and digital metrics to the C-Suite.

If live video isn’t part of your content marketing strategy in 2017, it needs to be. According to Tubular Insights, a massive 300 hours of video are being uploaded every minute on Youtube, and Snapchat and Facebook account for 14 billion video views every day, TechCrunch reported in late 2015.

Cisco predicts that by 2019, 80% of all internet traffic will be video. Brands that prepare a solid video strategy this year will leave those without in their wake.

 

 

Daniel Littlepage is managing director, Australia and New Zealand, at 90 Seconds.
Image copyright: stokkete / 123RF Stock Photo