If you believe a picture is worth a thousand words, live streaming is probably worth substantially more. Content creation has been the bedrock of digital marketing for the past few years, but recently text and image content has made way for video.

This is a direct result of the widespread adoption of social media platforms and the proliferation of cheaper and faster broadband across the world. Streaming giants like Netflix and YouTube have built multi-billion-dollar businesses on this recent mega-trend.

Source: Imgur

The cutting-edge of this sector of the digital marketing space is live streaming video. Social platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have all adopted live-streaming features because the engagement and conversion rates are higher. Turns out more people tune in and interact with a video when it’s being shot live rather than stored on the internet permanently. Now, small and medium-sized enterprises are finally getting involved to leverage online streaming and video content to reach out to more customers.

Benefits of live streaming

Source: Imgur

According to marketing expert Neil Patel, online live streaming is expanding rapidly enough to warrant attention from businesses of all sizes. This industry is expected to be worth $70 billion by 2021.

Meanwhile, the total number of live streamers and the monetary tips they receive from their expanding global audience is growing just as rapidly.

According to Streamlabs, streamer growth was triple digit percentages for all platforms in 2017. Twitch and YouTube were the dominant platforms, but Facebook and Instagram weren’t too far behind.

At this stage, most streamers are gamers but social media influencers and small businesses are quickly adopting these tools as well. The reason is a higher than average conversion and engagement ratio. Brands and influencers get way more exposure from a live stream than from a regular content.

According to Vimeo, more than 80 per cent of users prefer a live streamed video from a brand and more than B2B businesses reported positive return on investment (ROI) after live streaming on social platforms.

Here are some critical tools businesses are using to leverage this marketing trend:

Social Live Stream: automation

Messenger Appeal’s Social Live Stream is a relatively new piece of software that allows businesses to automate and manage their live streams across multiple channels.

Marketing professionals will tell you that while live streaming is a great way to boost engagement with social media users, poor-quality video or badly produced content will be counterproductive. Each traditional live-stream requires effort, planning and time.

However, automation tools like Social Live Stream eradicate this barrier. The software basically allows users to upload video and have it live stream on all social media platforms simultaneously. These live casts can be pre-scheduled, automatically launched and uploaded multiple times. In other words, businesses can live stream without having to be live or log into every social media platform. Most importantly users don’t need any technical skills to schedule their live streams.

According to its creators, the software is so effective that some users have had three times the standard engagement on their streaming content simply because the timing was calibrated, and streams were syndicated across all platforms.

Automation tools like this can also have a direct impact on the company’s return on investment by slashing marketing costs and improving sales conversion ratios.

Superdata: measuring RO

Another critical tool in the live streaming marketing arsenal is SuperData Arena. Created by Nielsen-owned analytics firm SuperData, this live-streaming dashboard allows streamers to measure the level of engagement on each video they launch.

The platform tracks and ranks users and channels by the number of hours watched, peak concurrent viewers, content retention, engagement, magnitude, purchase intent, demographics, and total followers across multiple streaming and video platforms. It’s also linked to the company’s influencer index so brands and other companies can reach out to streamers for partnerships.

For small and medium-sized businesses, SuperData’s analytics could be a vital tool for measuring RoI and strategy success across a live-streaming campaign.

Bottom line

Live video is clearly the best way to reach out and engage an audience online. Gamers and social media influencers have been using the built-in tools to market products and content for the past few years. Now businesses can also apply the same tools to reach out to new audiences, seek engagement for new products and gain a competitive marketing advantage over rivals.

According to marketing experts and industry researchers, this section of the digital marketing space is likely to expand rapidly as businesses realise the higher conversion and better engagement metrics of social live streams. There simply is no better way to get a global audience engaged with a brand. In fact, a majority of users say they prefer to interact with and tend to better recall brands that have streamed video live.

Tools like automation software Social Live Stream and data analytics dashboard SuperData can help businesses of all sizes deploy live-streams with greater efficiency and better results.

Adopting these tools and platforms while deploying live video is a crucial part of any cutting-edge digital marketing strategy.

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