How To Build A Successful Live Video Marketing Plan
The rise of live video over the last year or so has given content marketers a powerful new weapon to add to their armory. To add to venerable email marketing, blogging, social media and static video content, marketing professionals can now add a format that brings a whole new set of benefits. Live video is urgent, interactive and exclusive. It’s also demanding. And while it's effective by itself, it achieves its best results when used as part of an integrated marketing plan.
That plan should have four elements:
1. Audience Building
Hit the "live" button on Facebook, and your audience members will receive a notification telling them that someone they know is broadcasting. That’s even more powerful of an interruption than telemarketing -- it’s a call from someone they know. But only a small share of the audience will be free to participate at that moment, and the larger the number of people who receive that notification, the bigger the actual audience will be.
The first part of a live video marketing plan then is audience building: Line up followers so that when you’re ready to broadcast, you’ll have people watching and participating. There are all sorts of techniques for rapid audience building on social media, but one of the most effective is the strategy followed by YouTube magician Julius Dein. Dein partnered with other pages to share content, forging agreements with larger pages as his own audience grew. He went from zero to 6.5 million followers within a year. Make that growth part of your live video marketing strategy.
2. Brand Definition
What you say on your live video broadcasts will be important, but how you say it will be equally as important. The live video broadcasts created by Benefit Cosmetics are informal, friendly and tongue-in-cheek. The videos produced by Sephora are still casual but they’re more controlled and polite. It's more like a gathering of women who lunch. Both broadcasts closely match their company's brands.
