Most of us had to get comfortable with video fast over the past couple of years. We have collaborated, planned, socialised, and sold online rather than in person. As a result, most of us are better at being on video than we might have been otherwise.

But does your comfort zone extend to going live on social media?

Live streaming on social media can bring a host of benefits to B2B companies. Broadcasting live creates a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and interaction with your brand. Done well, it has the power to humanise and connect in a way that few other mediums can. With just a bit of planning and your phone you can go live, connect with your most engaged prospects, and start building relationships.

With the barrier to entry so low, what’s stopping you from exploring the potential?

Of course, there are challenges. To begin, despite all the Zoom quizzes, not everyone is comfortable speaking live in front of a camera. You also need to think about why you’re exploring this medium, and why your customer should care about the content you’re creating.

In future articles, we’ll be looking in-depth at what is possible on each social platform and how you can make it work for you. We’ll also be giving you some tips and inspiration for developing the skills needed. But for now, let’s look at why you should be considering live video as part of your content strategy.

Why use live streaming for B2B marketing?

“70% of the time we're going to focus on things that we know that are very core to our business. 20% is where we're trying to push the boundaries. You get into the known unknowns. And the last 10% is a true crazy experimental stuff.

Trying to figure out how to do uncomfortable things that we're going to fail at more than we will succeed at. But with every success, you build a competitive advantage.”

- Avinash Kaushik of Google’s marketing department.

Avinash Kaushik has a point. Live streaming has been around for a while, but it might be new - and therefore uncomfortable - for you and your company. However, these statistics from Wyzowl’s The State of Video Marketing 2021 indicate it is worth exploring:

84% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads.
84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
94% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
Marketers have rapidly come to understand the ROI of video - from just 33% who believed they got a positive ROI from video in 2015, the number now sits at 87%.

Video can be an excellent part of your digital marketing, helping you to raise awareness of your brand, engage with your target audience, and get attention to your product or service.

The benefits of B2B Live Video

Here are just some of the benefits of adding live video to your social media marketing:

Brand Building:

Real-time Marketing

You can engage with your customers in real time, getting likes, comments, and shares as you continue with your live stream. This is highly interactive marketing where you can judge your success immediately based on feedback from your viewers, and respond to their needs directly.

You can answer questions, hear what people think about your products or services, see what impression people have of your brand, and get constructive criticism.

This feedback is extremely valuable. It is also priceless information for your marketing and sales departments. Comments can give you insights into your customers and ideas for new content. You can also prepare answers to any questions that come up to create a knowledge base that speaks to your target audience in their own language.

High Engagement

With video, people tend to comment while they are watching. You will also get comments later from viewers watching the replay. This is a valuable source of customer feedback and interaction. It is also extremely important in getting the social platforms’ algorithms to show more of your content, making live video a powerful component of your social media strategy.

Informal and Personable

Video offers your audience another way to get to know your business, and offers the opportunity to be informal, chatty, and humorous in a way that can be difficult in the written word. This helps you to build the know-like-trust factor.

Save your more formal content for another format and take this opportunity to humanise your brand. Relax and enjoy yourself and your audience will too.

Customer experience:

Brand Interaction

With live video, you are allowing your customers to participate with your brand and for huge fans of your brand, this can be extremely exciting. They get to talk to a live person from one of their favourite companies and get closer than they would ever be able to get any other way.

Accessibility

Many people watch videos with the sound off, so brands tend to add captions to get around this and still get their message across. With both video and captions and sound available, your content is available to everyone.

Connect with Different Learning Types

Some people are visual learners, some prefer to learn by taking part, and yet others prefer to read. If you include video streaming in your marketing mix, you’re ensuring that visual learners are covered and can still feel engaged by your brand.

Keep your Customers Informed

The immediacy of live video on social media makes it easy to update your customers and share information. You might want to share news on product updates or new features, or run a teaser campaign of lives if you have a big online event coming up.

As long as you’ve planned what you want to say on your live video and how you will handle feedback, this can be helpful even if you have bad news to share. While no-one likes bad news, getting out in front of it as soon as you can builds trust and shows you care about your customers. Not only does this let your current customers know what they can expect, but it also creates an excellent impression in the minds of potential customers.

Maximising Content:

Repurposed Content

The benefit of going live doesn’t end once you've hit the stop button. By repurposing one live video, you can create more engaging social media posts, blog posts, and audio files, and research content for courses, articles, white papers, case studies, and more.

Social platforms post a recording of the session to your profile so that people can catch up after the live. You can also download the video to repost on other social platforms and your YouTube channel.

You could perhaps create a blog post around it, embedding the video from YouTube and inviting people to follow you on social media to stay up to date. Finally, we all know how the social algorithms love video. You could mine each live for shareable and quotable moments to create bite-size videos for individual social media posts.

Boost your SEO

The major search engines all have a Videos tab where searchers can find nothing but video content. YouTube is also the world’s second largest search engine. If you’re regularly creating videos and building a presence on YouTube by going live, this is an extra place where your business can be found in the search results.

Low Cost of Entry

You don’t need top of the range video cameras, expensive lighting rigs, professional backdrops and sound recording equipment to go live on social media.

If your brand is highly professional, high-end, and top quality, you may not feel comfortable simply using your phone or a webcam, but it’s so often about personality over tech that you might be surprised. It’s worth testing out what you can achieve with some basic ring light and microphone before splashing the cash.

How to Use Live Video on Social Media

So, you’re convinced that live streaming has potential. But what should you do with it? What do you talk about?

We’ve put together a list of just some ideas for you. This is by no means exhaustive, and not every idea will be suitable for your company, but you should be able to find a few ideas that can get you started.

From there, get creative and try not to overthink things. After all, Buzzfeed went viral with a 45 minute livestream of two employees trying to explode a watermelon using rubber bands.

Remember that the real strength of live video is the potential for interaction with your customer. Whatever formats you choose, create opportunities for your audience to engage. Ask questions and prompt them to feedback and react.

Not only is live video excellent for engagement, but you can learn so much about your customers and what they want from using it. This could be something as simple as asking where they are from or what their role in their company is. You could ask them what the main challenge is in their job or around the topic you’re exploring.

Tutorials

People love how-to videos. They can learn how to use your product or service, or improve their understanding of it. Help your customers to become more efficient, and gain expertise. From their point of view, you are giving them incredibly valuable content, especially if your tutorials solve a problem they’ve been having or show them something new they didn’t know the product could do.

Product Demos

While you might not find the idea of demoing your product exciting, it’s useful for customers to be able to see the features of your product and look at how it works. They might be persuaded to buy from seeing a demonstration video, simply because now they know how it can help them.

Customer Feedback

You can use live videos to beta test and do live product development. If you ask for feedback on particular features and ask what customers would like to see, they will tell you. Not only will you find out if what you’re doing is what your customers want, they could give you ideas for new features, and vote on what your team should be prioritising.

Coming Soon

People love to feel like an insider so get your customers involved in your brand by keeping them in the know. Let people know what you have in the pipeline.

Build excitement with a live video on new products and services, or features, that you’re releasing. Tease them with what they can expect and what the benefits are. You can also create a video campaign around any big launches, events, or pieces of content. Even something as mundane as giving advance notice of a change in service levels gives you an opportunity to quickly connect.

Authority Building with Q&As and Panel Discussions

How about getting the CEO to do a Q&A? Perhaps they have high-profile or influential industry contacts with interesting points of view and could host a panel discussion on a hot topic. By partnering with other businesses who aren’t direct competitors, you can get twice the ideas and attention from a borrowed audience.

Either option is a chance to show off your expertise and thought leadership. If you have an idea for a panel discussion that you know people would attend, it could be made to work as a live.

Meet the Team

You could interview members of your team about working with the company, what they do, and why. This is an extremely engaging format. It allows your customers a glimpse behind the scenes and helps them to understand what motivates your team. It can also be a great way to build your employer brand and show potential future employees why they want to work for you.

Behind the Scenes

Another simple format to execute is to take your audience on a tour of the building. You might do a (pre-planned) ‘pop’ into marketing. You could showcase any interesting manufacturing processes or interview a product expert on the shop floor. Let people see where you work and how you work.

Livestream your Events

If you’re going to be a speaker at a networking event or conference, you might be able to live stream your speech. You’ll attract people who are interested in the subject matter, and this is another great way to establish your authority.

While you do have to use video marketing in the right way and do it well, it’s such a strong aspect of marketing for any business that it’s worth getting over any doubts and exploring whether live streaming can work for you.

Who knows, this time next year, it could be your business with a loyal following of engaged fans who look forward to every live event.

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How to Reap the Benefits of Live Video in Your B2B Marketing Strategy