If you aren’t leveraging the power of videos to promote your business or to simply engage your customers, it’s time to catch up. By 2021, the overall web traffic will be dominated by videos consisting of 82% of total traffic. If you are yet to build a digital-first business, you must create a solid foundation with tools that have been around before branching out into new heights. A perfect place to start is live streaming. The convergence of advanced technologies is making live streaming available to anyone with a mobile device.
Live streaming is broadcasting of real-time live videos to your users over the internet. You can live broadcast anything you like across the globe. All thanks to social media live streaming tools like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, and Instagram Live for making it easy for anyone to broadcast live videos. Live videos offer a better approach for businesses to communicate with their customers and create trusting relationships with minimum costs.
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Reasons why you must use live streaming
Many businesses are already leveraging the power of live streaming in a wide variety of contexts like live announcements, product launches, etc. Businesses can use live streams to enhance and improve direct communication with users. As useful as livestreaming can be, knowing how to set up live streaming video is also important. If you aren’t familiar with live-streaming technology, it is the easiest and affordable technology if you have the right tools. Integrating live-streaming to your marketing strategies will give you the opportunities to reach and interact with a broad audience across the globe.
Here are just a few more reasons why brands love live streaming services:
1. Fastest growing industry
Livestreaming is one of the popular and fastest-growing technologies. Most social media channels are promoting live videos and besides that, there are platforms built exclusively for live-streaming. The future of live-streaming is bright and it is here to stay. It is a powerful marketing tool that offers real-time and interactive content that is more appealing to your audience.
2. Live video fosters engagement
The content created during a live stream is unique by its very own nature and creates real engagement. The real-time and immediate nature of live broadcasts captures more attention and compels the audience to engage with the content. Streaming live creates opportunities for you and your viewers to discuss and share opinions instantly. This real-time connection helps to build personal relationships.
3. Raise brand awareness
Businesses can utilize live streaming to publicize your brand message. What makes live videos different from other forms of content is its rich nature. Live streams present more opportunities to experiment with different video formats whether it is short announcements or big events. A business that integrates live-streaming into its marketing strategy becomes more approachable and successful in improving brand awareness.
4. Help to understand the interests of your audience
Live-streaming is a great experimentation ground. It helps you to understand what your audience’s interests are. For instance, some live streams perform better than others. Experimenting with different types of live shows will help you understand what your audience likes and what they don’t like. During live broadcasts, you can get instant feedback and honest opinions about your services.
5. Easier to create than on-demand videos
When compared with on-demand videos that are pre-produced, live videos are much easier to create. You just need a smartphone, a social media account, and a broadband connection to broadcast live videos. If you are looking for how to set up live streaming video on a budget, you can look for solutions that offer cost-effective professional set up. Once the live broadcast is finished, you can repurpose the videos to use it in the future, which makes it more cost-efficient.
Live streaming for different business niches
Streaming can be applied to businesses in any industry. Besides marketing, live videos have become an additional tool for various business fields. To start with, you can utilize social media live streaming tools to use the lucrative opportunities provided by live videos to grow your videos. However, if these social media tools are not meeting all the demands of your business, you can consider how to build a live video streaming website as well. Here are some of the business fields where livestreaming can be applied.
1. Healthcare
Healthcare is one of the industries that has witnessed several significant technical advancements recently. Now the industry is brimming with opportunities to improve the communication with patients and caregivers along with modernizing knowledge sharing, training activities, and collaboration among team members.
Here is how livestreaming is used in the healthcare industry.
- Conduct staff training
Medical practitioners need constant training to stay connected with the latest technological advancements in the industry. A live stream is a powerful medium to enable interactive learning that supports better accessibility for self-learning from remote locations. Furthermore, live video streaming removes the cost associated with it as well as inefficiencies in timing associated with remote training.
- Mass communication
Live streaming in the medical industry has become a quick and effective tool for mass communication. It is effective for executive messages and announcements to be presented along with any supporting documents. Analytics in live streaming tools can also be used to track the acknowledgment and engagement of users.
- Live-streaming surgical procedures
Some medical institutions encourage streaming surgical procedures for promoting highly engaged learning in real-time. All live videos can be recorded and saved for offline viewing later.
- Stream health webinars
Medical professionals can leverage the power of live streaming to conduct interactive health webinars to patients to talk about health education and measures for treatment. Despite the difference in geographies, both doctors and patients can create an immediate real-time connection while discussing important things.
2. Finance
Financial organizations are constantly striving to deliver the best customer service to their customers to reduce churn rate and increase brand loyalty. And, to achieve this, there is no better tool than livestreaming. Live streams not only helps in building confidence among users, but it also allows your company to connect your customers with your customer service department in real-time.
Here are some of the benefits live streaming offers to the financial industry.
- Virtual training
Finance is again another ever-evolving industry where the professionals need to keep up with the emerging strategies and other advancements. A live stream is extremely beneficial when it comes to keeping resources updated through virtual training.
- Online consultation
Live streaming consultations give customers a wider choice of a good financial professional for attaining knowledge on various aspects. Any consultation regarding financial issues can be directly discussed through live streaming.
- Customer service
Among all the applications of live streaming in the finance industry, the most significant one is customer service. Considering the diverse nature of the sector, the customers need to have great support from the team. For customer service, live streaming proves to be of immense value. Not just in delivering customer services to students, customer service training can also be delivered through live streaming to prevent any customer service issues.
3. Education
Live streaming for the education industry keeps getting better. Live broadcast helps students maximize their learning opportunities and teachers to increase their productivity. The ever-growing potential of livestreaming for the industry is evident with the emergence of eLearning platforms like Udemy.
Let’s look into how the education industry utilizes live-streaming.
- Reaching a diverse learner base
With live streaming, any educational institution or freelance educators can reach a diverse learner base. While physical classrooms have limitations in terms of accommodating students in a classroom, the virtual classroom doesn’t have any limitations on the number of students.
- Real-time interactive experience
The major advantage of the live stream is that it delivers live interactive experiences to students. Live streaming platforms come with advanced tools to deliver an interactive learning experience for students about each learning concept.
- Record the lectures
Live streaming allows teachers to record their lectures and use it for the future. Moreover, they can also use these videos on other platforms like YouTube as an acknowledgment of their work and for better monetization opportunities.
- Analytics
Another benefit of a live stream in the education sector is the availability of powerful analytics. Online teachers can track the performance of their classes to determine whether their teaching activities are working or not. If you are looking for how to build a streaming website, you can look for solutions that integrate powerful analytics and reporting tools.
4. Real Estate
Real estate is another industry that benefits from advancements in live stream technology. Real estate agents can use live videos to demonstrate their properties with no need for the customers to be present at the location.
Here are some of the ways how the real estate industry can benefit from live streaming.
- Facilitate virtual property visits
Use live stream to walk your customers through real estate properties to create virtual open property visits where people can view the real estate if they are not able to make it in person to the location. During the visit, add a commentary to add more value to your live videos.
- Live stream auctions
Live auctions are very exciting to view. So why not broadcast it live as it happens. You can appoint a team to shoot the live video for you if you are busy during the event.
- Discuss the property market with your customers
Conduct a live broadcast with a local broker or a specialist who can give insights about the industry to your customers. Tag the specialist as well to tap into their user base as well.
- Showcase a home stager
If you are preparing to sell a home, broadcast live to give your customers tips on home staging. Ask a professional home stager to give your viewers valuable information on maximizing the potential of a given property.
5. Retail
Due to the rising popularity of live videos, the retail industry can use it for marketing and increase sales. To take it to the next level, you can allow your customers to buy your products and services during the live stream.
- Shopping through live videos
Most of the customers prefer to shop online due to the ease of the process and accessibility. Brands are taking advantage of this trend and integrating shopping to live stream as well to make selling effortless. The newest trend in this area is the touchable video where retailers allow users to tap on products mentioned in live videos and to purchase the featured products.
Logistics
In the logistics industry, customers will be interested in receiving their delivery safe and one time. Live streaming allows delivering this goal effectively. You can place a camera in the warehouse or the vehicle’s luggage area so that your customers can watch it live. You can also utilize live videos to get in touch with the drive of the delivery vehicle or the delivery executive to get in touch with customers in case of any accidents.
Conclusion
Streaming live is not just beneficial to grow your business, but also to emerge your business as a brand that cares for its customers. It allows you to get to know your customers better and create a close connection with them. Before starting out, you need to build your online presence and audience base, because if your audience cannot find you, they won’t be able to participate and interact with your videos. When you are just starting with live broadcasts, you can use social media live streaming tools. However, if you want to take it to a professional level, you must consider how to build a live-streaming website.
Live streaming can be effectively used in various business fields to promote your brands and directly engage with your audience. Regardless of the way you choose to live stream, you need to choose the best solution that allows you to access the essential features and monetization options to succeed.
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Thanks for the nice review of live streaming benefits. I learn some great business ideas about live streaming here. I’m really impressed with your clear guideline. I will try to use it on my next project.
Thank you for sharing! This is a great article everyone must read and know.