10 best ways brands are using live streaming videos

A simple yet breakthrough live streaming technology invaded the market in 2016. Platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook are capitalizing on the trend of live streaming, which has taken off at a staggering speed. The industry’s value is expected to reach $184.3 billion by 2027.

Today, live streaming represents a chance to create your own live media show that will grow and spread interest in your brand or company. This marketing area is not yet overcrowded and employs evergreen technology: video. The level of engagement and interaction it offers is unprecedented. Live streaming is quickly taken up by high-competition-industry companies hoping to get ahead of the crowd.

In this article, we’ve broken down ten simple ways to use live streaming for business. If you are already incorporating video marketing into your strategy, it only makes sense to jump on the live streaming trend.

1. Live Interviews

If you advertise live interviews well in advance, create buzz around the event, and host an interview with a big name in your industry, you’ll surely raise awareness about your brand and draw more viewers to your social media and website.

Benefits for business:

✅ Boosts interaction. Any live interview can be enhanced by questions from the audience in the comment section of the live broadcast.

✅ Stackable. You can add an additional feature to a live interview, like a flash sale. This move may yield a load of conversions due to the fear of missing out and the sense of urgency.

✅ Expands exposure. Thanks to content distribution platforms, like Restream, you can multiply the extensive result even more by multistreaming the interview.

Here’s a great way British chef Jamie Oliver continued to advertise his new cookbook, Veg,  by live streaming recipes from it.

2. Live Q&A

“Ask me anything,” “A fireside chat,” “Q&A:” whatever you call it, this type of video stream needs only a small studio, a camera, and preferably an experienced host. Invite your company’s CEO or a host who is able to salvage an interview if anything goes wrong, such as a boring or aggressive guest. Live Q&A sessions work well for any brand in any industry.

Benefits for business:

✅ An effective tactic to generate leads

✅ An incredible engagement booster

✅ Helps a brand create tighter connections with their audience

✅ Great way to share your expertise on a subject

✅ Helps sell, educate, and entertain all at the same time

Here is a Linkedin Live session with Meagan Tanner, head of Google My Business Strategic Partnerships. Meagan covered a set of topics, the major one being “How to stand out using the Google My Business listing description.” She also answered the most popular questions from the audience during the session. The video ended up with 260K views.

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3. Live Product Promotions/Tutorials

A filmed product demo can overcome any other kind of product promotion video. It is a good fit for seasonal product launch marketing campaigns, as well as exclusive deals and specials.

Benefits for business:

✅ Live streaming is quite easy to arrange. Live video of a product in use will increase the traffic to all goods/services overall. Thanks to platforms like Restream, distribution and multistreaming to a number of platforms is only a couple clicks away.

✅ Live streaming increases sales conversions. It is quite easy to include a special offer in a live streaming event. This way viewers will be able to watch and act on the emotion right away.

✅ Live streaming provides reusable video material. Who said you can’t post the recording on social media? Do so and more people who have missed this one will look forward to the next one and subscribe.

Martha Stewart sets a very handy example of using live streaming to promote a seasonal collection. She went live with her right-hand man, Kevin Sharkey, and presented a tutorial of a Christmas wreath that used items from the Martha Stewart Living Home Depot Holiday Collection.

4. Live Product Launch

Launching a product using live streaming is an incredible way to streamline your sales instantly. So many brands have done it right: Google, Apple, Honda. Not only does this technique attract attention to the event, the brand, and the product, it is also able to convert buyers like crazy.

Benefits for business:

✅ Can be easily turned into (or reinforced with) several other marketing formats, like a flash sale, a brand awareness event, or a product demo

✅ The footage can serve further by being repurposed

✅ Builds viewers’ engagement through the power of real-time video

✅ Works for smaller brands’ live streaming strategies as an awareness booster

This was how Fenty Beauty launched their makeup line. The brand’s biggest asset, its co-owner Rihanna, hosted the event, which made perfect sense. It also garnered a million more attendees than it would otherwise. The soiree included makeup master classes, interviews, crowds of press, flashy LED screens, and loud music. Fenty’s online store launch was announced at the end of the evening. According to Forbes, Fenty Beauty accumulated $570 million in revenue through just 15 months of operation.

5. Live Behind the Scenes

Behind-the-scenes videos are known to draw a much larger audience than any other brand-related content. This type of video will boost your traffic, provide a much deeper level of engagement, and demonstrate the lives of the real people behind a brand name and a logo.

Benefits for business:

✅ An audience-growing tool

✅ Very interactive strategy; builds community around the brand

✅ Chance to showcase the team behind the project

✅ Gives a “human face” to the brand on the screen

Andrew Rea, a filmmaker who recreates recipes from TV, movies, and video games, launched the Binging with Babish YouTube cooking channel back in 2016. . Over 6 million subscribers watched his live Behind the Scenes. Andrew and his team demonstrated a perfect combination of audience growth tactics, brand awareness growing, and one’s own brand building along with some fundraising. It’s always satisfying to see someone doing what they love for work. Way to go, Babish.

Read later: How to stream to Facebook and YouTube at the same time 📍

6. Live Product Showcase

By choosing to create a live product or service demonstration, you’re in for the most cost-effective way to boost sales. A live demo of a new product or a service colorfully depicts it, literally priming customers for purchase.

Benefits for business:

✅ Easy to complete — money-saving and straightforward, a live demo will take a single shooting set to accomplish.

✅ Conversion-boosting — the fear of missing out will work to boost product sales.

✅ Can be supplemented by product trials, brand announcements, and giveaways

Check out how the vertical-folding Motorola Razr is presented on the CNET stage by Doug Marceau.

7. An educational event

Virtual training and educational speeches are very “in” right now. Larger brands are feeding off the fashionable desire to learn. By gathering a branded educational event, you can potentially bring together a much larger audience.

Benefits for business:

✅ Can fit almost any type of advertisement, demo, or presentation with educational content

✅ Potentially garners a more diverse demographic than a common branded event

✅ Draws larger media attention

Keynotes from CEO Satya Nadella at a Microsoft Inspire event have brought thousands of viewers to Microsoft’s YouTube channel.

8. Live stream an offline event

They say that, despite invading the market in 2015, live streaming marketing is not yet being utilized at its most — especially in connection with physical conferences and symposia. The likely cause is that this business niche often turns around ticket sales by engaging its online users to come next time a summit takes place.

Benefits for business:

✅ Transfers a physical event to a virtual location

✅ Enables monetization of the demographics that were not previously covered

✅ Builds buzz around the event

✅ Grows a community thanks to all the interaction, comments, and shares on social media

Vidsummit authorities executed a brilliant yet simple idea of selling virtual tickets to their annual event. Watch behind-the-scenes footage of what you’ve missed at the VidSummit Conference 2019.

9. Live competition broadcast

Some companies send a lot of their cash to their audience, all for the sake of drawing bigger audiences later. Does not make sense? Well, it does to many companies. By putting on a competition or contest live, not only are they getting crazy amounts of traffic during the show, but also quite a bit of buzz after!

Benefits for business:

✅ Raise awareness about the brand

✅ Pump up the views

✅ Gain new customers and re-engage the old

✅ Cool way to promote a new product or a service

An example of this strategy well-applied would be Cool Radio cashing out on their 30-year anniversary. The contest is “Cash Call” and is held on a regular basis. They announce the Cash Call amount in the beginning of a day and then randomly pick a listener who entered. If the listener knows the exact amount that is being payed out, he or she gets the total sum in cash.

10. Influencer takeover

Influencer marketing has been a tried and true strategy ingredient for almost a decade. But here is how a creative idea changes up the whole way the brand is perceived. A new take on influencer marketing has proven to draw large spectator crowds and loads of media attention to the outstanding expedition.

Benefits for business:

✅ Brand can save some resources by hiring an influencer for the job

✅ Engagement-driven interactions with a real person instead of a brand

✅ Boosted live stream thanks to the influencer’s subscribers

✅ Influencers can benefit from the collaboration by gaining more viewers and subscribers.

Royal Caribbean hired several “high on life” young influencers from all over the globe to join their #ComeSeekLive campaign and stream live video from every place they traveled.

Final thoughts

If you choose to follow these streaming examples and expand the impact of your broadcast, use Restream as your multistreaming platform and get the following benefits:

• The capacity to live stream to multiple social channels
• No limits whatsoever on bitrate, stream duration, resolution, or number of viewers
• Stream backup without fail
• Real-time management of your channel
• Analytics, and much more!

Multiply your views and engagement

Reach a wider audience by streaming to multiple platforms simultaneously.

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Live streaming offers multiple opportunities for businesses in practically any field. We’ve gone over several amazing ways to make yourself heard in the world of live streaming video. Influencer live streams, interviews, product demos, competition broadcasts, offline events: all of these broadcasted to a number of platforms can create a superb visibility for your business.