3 Tips for Live Video Steaming for Retailers

Haniya Rae a technology and design writer for Skyword and numerous others created a great guide for live video for retailers.

3 Tips for Adding Live Video to Your Retail Marketing Strategy

Even though live video marketing has become a hot topic, only 14 percent of marketers are actually doing it. More than 50 percent of retail marketers want to push their creative thinking abilities to learn how to add it to their strategy but aren’t quite sure how to start. They saw Lowe’s promote Black Friday deals via Facebook Live with the Property Brothers, a campaign that drew a total of 1.4 million viewers to see what deals the hardware giant had in store. They know that 30 percent of all online activity is spent watching video and that their target audiences use Snapchat and Instagram regularly. Many marketers are wary of that off-the-cuff, not-quite-planned aspect of live video—and for good reason. If something goes wrong, the rep damage could be lasting. But retail marketers want to be able to stream to different platforms based on the product being promoted and their goals. It’s difficult enough as it is to have a strategy around static content that can be edited and pared down, but when it’s in real time, it’s a whole different ballgame. That’s why we’ve put together a list of some things to ask yourself when considering a campaign.

1. What Do You Want to Measure?

Live streaming might grab large audiences, but it can’t yet be used to completely track a customer’s journey through the funnel from beginning to end. With static online advertising, marketers have granular details about who’s looking at the website, where the traffic is coming from, if it’s a repeat visitor, and all the regular analytics that make digital marketing fun. But with live video, it can be difficult to know and track all of these things, especially if it’s traffic that’s not going directly to your website. Ad Age said that streaming platforms can provide some useful numbers, but, as Marketing Dive added, there’s a caveat: social media platforms that are used for streaming may not offer as much data as marketers are used to (though the site does acknowledge YouTube and Facebook’s offerings). Live video is a great tool for gaining awareness, but if your goals are more concrete, the popular platforms may not be the channels for your live video strategy to start on.

2. Should You Have Actors Act, or Employ Employees?

If there’s one thing that social media has taught marketers, it’s that if you try to control the message too much, it can backfire. Audiences love getting a genuine sense of a brand through content that doesn’t feel forced. They want to feel as though they’ve got the “in”—that is to say that they feel included. Pre-scripted video is often unrelatable and boring, and should a performer go off-script, it can easily feel as though a step was missed. Read more here.