With thousands of online events taking place every day, marketing your upcoming live stream is an uphill battle. But it’s worth the effort.
Indeed, over 29% of internet users worldwide watch live streams on a weekly basis. With 26% of marketers including Facebook Live in their video marketing strategy this year, live broadcasts on social media channels are clearly becoming a go-to marketing strategy for brands worldwide.
Local small businesses, ecommerce companies, and tech startups often run social video events to increase brand awareness and even drive sales.
About 52% of senior executives agree that event marketing drives more business value than any other marketing channel. You probably share this opinion if you’ve decided to run a live social video event. But getting people to watch your live streams is one thing — what about having the ability to follow up with them later?
Capturing leads with live streaming events is still an underutilized objective. That’s why you should definitely try it.
In this article, we’ll cover six strategies for marketing your live social video event so you can increase engagement and, most importantly, capture more leads.
1. Create event pages on the social platforms
As soon as you’ve come up with the topic and date of your event, create a page for it on the respective social media channel. Many leading platforms — be it Twitch, LinkedIn, or Facebook — allow you to create and manage a dedicated event page in a few clicks.
Here you can specify the date and time, the topic covered, a landing page link, and any other details about the upcoming streaming. If people click through to your self-hosted landing page, then you can encourage them to register for the event, and there’s your lead capture mechanism. But even if they don’t, by indicating interest on the social platform’s event page, they’ll receive notifications once the event starts.
Tip: It’s recommended that you schedule your live event two weeks in advance to have enough time to promote it and get traction.
Vimeo uses LinkedIn Live to reach wider audiences and generate leads. To watch the live event, users need to register first and specify their contact information, company name and size, location, and their intent. This way, Vimeo not only captures leads but also qualifies them.
2. Post consistently
You won’t get high enough traction with one social post. Share posts about your upcoming event multiple times, across different social media channels — don’t limit your promotional activities to one specific channel.
The weeks and days before the stream will definitely be hectic, so do schedule social media posts in advance with a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. Plan two or three posts for each channel per week to gain maximum traction.
3. Run a paid retargeting campaign
Paid advertising is the fastest way to increase the visibility of your upcoming event. But it’s also an easy way to waste money if you don’t set up your campaigns properly. Running a broad targeting campaign is good for increasing brand awareness, but not for driving micro-conversions like getting people to watch live streams or register as leads.
To ensure you reach the most relevant audience and gain qualified leads, we recommend that you run retargeting ads.
Retargeting is the use of paid ads to reach audiences that have previously interacted with your brand. On many of the leading social platforms, you can set up a retargeting campaign for website visitors or past paid campaign clickers.
If you have already set up a tracking pixel on your website, you should have enough data to create a retargeting campaign for your upcoming live event. It’s also good to segment your audiences based on the pages they’ve interacted with or actions they’ve completed — this way, you’ll be able to craft your ads to fit the preferences of separate audience groups and ensure high engagement.
Some 54% of agencies say that retargeting ads have helped them to increase revenues, and 42% see conversion rate lift thanks to retargeting. By re-engaging with audiences that have already shown interest in your company, you increase the likelihood that these people will sign up for your live streaming and eventually convert.
4. Encourage audiences to register for the event
When should you “gate” content behind a registration wall, and when should you keep it open for all? With live social video, you have the advantage of maximum reach, on platforms where your audience is already spending their time. There’s also no need to ask them for access to their inboxes, which is often a turnoff.
So why would people share their contact information to attend your live social video event? Make it a win-win situation by offering users to register for alerts so they can receive a text or email before you go live.
You can easily accomplish this with vcita’s event management features. The platform allows you not only to plan your event and promote it but also to capture leads and reach them with automated email or SMS sequences – both before and after the event.
Here’s how you can use vcita to make the most of your live social video event:
- Create an event on the preferred social media channel and add it to vcita
- Generate an invitation link to the event, leading to an automatically created but customizable registration page
- Distribute that link across your go-to marketing channels
- Use vcita to set up email or SMS alerts to remind registered users about the upcoming event
- After the event, build an email sequence to nurture warm leads with vcita’s automated campaigns
Tip: To inspire audiences to sign up for your event, you need to make an irresistible offer. Make sure to highlight the value of watching the broadcast — be it exclusive content or special bonuses for registered users.
5. Collaborate with niche influencers
Streaming platforms allow you to co-host your broadcasts with one or more accounts, bringing in tons of opportunities for expanding your reach.
Inviting co-hosts to your live stream is beneficial in many ways. First off, they’ll share the news about the upcoming event across their accounts and bring you new audiences. Moreover, if you go live on Instagram with a co-host, Instagram sends notifications to all of your co-host’s followers when the event starts.
Here’s how Clarks partnered with Instagram influencer Nià The Light to run a live video shopping event and tap into new social audiences. From the Twitter post, you can see the company hasn’t limited its promotion efforts to Instagram.
If you work in B2B and can’t find an independent influencer, you can choose a company to partner with. Just make sure you have audiences in a parallel cluster.
This means that your co-host should be close to your niche, but you shouldn’t offer very similar products or services. For instance, a SaaS company offering email marketing services will benefit more from a partnership with a paid media platform than from a collaboration with a CRM solution.
6. Promote your event on relevant niche communities
Another effective method for promoting a live stream is to share the news across social communities. There are online forums, LinkedIn Groups, Reddit communities, Facebook Groups, Slack communities, Discord servers and other close-knit groups where you can spread the word about your upcoming event.
Just search Google for the communities in your niche if you haven’t found any yet, and you’ll likely discover a ton of places your audience loves to spend their time.
To encourage event signups, SparkToro, the audience research tool has announced a giveaway and distributed the offer across online communities for digital marketers. By offering a giveaway to event attendees, they’re able to maximize registrations.
Ready to generate leads with your live video event?
You can run a broad targeting campaign or spend a couple of thousands to syndicate a press release on Bloomberg, but it doesn’t guarantee you relevant, high-quality leads for your live social event. Instead, follow our tips to reach the right audiences and build a genuine connection with them.
