How YouTube Live can Benefit Businesses
The concept of live streaming has taken center stage in online promotional strategies for almost all big brands. While the concept of live streams is not entirely new, live streaming as a marketing strategy has been pulled to the limelight from the back channels of obscurity in recent years owing to social media platforms using their existing user base to significantly increase the reach of live videos. One of the major platforms that have attracted thousands and millions of users are YouTube Live.
Marketing on YouTube announced itself to the world after the hugely successful live streams of Felix Baumgartner jumping from space, the landing of NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars, etc. The engagement that you receive from live streams over YouTube is much higher than other forms of live streaming. With proper knowledge of digital marketing, the user base of YouTube channels can be leveraged to produce greater results. With the expansion of the purpose of such media platforms, there is today a shift in the education sector to provide knowledge and key intelligence regarding the traits of online and digital media to students.
India is fast catching up with the first world in this regard, with institutes such as Digital Floats in Hyderabad, which provide comprehensive courses in Digital Marketing avenues. Armed with the knowledge of present technology, talented youngsters can harness the power of the internet for digital marketing, marketing of brands over YouTube and other social media platforms, etc.
Today, a lot of careers in media and entertainment spectrums use YouTube as their launch pad. YouTube marketing has brought talents to the attention of the general populace, helping them find reach and acceptability. The importance of video content marketing in today’s day and age is unanimously agreed upon by experts to be the single greatest contributing factor to online marketing.
Given that YouTube Live reaches out to so many people and brings businesses within reach of their target audiences, here are a few ways in which YouTube Live can help marketing your business. These are simply general objectives, however. The nitty-gritty of online marketing via YouTube constitutes a course in itself.
Ease of Production
One of the most attractive things about going live is the lack of post-processing and effort put into generating video content. In a live stream, everything happens in real time so no real post-production procedures are required. However, planning and setup pre-production remains the key to the success of the live video. The good thing about live streams is that once the video ends, your content is immediately ready. This makes them far more accessible for smaller businesses, independent entrepreneurs and generally non-technical business acumen.
The ease of production further contributes to the volume of video content that a business can reasonably put up. The amount of content that can be generated via live streaming is far more than that generated by conventional methods of video development and production. This means that the use of tools such as YouTube Live is the way forward to keeping users hooked to what your products have to offer. With the number of hours spent on average by people on YouTube going up every year, there is every indication that video content is the most effective manner of engaging potential customers.
Increased Engagement
The aim of a business through online channels would be to get people talking about a particular product or service. This is where features like YouTube Live prove far superior to simple existing video content. When a high number of users are simultaneously watching a live stream and engaging with the happenings in the form of sharing their thoughts via comments, a business is far more likely to generate crucial conversation among users centered on their product.
This sort of engagement cannot be found in the user simply watches an existing video at his or her leisure. YouTube Live offers to development of communities centered on common beliefs, needs, opinions or experiences. The insights that companies and businesses gain from analyzing trends in such communication is the major driving force behind the development of new technologies that pertain to the changing needs of customers.
Real-Time Feedback Channels
In a YouTube Live video, the owner of the channel can directly see the number of people watching, the number of people engaging with the content that is being shown, and the nature of engagement that is happening, all at the same time. This allows them to gauge whether the intended message is actually going out to the public or not.
Such feedback mechanisms help to fine-tune the sort of content that businesses produce based more efficiently on what their audiences and potential customers demand. By monitoring such social conversation, especially in real time, the businesses gain insight into the demands and needs of their customers and they can shape their marketing strategies and online policies of engagement based on these signals that they analyze.
Search Engine Rankings
YouTube as a platform stakes its claim to the best option for accessing live streams for the simple reason that Google owns YouTube. Grabbing eyeballs on YouTube directly translates to ranking higher on Google, which subsequently would lead to your next live video garnering more audiences who have come to know of your channels based on their Google searches. Thus, marketing on YouTube Live is probably the most effective way to gain influence among subscribers and viewers, and expand your business by spreading the word of your products and services.
A hefty chunk of customers to most product-oriented businesses come from direct Google searches, which is why Search Engine Optimization remains such a key utility. Using YouTube Live as a tool for marketing directly helps with Google’s page ranks, especially with the increasing trends of consumption of video content as compared to text or image content.
Exposure
YouTube is international. Videos on YouTube are viewed in over 75 countries across the world. Statistically, about 60% of the viewership that a marketing video generates comes outside the country of origin. This means businesses have a huge scope to reach out to newer audiences and garner more potential clients simply by using a platform that provides them that necessary reach and exposure. For small businesses starting out, YouTube Live can be an especially effective way of ensuring that word of their existence and work spreads to all corners of the world and reaches potential customers.
YouTube marketing for small and medium-scale businesses gives a boost to their reach and serves the purpose of direct engagement without requiring hefty payments and offering a forum for additional profits. For someone building something unique and trying to go viral so as to catch the eye of investors or customers, YouTube Live is the best bet to get their message across in a clear, decisive and yet candid and informal manner. It allows a more personalized interaction between business and consumer that is offered by other forms of engagement.
YouTube Live is an excellent way to represent businesses, both new and old, on a successful online platform and draw increased reach by piggybacking on their existing user database which translates to the subscribers of the concerned channel. Features such as deregulation of content, security policies, privacy enforcement, international reach, suggestion algorithms and the like have been drawing businesses to try out their online marketing on YouTube Live for the last couple of years or so, and have reported positive results emanating out of their investment in online media promotion.
Indian businesses are rapidly replacing their traditional marketing strategies and migrating to online platforms to come up with social media-based, online marketing strategies. India, in fact, is the fastest-growing contributor to video content on YouTube. Digital marketing has emerged as the need of the hour for businesses and projects to gain traction. In response to this need, India is investing in its youth, setting up workshops on the necessary details of online marketing and educating them about the facets of digital strategies through various institutes providing quality services in the field of digital technologies and web-based technologies.
Digital Floats in Hyderabad is one such institute providing quality courses on digital marketing, including courses that deal with how to make the best use of YouTube for online marketing.
Videos are an indispensable part of marketing plans today, and once we understand the sort of direct engagement, real-time monitoring, and feedback, and analytical opportunity that YouTube Live provides, coupled with its existing user base of over a billion profiles, we see YouTube Live comes across as the most effective form for marketing through live streams. However, it is important to note that since live streams are a temporary phenomenon, the surest way to ensure the greatest engagement during that time frame is to plan the pre-event promotions significantly.
Once people are aware of the existence of such an event, they are far more likely to respond favorably when they receive the notification telling them your video is live. The conversion rate from YouTube Live videos is also much greater for a standardized call to action than any other form of interactivity.
