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Live Streaming for Brands: Engaging Your Audience in Real-Time

A man and a woman setting up various equipment for live streaming in real time

Today, live video streaming has well established itself as a dominant force in online content. As a powerful tool for engaging an audience, its popularity has led to every major social media platform providing the ability to view and produce live video content. Live streaming is an especially powerful tool for brands and businesses. It allows them to engage their audience in real time. We’ll explain some of the basics of live streaming and how your brand can use it to directly engage with its audience.

The Benefits of Live Streaming

One simple benefit of live streaming is that it’s extremely popular. it’s one of the most popular kinds of video content online with 23.7% of time spent on social media platforms dedicated to watching live streams. The other benefit is that live streaming is the best content for directly engaging with your audience. In all live streams, users can chat and react to the content in real time. In turn, the streamers can immediately respond and engage with their active viewers. This makes live streaming extremely personable compared to other kinds of content, and is why it’s also a popular choice for influencers. The result? Live streaming is one of the best ways for your brand to foster personal connections and communicate directly with its followers.

Streaming Platforms

With streaming’s immense popularity, there are many platforms to choose from. However, like any services, there are some clear leaders. 

Social Media Live Streaming 

Considering how fast they deliver and spread content, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the major social media platforms have their own live streaming services. Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and TikTok Live are all great and popular options for your brand’s live streaming. These allow you to stream directly to the audience you’ve already developed on any of those platforms. Plus, it’s easy to start right away. Streams on these platforms usually have simple production values, with streams coming directly from a mobile device.

Twitch and YouTube Live

The two other dominant streaming platforms are Twitch and YouTube Live. They are by far the most popular. Twitch users watched over 210 million hours in just the third quarter of 2022. It originally was designed for streaming video games, which is still the primary content on the platform. However, over the past years, Twitch and its streamers have diversified to now include more broad cooking and “Just Chatting” categories, the latter being by far the most popular. As a true testament to the variety, the BC Marine Mammal Rescue streamed the Vancouver Aquarium’s otter habitat for multiple years there. YouTube Live streaming is newer but has always been as diverse as YouTube’s on-demand content.

A difference for these platforms compared to social media streaming is production value. Twitch and YouTube streams tend to have more complex video and audio setups. Streams are meant to be horizontal video and rarely, if ever, come from mobile devices. Similarly, some brands and companies even just stream out pre-recorded videos or presentations. On the other hand, that complexity also means these platforms come with various tools like creating clips or countless plugins that social media lacks. Overall, these platforms are better suited for brands planning to make streaming a regular part of their content delivery strategy. 

Tips for Live Streaming

The ability to communicate and engage directly with your audience makes live streaming incredibly exciting for brands, but it can also be a little daunting. Here are some of our tips if you’re looking to start:

  • Engage your audience – The strength of streaming is the live component that allows for engagement, so be engaging. Address feedback, answer questions, laugh at jokes, etc. If people see you are engaging back, they will be more motivated to keep engaging with your brand.
  • Choose who and what to engage with – You can’t and shouldn’t engage with everything. If a stream has a large audience there will be a flood of chat messages, and you will have to be selective where you spend your time. Your audience will understand. Unfortunately, some material might be inflammatory or insulting. Ignore it and remove it. Acknowledging it could only fan the flames.
  • Announce and schedule streams – While many do regularly spend time on social media, many won’t be aware of your streams unless they stumble upon them. Announce planned live streams on your social channels so that followers are aware of when it’s going to happen. You can also provide some hints of the stream’s content, such as QA, announcements, a contest, or a giveaway. On dedicated streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, it’s more typical to have a set schedule and announce streams on other social channels.
  • Spice things up with spontaneity – Spontaneous and sudden streams can also have a charm of their own. If they attract enough audience, they keep your following regularly attentive, checking your other content to see if a live stream is happening.
  • Remember you’re live – Live streams have no edits or cuts. Be attentive to what you’re saying and how. Mistakes are fine and part of the charm but keep them innocuous.
  • Choose the right platform – It’s best to stream where you have the biggest following, especially in the case of social media. However, as already mentioned, if you’re looking to make live streams a prominent part of your brand’s content, look towards Twitch or YouTube.
  • Consider streaming on multiple platforms – You may have a substantial audience on more than one platform. Consider streaming on multiple platforms at once. Various other tools and services help with this, such as OBS. Just remember that when you are streaming on multiple platforms, you need to be attentive to engaging that audience in multiple spaces.

Let the Live Streams Flow

Now that you understand some of the benefits, and fundamentals, and have some extra tips in your toolbox, your brand is ready to go live. If you’re looking for more specific advice, need help with live streaming, or are considering making it part of your brand strategy, contact our marketing team at Rosewood Marketing. Their expertise will help you get those streams flowing.

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Why Your Business Should be Using SMS Marketing

A person holding a smart phone receiving SMS marketing

Alongside social media and email, SMS is one of the best marketing tools businesses should be using today. While SMS lacks the visuals of other marketing techniques, it leverages a powerful and wide-reaching network for immediate communication with your customers and audience. That means SMS is one of the most powerful tools for growing your business’ reach and retention. We’ll explain in more detail why your business should be sending your customers texts.

SMS is a Powerful Marketing Channel

SMS or texting is simply one of the best ways to communicate with your customers and clients. Over 5 billion people in the world have mobile phones and another billion at least have access to one. In Canada, over 88% of the population has their own smartphone and over 45% check their phone at least every half-hour. Plus, unlike apps or other communication methods, phone users rarely silent or mute their text notifications. This combination means SMS offers a reliable marketing and communication channel with an incomparable reach.

Customers Like SMS

A powerful communication method means little if people don’t like using it. Thankfully, that’s not the case for SMS. Instead, customers prefer SMS communication to other methods, particularly phone calls. That’s not just for friends and family either. Over 93% of customers want businesses to communicate to them through SMS texts. That preference and the direct contact to users’ phones has incredible results, with SMS messages averaging at staggering 98% open and 45% response rates. This makes it both an extremely efficient and cost-effective marketing channel.

The Convenience of Automatic Updates 

There are numerous platforms for SMS messaging like Klaviyo that include automations. These can be used to update customers about their packages, orders, or appointments. Automatic cart reminders or new product/service announcements through SMS are also perfect for helping to drive sales and foster retention. The immediacy of these updates is convenient for customers and their automation requires little-to-no input from your business to send. SMS updates can be tied directly into your ecommerce platform just like emails. This will easily allow you to send updates on either or even both powerful marketing channels.

Customer Service

Over the past decade of long holds and confusing phone menus, people have developed a distaste for customer service call centers. As a result, chat and text forms of customer service have become their preference. These don’t require customers waiting on hold and can be done at the same time as work or another task. As a result, SMS offers customers more flexibility and they feel their personal schedule is respected. SMS customer service is also beneficial for businesses who can automate simple requests or questions. This allows staff to address more complicated issues more quickly. This is especially useful in SMS, because people and your business can communicate with each other without relying on cellular data.

Getting Feedback

Texting is convenient, which is why we all tend to communicate with our friends and family through SMS. That’s the same reason why SMS is great for businesses to collect feedback from their customers. Simple messages that ask customers to rank a previous product or to answer a poll require only a numerical response, which customers can send in a second. In turn, your business collects valuable customer feedback. The same convenience is also great for getting customer confirmations or any other quick responses.

Perfect for Simple and Direct Communication

SMS is not as versatile as some other marketing channels. It can’t include high resolution images, easy to click buttons, or lengthy text. While that can be a limitation of SMS generally, it’s also a key factor for its marketing success. Its simplicity and concision make it perfect for quick and direct communication that can still impact its audience. Not every message you send customers or audience needs to be lengthy to generate buzz and sales. Ads are also sometimes only a sentence or two, and yet can still generate impressive returnsfor your business.

The Power of SMS is Right at Your Fingertips

You should now have a good sense of why SMS is a powerful marketing tool for any business. It leverages the power of a wide communication network that can be found at nearly everyone’s fingertips. Using SMS will help your business grow its reach while providing customers with convenience. If you’re ready to start incorporating SMS into your digital marketing strategy, looking to optimize your messaging, or want to learn more, be sure to contact our marketing team at Rosewood.

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Colour Accessibility in Web Design: Ensuring Sufficient Contrast

Pantone colour swatches with some that can't be differentiated for those with colour blindness

Accessibility is important for any website’s design. It allows the most possible people to access your business online. A key part of that is ensuring everything in your web design is clearly visible. Along with contrast and size, you also need to consider colour blindness for accessiblility in web design. If a web design doesn’t consider different levels of colour vision, certain elements of the site will become indistinguishable or even invisible. That creates a frustrating experience, and users will leave. We’ll explain why colour blindness matters for web design and some of the best practices for ensuring an accessible contrast on your website.

The Kinds of Colour Blindness or Colour Vision Deficiency

Colour blindness is often used as the general term for all colour vision deficiencies, but there are different kinds. The most common type that affects 8% of all males is “red-green” colour blindness. This is usually either from deuteranomaly or protanomaly and refers to their inability to see reds and greens as vividly. However, there are other less common types of colour blindness to also consider in your web design. There is blue-yellow colour vision deficiency, where blue and yellow are less visible. The other is monochromacy, where someone sees no colour at all and instead views the world in grayscale (black, grey, and white). An ideal web design should be accessible to all of types of colour blindness. 

How Colour Blindness Affects Sight or Visual Acuity

Skipping over the details of the biology, when someone has red-green colour blindness, they see greens and reds less strongly than those with normal colour vision. Most can still tell the difference between a red object and a green one, but each colour will be less vibrant. The difficulty comes in colours that have red and green in them. That is why someone with red-green colour blindness has difficulty differentiating purples from blues. They see less of the purple’s red, turning it blue. This is also something to consider in your web design. For example, if your design includes orange and neon green items next to each other, it will be difficult for someone with red-green colour vision deficiency to differentiate them. This is because they see the yellow in each colour more than the red and green. Depending on the strength of the deficiency, even something yellow will be difficult to pick out from the other two.

How to Accommodate Colour Blindness in Web Design

To be sure that everyone can see everything on your website, you need to be sure that even someone who can’t see colours can still differentiate text, images, or buttons. There are various techniques for colour accessibility, but here are some of the most essential for web design:

Don’t Rely Exclusively on Colour 

One of the staple practices in accessible visual design is to not use colour as the only differentiator. Those with colour deficiencies can still see shapes and other visual markers. For example, hyperlinked text shouldn’t just be blue or another colour. It should also be underlined to be recognizable to any level of colour vision. Bars in a graph with patterns inside along with colours are always distinguishable. This is the same design choice behind coloured tiles in a board game also having certain shapes.

High Contrast Colours 

Use colours that have high contrast to keep them distinguishable. For example, Rosewood’s web design primarily uses white and blue. No matter the kind of colour blindness, these can’t be confused. You can run a basic contrast test between two colours with a tool provided by Web Accessibility in Mind. The plug-in tota11y will check your entire website for various visual accessibility concerns, including contrast.

Keep it Bright 

Colour vision deficiencies have a harder time differentiating darker colours. Using brighter colours will help them stay visually distinguishable. 

Not All Complementary Colours Contrast Equally

Choosing two colours on the opposites of the colour spectrum, such as black and white, can typically provide good contrast. However, that isn’t true for all kinds of vision. Blue and yellow are complementary colours with a high contrast value, but they are less distinguishable to those with blue-yellow colour blindness. That is why blue and orange are often used instead. The red in the orange helps it stand out from the blue.

Using Greyscale 

Designing a site in greyscale (grey, white, and black) will ensure its visible to all colour vision deficiencies. However, your branding may include pops of colour. In this case, various web tools and screen filters built into MacOS and Windows will allow you to look at your site in greyscale. This simulates an extreme monochromatic experience and can help you see whether some colours in your web design might be confusing.

Web Design Everyone Can See

If you have full colour vision, it can be easy to forget not everyone sees the rainbow as vibrant as you. However, accessibility is a critical part of web design used to create a website that accommodates everyone’s abilities. An accessible website creates a welcoming digital space. If you make sure every part of your web design stands out, your business will too. If you want to be sure your web design accommodates different colour vision deficiencies, contact Rosewood’s web design team. They’ll make sure your colours shine.

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