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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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Personalizing for Relevance: How AI is Transforming Customer Experiences

Woman with gray hair having a personalized customer experience on her computer thanks to help from AI

We’re continuing to see the many powerful applications for AI. Along with potentially useful creative tools, AI excels at data collection and parsing. Now, we’re seeing that algorithmic power combine with marketing expertise to create a personalized and relevant customer experiences for small businesses. Rosewood will explain what personalization and relevance in marketing are, and how AI is a powerful tool for a marketing team to create personally relevant marketing for any customer or client experiences.

Personalization, Relevancy, and AI in Marketing

Personalization has been a major tool in marketing for over a decade. It emphasizes marketing that communicates personally to the individual members of your audience over broader, more general marketing campaigns that lack a specific target. While this might include one-off custom communications or exchanges, it can also be automated. For example, emails or messages can automatically address receivers by their first names. 

Overall, customers have come to expect personalized experiences that respect their individuality and interests. At least 71% of customers expect a personalized experience, and a greater 76% are frustrated when they don’t have one. Personalization has also demonstrated an average 10-15% revenue lift, which increases to 25% for direct to consumer businesses. These individualized experiences create stronger personal connections, which lead to more customers and clients returning for more purchases and services. This is where small businesses can excel over larger companies that typically provide more generalized customer experiences.

Thanks to AI, more complex and valuable data can be gathered from users to create even more personalized marketing that is relevant to customers’ interests and experiences. This is why relevancy has become an essential marketing criterion alongside personalization. These algorithms and AI automations can consider browsing history, page time, social media data, and more. Marketers can then use this information and tell these programs how to generate product recommendations, personalized notifications, curated packages, communications, and more. These AI help your business understand the true, individual interests of each of your customers so that any marketing that reaches them is relevant.  

Where AI Can Help with Personalization and Relevancy

As we’ve covered before, AI is a general term. It’s recently become the common title for various programs which can learn from data to accomplish more complex tasks. For personalized and relevant marketing, these AI can sift through an overwhelming amount of user information that would take far more time for a human. That’s why AI is a powerful tool for small businesses who usually won’t be able to dedicate a person to poring through this information. Instead, AI is a valuable tool for your marketing team to build effective strategies for relevant marketing campaigns. We’ll go over some of the most effective uses of AI in personalized marketing.

E-Commerce Tracking

When customers are on your website or digital store, AI software can track what they browse and for how long. It will also track any purchases, wishlisting, shares, etc. This tracking isn’t especially new, but more developments in machine learning allow AI to start grouping and interpreting the data. All that behavioral information from many customers, allows an AI to develop customer groups and profiles according to their interests and various other demographics like age and area. These can then be used for a plethora of personalized and relevant marketing strategies.

Relevant Email Marketing

With this detailed profile generation, AI can then begin to automatically message subscribed customers about product recommendations or send communications that are more relevant to their interests. This will still require a human to create and design the message and templates. However, the AI can take over the busy work of adding appropriate products and sending the emails off. 

Your marketing team can also use these AI-generated profiles to analyze your audience and segment your email recipients to start creating emails more relevant to each group’s interests. This will lead to more opens and clicks, since they will better grab your audience’s attention. Again, AI can’t quite handle the creation process itself. Human expertise is still necessary for effective personalized marketing.

Personalized Website Customer Experiences

By tracking their ecommerce behavior, AI incorporated into your site can start to tailor customers’ website experience to be more relevant. Products listed on the front page or recommended to them at other browsing stages can be specified to their personal interests. This keeps them in your store and more likely to purchase, since they will continue to see what is relevant to their interests in your business.

Personalized Chatbots

Customer service is an important part of your daily, individualized marketing, and instant messaging through your website, social media, and SMS has become a fundamental customer service tool. Those messages can also be overwhelming and chatbots can help manage the flood. However, they are also often robotic and simple. Current advances in AI famously happening with Chat-GPT and Google Bard are allowing chat bots to accomplish more complex tasks and communications. They can address the customer by name, and even potentially pull up their profile’s information. They aren’t quite at the level of replacing a human’s social finesse or able to handle more complex inquiries. However, they have made great strides where simple interactions can be accomplished entirely automatically for a pleasant and personalized customer experience.

Don’t Forget About Human Expertise

AI technology is currently surging in its development and it’s still hard to see where it will end up in the coming months and years. It’s already showing it’s a powerful tool for personalized marketing, but don’t let it completely override the human touch of your business either. Ultimately, personalized connections are human ones, and customers want that human connection with your business. Similarly, AI is still limited in its abilities. Analyzing information, writing messages, creating visual content, and more still require human ingenuity and expertise. If you want to talk more about how you can strategize and incorporate AI into your digital marketing, ecommerce, or web design, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing.

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