Are you looking for a proven method to boost awareness, increase engagement, and amplify your business's message? 🎯Then consider livestreaming! Whether you’re a passionate-led entrepreneur, a service-based business, a small business, a nonprofit, or an internal communications team, it’s a great way to achieve these goals.
Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse recently sat down with digital marketing professional and experienced livestreamer Anh Nguyen to share insights and best practices about the power of livestreaming.
Growing your Visibility
Anh believes so much in using livestreams to grow your visibility that she runs three different ones: Purpose Amplified, featuring purpose-driven people, ventures, or organizations making an impact in their local and global communities; Shift Happens, celebrating individuals who've made bold career moves and sharing their stories and the inspiration behind the shift; and Brand Craft, showcasing small but mighty marketing teams who make a powerful impact for their respective brands.
For her, livestreaming is strongly connected to storytelling. “That's my theme across the board with all the live streams… sharing stories that hopefully will inspire you,” she says. Originally drawn to journalism, in college she realized that “reporting wasn't really my thing, but I loved sharing stories…. and that was why I was drawn to livestreaming because I was able to have a conversation and share people's stories in real time.”
But she also notes that livestreaming “has to make sense for my business and my brand as well.”
Livestreaming Appeals to Audiences
Anh loves the immediacy and authenticity of livestreaming and believes others do as well. “I just feel like it's more authentic… and I think more people are drawn to that than seeing a produced, recorded video,” she says. “Last year, in 2023, there were 163.4 million live stream viewers [globally]… That number is expected to grow incrementally to 165 million in the next couple of years.”
Adding Your Unique Voice to The Mix
She recommends doing research before launching your own livestream to ensure you’re adding a unique voice and content to the mix. “The other part about starting your live stream is doing that research to see what else is out there, competitive research. We already do that for marketing, right?” she shares.
“There's so many people that have something to give… each and every one of you have a special voice that only you have, and the way that you come at it is only in the way that you do, and there's a universe of people out there… waiting for you to speak,” Kami adds.
Building Your Community With Livestreams
Livestreams are also an excellent way to build community in a way that’s not easily scalable through pure face-to-face interaction.
“If you're talking about a brand, say like a B2B brand, which is what I have been working with mostly, how do you nurture a community with a B2B brand?” asks Anh. “Are you going to take all of your clients out for coffee?”
She says you need to ask yourself, “What can you do to help nurture that community? And that's through your content and through the way you communicate with them, whether it's social media posts, whether it's emails, whether it's livestreaming.”
She adds that it’s important to remember to show up consistently. “It takes consistency for people to know that this livestream is there.”
Becoming an Influencer
Livestreaming is also a way to become an influencer, and you don’t even need a large number of followers or a huge community.
“Micro influencers are blooming in popularity much more than the big huge influencers,” says Kami. “I think a lot of people around the room would think, well, I'm just a small little company or a little brand and what's my influence?” But, she adds, “trust in specialized creators, which is a micro influencer – specialized, small, micro – is almost as high as trust in recommendations from friends and family.”
“Think about when your friends or family ask for an opinion about something – you're influencing them. Or if they're asking, ‘hey have you tried this product before?’ you're influencing that decision, and so each and every one of us is an influencer in our own way, and communities are a great way to influence that as well,” says Ayn.
Your Livestream Content Can Shift and Evolve Over Time
Some people may be concerned about getting stuck livestreaming about only one particular topic, and Anh argues that this shouldn’t be the case. “Your brand can evolve and it should evolve over the years and so don't be afraid to let go of a show just because you've had it.
A Sample Workflow of a Good Livestream
For people thinking about creating a livestream show, Anh shares the workflow she uses in her own work.
1. Create a guest submission form. “I have a guest submission form for each show. It asks them specific things that I need to know for the show – name, contact, social media profiles, what it is that you think you're bringing to the show, what do you want to talk about.”
2. Send prospective guests a thank you email. “So once the guest submission form has been filled out… then you follow up with an email saying, ‘thank you for your interest in being a guest, you're confirmed for this date, please schedule some time to have a short prep call with me’.”
3. Schedule a prep call. “I give them a Calendly link; I have a specific calendar for prep calls…. We have the prep call [and] there's a very detailed form with notes of what we've talked about, and I have all the information I need for the specific guests on this one form.”
4. Email guests the livestream instructions. “Before the interview, I send a very specific detailed email to the guests as well with instructions of ‘here's your link for the show, here's best practices.’”
5. Repurpose the livestream into social media elements. It’s wonderful if your livestream has many real-time viewers. But don’t let low numbers disappoint you. “The value is actually in the video replay.” Turn the long form video into clips shared on social media “to drive folks back to the video.”
To hear more insights from Kami and Anh, watch the full livestream.