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. Local small businesses, ecommerce companies, and tech startups often run social video events to increase brand awareness and even drive sales. Capturing leads with live streaming events is still an underutilized objective. That’s why you should definitely try it.
- 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 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.
- 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. Plan two or three posts for each channel per week to gain maximum traction.
- Run a paid retargeting campaign
Paid advertising is the fastest way to increase the visibility of your upcoming event. unning 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. 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.
- 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.
