Leveraging Live Video to Grow your Business

There's a lot of different marketing tactics that you can use to grow your business. Today, I’m going to give you a tactic and it's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites not just because I enjoy executing the particular tactic, but because it's one that will add lots of revenue and profit to your business. So live video is obviously a distant cousin to video in general. But let me kind of tell you why I like live video and what do you need to do to actually move this forward?

Live video has this distinction of reality TV in a way that you don't necessarily know what's going to happen. So you could have one person come on your feed, you could have 600 people come on. You could have unique comments, crazy comments, questions, interactions, you could have special guests, and things like that. Live video. as opposed to just static video, puts itself in a completely different league that makes it more like a show.

It’s like a reality TV in a way that you're being real, you're being raw, relevant, you're coming out there and you're just putting content out there to the universe without having to have everything perfectly scripted and the perfect background and microphone and things like that. 

While I love video in general, and you should be using as much video as you possibly can in your marketing - live video, for the people that have seen execute it, myself included. It just elevates the power. But where could you start with live video? Where should you start? How do you leverage all that good stuff? 

The easiest place to start is Facebook. And it's the easiest place to start because it's common practice to be doing live video and more. So I'm sure that you probably already have a Facebook profile. And there's already an audience that's sitting on Facebook all day every day. Rather than you having to create something from scratch, I want you to start with Facebook Live video. Now, there's other tools Ustream and other streaming tools. And there's other tools like live stream, you can go live on YouTube, Instagram - there's lots of different options to go live. But my suggestion would be to start with Facebook. 

Now, this is where you're going to have some resistance. This is where you're going to second guess things. What do you talk about? What do I talk about? So what I want you to do is to pretend or make the assumption that not one person is going to show up. And I want you to have an entire show scripted out to where you're just giving really good content and information. 

So let's say that you are a daycare center. You could do a show once a week.

Start talking about all things relating to childcare. One week could be about sleeping tips. The next one about discipline, food and eating. There's a lot of different options in ways you can take that particular show. And I'd want you to have that 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever the time that works for you. And we'll talk about that again in a second. Just script it, so that you're welcoming your audience. And you're just saying that I'm here to just be real with you, be relevant and give you some really great information. And if you want to interact great. If not, I'm still going to show up every Friday afternoon at two o'clock, for example, and I'm going to deliver you some fresh content that I hope makes an impact on your life and your family and your kids. 

It's as simple as that. Do not overthink it. Put the script together and just have some rough talking points and it always sounds better when you're doing something ad lib versus something that's totally scripted. When I'm saying scripted out it's having some talking points. Because what I've seen is people will often show up and they'll be like, Hey, get away for some people to come. And then no one shows up and then you kind of get disappointed and then you don't do it ever again. 

The goal with this live video is to do it consistently. Whether you're going to do it weekly, monthly, every other day daily, whatever the frequency is, the time really doesn't matter. I've seen live streams that are five to 10 minutes do really well. Streams that are 15 to 30 minutes, and they're a little bit more of a show when there might be a guest or two. 

All that I'm looking for you to do initially is to pick a topic that you can contribute on and schedule a couple of these out. And from a technology standpoint, you can leverage a webcam, you can do it right from an iPhone or an Android, for example, as long as it's on a tripod, you're not holding it and shaking all over the place. It doesn't have to be crazy in terms of the production value. But this raw stuff in the lower production value stuff, it's going to be a lot more impactful than if you were to have this completely scripted out and completely redone in post production. Get in the habit of putting yourself out there. And it might take you 10 different live videos to really find your groove. But I promise you, you're going to start to like these and it's going to start to drive traction.

You're going to see that maybe the first day there's only 12 people that listen to your live video and then all sudden there's 200.  And then as always, with video, you can take that video, get it transcribed, now you have a blog post. Now you've got social media content. Now you've got audio content for a podcast like this. So that live video becomes static video, audio, written content, etc. 

It's all about just getting something started, something started around your passion, because your passion will start to come through and video and people will start to relate to it. And they'll continue to tune in and listen and just really want to be a part of that community. 

Have some confidence to execute this and know that it's not that challenging. You could be doing a live streaming video in the next 15 minutes. It's as simple as that. Get out there. Take some action.