One of the main things that makes live video so critical in nature is that, not only is the broadcast live and in real-time where mistakes can be unforgivable, the event is at a specific time making it important for people to plan to make it to the stream during the designated time, and if the audience doesn’t show up…. well that can be embarrassing. It’s important for marketers to plan not only the production of a live event but also the promotion around the live stream as well. Below we’ll outline 3 simple ways you can make sure your events are maximizing audience engagement.
1. Before Your Event: Track Your Audience Through Registration & Pixel
Before anything you need to lay the tracking groundwork for marketing and advertising across your intended audience. The best way to do this is through event registration and audience pixel tracking. Create a registration page to collect email addresses and add a tracking pixel to your registration page to keep track of your organic traffic. Landing pages and forms generated by common marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot and others already have tracking pixels integrated, so if you’re using one of those tools you should be set to go.
Now that you have this information you can start marketing to your audience via email and across the web using ad retargeting platforms. The contacts that register will be your sample you can use to build a lookalike audience of new people who may not even know you exist yet, but who share interests and characteristics with people that have already registered. Once you have all this information you can then carry it over to be used during your event. We’ll next talk about how you can use the data you’ve gathered about your registered and pixel’d audience and apply it to retargeting of ads while your event is live to further amplify your live stream.
2. During Your Event: Activate Advertising Retargeting Technology
Once your event goes live you can leverage advertising technology to start promoting your live stream. There are a few ways to do this, the most common would be to create ad creatives before your event promoting that stream is ‘LIVE’ right now and then pushing them out via traditional retargeting platforms. The second method, which is an emerging strategy is to use a Video Audience Amplification tool which is designed specifically for retargeting and promoting live streams as they are live. These softwares tools push live streams across high-traffic publisher websites in the ad containers to a segmented target audience.
Since you gathered a sample of data by requiring the audience to register and get pixel’d in the ‘before event’ stage you can now further segment to make sure you are getting the right people during the actual event. Segment based on interest, location, company, job title, and engagement rate. The result, while your event is live so are the ads that have your live video player in them, placed strategically across the web for your intended audience to see. And, a tracking pixel placed in the live stream video player will provide valuable data for follow up campaigns and tell us whether someone watched or not. Next we’ll talk about how to carry the ‘during the event’ engagement and data into the ‘after event’ follow up.
3. After Your Event: Retarget Your Engaged Live Broadcast Viewers
After the event has ended don’t forget that most video viewing happens after the broadcast ends, when the majority of the audience finally has time to get to your recording. Those are just the facts. So make sure you are designing your broadcasts for both real-time and on demand viewership. Things like polls and Q&A should maybe get left out of the recorded version. Now, since you placed a tracking pixel on your live stream video player the Video Audience Amplification Software can help you follow up with engaged viewers by making sure they see more of your ads and videos across the web. For those people who couldn’t make the live broadcast, you have their email addresses so make sure to send them the recording served up in a video player with the tracking pixel.
Check out over 100 video live streaming software tools in our directory.
