Live shopping is becoming an increasingly mainstream shopping format. Some brands have started their venture by broadcasting live shopping on social media, and certainly, this has benefits. It’s cheaper, and your follower base might be more significant on social media than on your website. But if you want results, own your data and improve conversion rates, then broadcasting on your website is the only way forward.
By hosting your live shopping event on your website instead of social media platforms – such as Instagram, TikTok or Youtube – you’ll own the entire customer experience. You own the data generated from live shopping, and you own the branding of your event. In short, you’re not dependent on anyone but yourself. Knowing this, why would you invest time and resources to conduct live shopping if someone else will own the customer experience and the data to follow up on your investment?
Social media are attention grabbers; it’s there for us when we want to educate ourselves, dream ourselves away for a while, or mindlessly consume content. But the clickbait, vibrant colours and scroll-friendly material is also contributing to the fact that our attention spans decreased by 103 seconds between 2004 and 2023. Social media want your customers to spend as much time as possible on their platform, where their advertisers are – not on your brand’s website.
To fix this, something new and exciting will always pop up in the feed. Just think about how you use social media. Do you often spend half an hour watching the same video, or do you feel like there’s always something new calling for your attention? When you attract viewers to your website, you can have a potential customer’s full attention without fighting ads and competing content. This will also increase your Time Spent with Brand (TSB).
Even though you decide to broadcast your live shopping event on social media, that’s not where your viewers will convert into buying customers. Because while many brands focus their live shopping investment on building community and increasing brand awareness, many have one specific end goal; selling products.
Social media is fun and educational, but it has a different purpose. By broadcasting live shopping on your site, it will be streamlined with existing customer behaviour. You can show products beautifully, make shopping easier and improve brand communication. Again, without competing content and annoying adverts.
To make it easier for your viewers to convert, minimise the number of clicks it takes. If you choose to host your event on social media, the viewer wishing to purchase has to leave the live broadcast, look for the product they want and find their way to the checkout. Using a professional live shopping platform lets your viewers add and buy products while still watching the event.
In addition, you shouldn’t hide your forthcoming and completed events on your website. Make it easy for the target group to watch, participate and convert.
“We had one client who started with live shopping but decided to put their live shopping gallery two clicks away from the homepage. When they moved it to the homepage instead, they had 325% more viewers in one day than in one month.” – Rickard Lönn, Head of Sales Streamify.
Now is the time to clarify that social media is crucial for your live shopping success. Because social media is an effective tool for attracting viewers to your event. Many brands have a larger follower base on social media platforms compared to their website, which makes them a great base for marketing. One great piece of advice is to go live on an existing channel a few minutes before the actual event.
What’s evergreen content, again? The Digital Marketing Institute summarises it as “/../content that retains relevance, is not time-sensitive and continues to drive traffic long after it is first published”. Let’s say you’re a beauty brand that makes a live shopping event about dry skin during winter and the best face creams for that particular challenge. The educational content within that event is not subject to change anytime soon and can be valuable for a long time after cameras stop rolling.
Moreover, all the questions from your audience (and your answers) will still be present, which means that people participating later on get a chance to have common questions answered. With Streamify, all the products you recommend will continue to be shopable after the live event.
Example of evergreen content. Excerpt from Naturkompaniet Live Stream, where an experienced Mountain Leader shares his best advice on how to climb Kebnekaise.
While SEO (Search-Engine Optimisation) efforts on social media can be valuable, you’ll get the most bang for your buck by optimising your website. By broadcasting your live shopping event on your website, you can put each completed event on a landing page that you can optimise for search engines. For example, a fashion brand could make their educational live shopping searchable for phrases such as “bridesmaids dresses for summer”, “how to dress for my size”, and “matching shoes and purses”.
Content days are a common practice in photography but are quickly becoming adopted by marketing. During a content day, the aim is to create weeks, sometimes months, worth of content on a specific day. Hosting a live shopping event is the perfect opportunity to have a content day and build your content library.
You already have a presenter, products, sound, camera and a studio (or a corner of the office) available – why not use your resources to the fullest and shoot content for social media and your website simultaneously? If you want to become even more efficient, you don’t even need to shoot separate content. With Streamify, you can easily download a video file from your event and cut it up into numerous pieces of content.
Would you like to reap the benefits of hosting live shopping on your website? Reach out to our expert; Alexander.