How to Develop a Winning Live Video Content Strategy

Last Updated on 3 years by Christopher Jan Benitez

Live streaming is a powerful medium. Today, more businesses and agencies are turning to it as a way to reach and engage larger audiences to sell their solutions in real-time.

But there’s more to hosting a successful live stream than positioning a camera and broadcasting. To be successful, you have to have a live video strategy, a way to incorporate your live streaming events into your larger marketing strategy.

That’s what this blog post is about. In this tutorial, I’ll share practical steps for designing a simple live streaming strategy you can use. You’ll see how easy it is to identify who you’re going after, and how to find live streaming ideas that are directly related to helping grow your business.

Why you need a live streaming strategy

We live in the age of attention. Your brand, no matter what you offer, has to constantly produce quality marketing messaging, if you want it to grow. Live video streaming is a chance to make your brand shine. It’s a powerful marketing tool. And like all digital marketing tools, it must serve a purpose.

Because live streaming is so versatile, you can use it at every stage of the buyer’s journey. But you’ve got to be smart about how and when you go live. Your business can’t grow with a haphazard marketing approach. 

Live video strategy cuts through the noise of competing ideas. It refines your position as a brand. It also helps you focus on specific tasks and milestones, measure what’s working and what isn’t, and with the right strategy, you can see the needle move in your business. 

How to create a live streaming strategy

Developing a live video strategy can be as complex or simple as you want it to be. This approach is simple. It’s based on addressing two core questions. 

• First: What business goal must you achieve?
• Second: Where is your audience and where do they need to be?

What business goal must you achieve?

Specificity is essential for goal attainment. Without specific goals, you cannot clearly navigate your way. For example, all brands must and do so by introducing a product or service. And for businesses to grow, they need an idea of what type of growth to aspire to. For example, a specific business goal can be to increase sales revenue for a core product by 5% this next quarter. 

With a clear and specific goal, you can begin to reverse engineer the actions you must take to reach your goal. To sell more of your core product, you will need leads. To attract leads, you’ll need content. What type of content? Live streaming content designed to generate leads.

As you think of your business goals, focus on a specific number, and leave the idea of live streaming out. Doing so will save you time and help your zero-in on what your business needs to grow and not the creative elements involved when going live. Because, believe it or not, that’s the easy part (and there’s more on this below). 

Where is your audience and where do you need to be?

Answering this question is a matter of addressing 2 key elements. First, identify your audience. Second, create the kind of value they can’t dismiss. 

Identify your audience

Knowing what your buyer’s journey looks like is more important than most know. It’s like visiting a new place and having your GPS guide you along the shortest and least congested roads. You get to identify what your buyer’s experience is at each stage. 

Because live video streaming is versatile enough to be used at each stage of the buyer’s journey, having each stage and experience clearly mapped out is a godsend. You’ll find it easier to know what information your buyers are after as they become more invested in solving a problem with your brand’s help.

Image: HubSpot

If you’ve never unpacked what buyers experience at the awareness, consideration, or decision stages when engaging with your brand, here’s a set of questions that will help. Simply take to paper or your document editor and create three columns, one for the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. Next, answer each question to establish what audiences need at each stage:

1. What questions do people ask at this stage?
2. What challenges, pain points, considerations, or fears do they experience and this stage?
3. What misconceptions do they have at this stage and why?
4. What will help buyers and this stage take the next step?

Create value 

‘Creating value’ seems loaded. In simple terms, it’s about showing buyers that you understand them and what they want from solutions like yours. While that’s easily said, value creation is often a tough nut to crack for brands. They get lost in ideas that don’t gel with audiences and product marketing messaging that simply doesn’t stick.

But that can change if you use the Before and After Grid. It’s a simple, yet powerful process for identifying the value you can offer. The Before and After Grid was introduced by DigitalMarketer as a way to identify the emotional states and challenges buyers experience before and after engaging with a brand’s marketing content.

Take DigitalMarketerHQ, the brand’s premium education platform. Note how clearly DigitalMarketer has identified what will help their buyers turn negative emotional states and experiences into positive ones.

Image: DigitalMarketer

Develop live event ideas

This is where research and insight above is transformed into live streaming experiences.

How? Mind storm. 

Mind storming was introduced by Brian Tracy, a management consultant and author, and public speaker. Where brainstorming is about creating a list of ideas, mind storming is different. It’s about thinking creatively to address a specific problem. 

Start with a challenge or problem that you’ve identified. Turn it into question and create a list of 20 ways you can help your target audience solve the problem. If you’d like to develop even more ideas, take each answer and phrase it as a question, and continue the process. Use this process with every insight you have about your buyer at each stage of their journey. 

This sounds like a difficult exercise, especially if you’re wondering how live streaming ties into it, but this is where you must remember that live streaming is just another form of video content. Whether you’re starting a live podcast, hosting a live event, or promoting a product launch, the ideas you come up with can be translated into live streaming concepts and shared with eager audiences. 

When using this technique, be sure to lean into what you know bothers your audience and always phrase these issues as questions to get your mind thinking about solutions. Also, don’t scrutinize your answers. Just write them down and move on to generate your list of 20. It’s important to put pen to paper and find answers before disqualifying any of them.

For example, if your buyers at the consideration stage are looking at new accounting SaaS products, and know that they need something affordable and your product is priced mid-tier in your industry, you need to change their minds about going for a cheaper solution. 

You could phrase this as: “how do we show that buying cheaper software isn’t a good thing for a business?”

Answers could include:

1. Explain that not all software is developed equally (think about the talent you employ and the tools they use)
2. Show that your product has fewer bugs 
3. Show that your product is used by similar-sized companies
4. Explain key differentiators between yours and the competing solution
5. Share research on the results of a study for customers using cheaper solutions vs yours
6. Show the financial risk of choosing a cheap solution 

Once you have a list of at least 20 solutions, pick the set you’d like to use, if not all, and explore them. Build them out into complete ideas that can be turned into live streams.

Map it out

Mapping out the list of topic ideas you’ve discovered. Prioritize them in an order that makes sense by assigning each idea to a stage in the buyer’s journey. Next, add them to your calendar, assign resources like subject matter experts to conduct research, and other key team members to plan each live streaming event. 

Live streaming video promotion

Promoting your live stream may sound daunting, but it’s simpler than most think. Promotion is a matter of sharing what you have to offer, and one of the simplest and most effective ways to do so is by using what I call the “Hollywood Method”. 

This method is all about the build-up to the event. Like major film studios, your goal is to promote your webinar ahead of its broadcast date. For live streams, a set timeframe of at least two solid weeks of event promotion. 

Pro tip: the larger the event, or the more critical the subject matter, the more time should be devoted to promoting it. Larger and more important events are often packed with tons of value, and you want to grab attention by teasing as much value as you can before your event.

Get your audience excited about the event, topics it will explore, and who will host it. Use Social media, your email lists, paid advertising, media outlets, and consider tapping into partner and affiliate networks with which you share similar customer segments.

And don’t forget to lean into organic SEO. Optimize your website or landing page to reach as many Google Search users as possible — a quick win if you’ll be using YouTube Live as one of the many live streaming platforms available. YouTube live content ranks well on Google, and can secure more views for your live streaming event.

Tips for creating your best live video strategy

The strategy above is sure to help you create a more cohesive and results-driven live streaming strategy. And while you’ll have more direction, there are always ways to elevate your video strategy and live streams. Here are four tips to help you do just that.

1. Be as detailed as possible

As broad as your strategy may seem as you develop it, pay attention to the specifics to help narrow down value later. Know exactly what your audience needs to move further along in the buyer’s journey or your messaging will vague and fail to deliver results. 

2. Find the right resources

Live streaming stats prove that quality content is essential. To create the very best experiences for your audience, identify subject matter experts and work with them early on to develop stronger and more relevant topics. Use them to verify ideas before you spend too much time developing creative content that’s inaccurate or somehow misaligned with your product or service capabilities.

3. Collaborate with influencers

Expand your subject matter expert pool by tapping into external industry experts and influencers. Leveraging knowledge experts, adds a greater degree of credibility and brand awareness to your brand, positioning it as a thought leader in your industry. It also supercharges your digital PR strategy and allows you to be amazing relationships with thought leaders in your niche.

4. Think about your video marketing goals

While this is all about live streaming strategy, keep your goals in mind. Live streaming is a tool and must deliver results. This will often mean thinking beyond just a live stream. 

Think about your live stream as part of a connected content marketing strategy. It must compliment your overall content strategy and elements it includes like building landing pages, making offers, using gated content to capture leads or sales pages to drive sales. Repurpose your live stream gems to carry messaging forward and better connect all content.

Over to you

Knowing what and who you’re going after makes it easier to find creative ways to generate results. As you take to creating your live streaming strategy using the process laid out above, slow down and enjoy the process. Give yourself the time you need to research your audience, plan your event content, and promotion cycle.