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Maximizing the results and profitability of your influencer marketing strategy is vital. In this day and age, influencer marketing is a great way to boost brand awareness, reach new customers, and improve product sales across the board, especially if you partner with a knowledgeable influencer who fits perfectly with your brand. After all, it’s grown by 42% as of 2021.
Many organizations are beginning to use livestream shopping to excellent effect. But what if you don’t know what livestream shopping is or whether it can enhance your influencer marketing campaigns? You’ve come to the right place.
Livestream Shopping Explained
In a nutshell, livestream shopping is, you guessed it, live audience shopping in the middle of an influencer livestream.
Imagine a standard livestream performance, where an influencer showcases various branded products and talks about why they prefer them compared to others. In contrast to this kind of content or candid content (where an influencer uses the products during their day-to-day activities), livestream shopping allows viewers to purchase the products then and there through buy buttons integrated into the screen.
Indeed, livestream shopping shows can be hosted on Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and more. Imagine a customer who sees one of their favorite live influencers talking about a new jacket she just purchased, and a buy button pops up for the same jacket. With one touch, the customer can add the jacket and her shopping cart. It’s easy, fast, and intimately connected with the livestream show.
In some ways, livestream shopping is similar to the selling showcase programs run on TV in previous years (and still broadcast in some cases). But in the case of livestream shopping, the audience inherently trusts the influencer or product presenter because they’re already invested in the rest of that influencer’s video content.
The Benefits of Using Livestream Shopping
Should you decide to use livestream in your influencer marketing campaigns, you could see several important benefits right off the bat.
Offers an Authentic Look at Products
For starters, livestream shopping gives your target audience members an authentic look at the products you want them to buy. Why does it feel authentic? Because they trust the influencer presenting the products in the first place.
Normally, online shoppers are disinclined to trust blatant advertisements. After all, they don’t have any emotional attachment to the ads themselves.
But when a popular influencer presents a product, the influencer’s viewers are more likely to take that presenter’s comments and opinions as truth. If an influencer working for your brand says that he or she likes one of your products, for example, their viewers may be more inclined to try those products themselves.
It’s all a matter of sales psychology. Your influencers have already spent a lot of time building up trust with their audiences. With livestream shopping, you can finally cash in that trust and convince your target audience members to try your products or make purchases that they otherwise might not.
Fosters Instant Buying Behavior
Additionally, livestream helps to foster instantaneous, gut-driven buying behavior. With the way livestream shopping is set up, viewers are incentivized to make purchases immediately. A buy button pops up on screen once an influencer starts talking about one of their favorite products; your viewers will be driven to make the purchase right then and there rather than sitting on it or waiting until later. This is beneficial for a few key reasons.
For one, it reduces cart abandonment (the act of a customer putting something in a shopping cart, then clicking away from your site or store). For another, it increases how many purchases you receive in a given day or week. This can help significantly when trying to accumulate income for business operations or expansions.
Great for Fashion and Similar Product Types
Livestream shopping is particularly popular and effective for fashion products and similar product types, and for good reason. For many of these products, customers want to be able to try them out before making a purchase or at least know that someone they trust has tried them and found them valuable.
This is harder than usual with online shopping. After all, someone can’t try on a jacket that they see in an e-commerce store. But if a person, hypothetically, sees an influencer with a similar body type try on that example jacket and it fits, they’ll be more likely to think that the jacket will fit them and make a purchase as a result.
This is true for fashion products, shoes, house furniture, and food. Experienced influencers will build up anticipation before showcasing the products, as well, which can help make certain product types much more attractive and purchasable than normal.
Easy to Incorporate into Your Current Influencer Marketing
Perhaps most importantly of all, livestream shopping is relatively easy to incorporate into your current influencer marketing strategies.
You can incorporate livestream shopping into most influencer marketing platforms like Instagram (which recently added this feature) in addition to other social platforms like Facebook and even Amazon (arguably one of the best ways to directly list your products and get purchases).
Since your marketing influencers already produce video content for your audience members, coming up with livestream shopping shows and product suggestions should be relatively straightforward. You can offer your influencers a cut of all the profits that you make from livestream shopping to incentivize them to put their best sales personas forward.
In essence, you can potentially open up this additional income stream with a minimum of modification to your current marketing strategies. That means you don’t have to spend a lot of time and money incorporating livestream shopping into your campaigns.
Should You Use Livestream Shopping?
Given the above benefits of livestream shopping, there’s no real reason not to try it for your brand if you already leverage influencer marketing in general.
Influencer marketing is highly effective because it builds connections with your audience members and because it helps to spread brand awareness across popular social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. If you already have a few partnerships with popular influencers, you can use livestream shopping to drive products and build even better connections with your target audience members than ever before.
Livestream shopping can be beneficial if:
- You want to generate cash flow and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
- You want to directly sell specific products that don’t have the best purchase rates on your e-commerce shop
- You are having difficulty connecting with your target audience members
- You want to improve your brand’s authenticity through your influencer partners
- You want to improve your marketing effectiveness without spending tons of money on advertisements
- Your target audience is more inclined to make a purchase or connect with your brand through influencer or social marketing as opposed to traditional advertisements
Wrap Up
As you can see, livestream shopping could be just what your brand needs to thrive in this new marketing arena. With livestream shopping, your influencer partners can connect to your audience members more directly than ever and sell your products more directly and easily, too. In fact, livestream shopping has the potential to reinvigorate your influencer marketing campaign from top to bottom. Consider integrating it into your marketing strategies today.
