Live streaming is a rapidly growing part of the entertainment industry, meaning that you may find yourself asking how it can help your business. Embracing new technologies and forms of communication is key for businesses looking to maintain current performances and push on to the next level. Building trust and credibility with your audience is essential in this process, and live streaming offers a unique opportunity to do so.
In this Article:
Using Clear, Informative Screen Text
A large amount of clear information across the screen can ensure that the viewer understands precisely the message that you’re sharing with them. Therefore, it’s vital to carefully select appropriate information and not overcrowd the screen with your messaging. Building trust and credibility starts with ensuring your audience receives clear and concise communication.
Be sure to avoid using so much screen text that it can become a challenge to properly engage with the stream itself. A live stream functions, to a very real degree, as a conversation between the viewer and the streamer. To that end, making sure that the conversation is visually unobstructed is extremely important. This unobstructed interaction helps build trust and credibility as it keeps the audience focused on the content.
What Should You Include When Considering Screen Text?
Brand Identity
Your brand is arguably your business’s most important asset, so it’s important to ensure that everything you produce is in keeping with it. It would be wise to select colors, logos, and streamers that fit well with your company’s ethos and attitude. Consistency in your brand identity across all live streams plays a significant role in building trust and credibility.
Style
A high quality, studio-style software will ensure that the stream you produce will remain consistent throughout the delivery. Use this advantage to ensure that your performance on screen (both text-based and human-based) is high-quality and professional.
Conciseness
Screen text isn’t a place for nuance. Rather, it’s more important to ensure that you get a simple, clear message across in very few words. This conciseness is crucial in building trust and credibility as it shows respect for your audience’s time and attention.
Customer Communication and Support
While a live stream might not seem like the most ideal place for a customer support conversation, it can be much more effective than you might first expect. Building trust and credibility often hinges on effectively addressing customer concerns in real time.
Because you have the ability to vet any customers that appear on your stream, you can ensure that any queries and issues that they may have are easily solvable by your time in real-time.
This straightforward and honest communication will come across to the viewer as both honest and capable. The honesty comes from admitting that there has been a minor hiccup and the capability of your team to easily fix it. By handling customer concerns transparently, you are actively building trust and credibility with your audience.
Since both of these attributes are desirable for appearing professional, resolving some customer queries on a stream can be a great way to boost your image.
Interact During Pre-Recorded Content
At first glance, it might seem to be an error to stream pre-recorded content. After all, those two things are quite often mutually exclusive.
However, sharing pre-recorded content can be a great way to interact with customers for one main reason: you’re ensuring that a customer is engaging with your brand and products while their issue is being resolved. This strategy not only keeps them engaged but also strengthens your efforts in building trust and credibility.
This problem-solving interaction, no matter how minor, can engender positive thoughts about your business in short order. If these positive thoughts are paired with messaging and information about your business (which you have vetted ahead of time), then the association will only become stronger.
Some great pre-recorded content to stream could be a ‘behind the scenes’ style video, where a customer can see how and where a product or service is made for them. This understanding of your process can encourage a customer to engage more with your employees. This would happen through the process of a customer asking supplementary questions to the video they’re seeing and wanting more information about your work.
How Can You Best Use This Interaction to Benefit Your Business?
Pre-generated Responses
A pre-generated response, such as pre-recorded video interview questions and answers, can be enormously important during a live stream! Essentially, a skilled streamer will be able to use these responses as a live, interactive FAQ page.
Tailored Redirection
There are, of course, some issues that you would rather solve in the privacy of a meeting or a closed email exchange. A positive, encouraging streamer can suggest that a customer get in touch with your company, and then personally follow up later on.
Generate Time-Sensitive Excitement
Having a buzz around your product and company is highly desirable for any number of businesses. The main reason for this is quite obvious – it’s free advertising for you!
While this excitement is valuable, though, it’s wise to avoid it going stale. This can be avoided by ensuring that the excitement that you cultivate centers around a specific event with a dedicated time and place.
You can achieve this time-sensitive excitement through a live stream – consider offering something extra during the stream itself. For instance, you could offer a limited-time discount code for your website, or run a Q&A to help people get the best out of your service.
Conclusion
Live streaming for business can be a daunting prospect for any business owner. However, if you make use of some of the straightforward methods we outline above, it can enable you to cultivate a dedicated, interested audience.
