How To Pre-Promote Your Live Shopping Events
Ultimate Live Shopping Pre-Promotion Guide
Table of contents:
- Promote Your Live Shows on Social Media
- Effective Email Marketing To Your CMS
- Run Paid Ads To Maximize Reach
- Programmatic Ads For Brand Awareness
- Push Forward with Mobile Marketing
- Ready, Set, Socialize with Influencer Marketing For Huge Engagement
- Add a Live Shopping Stream Schedule to Your Site To Encourage Signups
- Offer Incentives, Show Exclusivity & Create FOMO
- Post Teaser Videos For Curiosity & Excitement
From furniture to cosmetics, brands and retailers worldwide are leveraging live shopping to sell diverse products and experiencing significant success. But here's the catch: to make your live event truly sizzle, you need more than just great products—you need a buzz that's impossible to ignore. Savvy marketers know that strategic planning and employing various marketing tactics are crucial for a successful event with an abundant audience. With 96% of attendees seeking event information online beforehand, it's imperative to generate content that serves both educational and promotional purposes.
Here are the best tips from the experts at LiSA on effectively marketing and pre-promoting your live shopping event to maximize audience attendance and engagement. We’ve got a great guide if you’re new to live shopping and want to learn how to get started in 3 simple steps.
1. Promote Your Live Shows on Social Media
To maximize anticipation and engagement leading up to your event, begin your promotional efforts about six weeks to a month in advance. Starting with once a week, gradually increase your frequency of posts as the event draws nearer. Around the three-week mark, ramp up your promotion by posting at least twice a week across your channels. Use LiSA’s live shopping platform to easily generate a dedicated brand URL for the live shows that happen directly on your website. This URL can be easily shared on your social media or other video streaming platforms as YouTube. There’s lots of social media platforms that you can share compelling teasers on to promote your show, for now we’re giving tips and tricks to use on the top 3 that are most popular for our clients.
Facebook: Create a Facebook event for your live shopping show. These events have wide visibility on the platform and are effective at driving engagement. Encourage interested individuals to RSVP and share the event on their own timelines, broadening your audience reach. Make sure to use the discussion tab to interact with potential attendees and gain insights into their expectations regarding your products.
Instagram: Instagram stories are a brilliant tool to promote your upcoming shows. With creative content, you can swiftly captivate audiences worldwide. Generate excitement with visual countdowns, sneak peeks behind the scenes, interactive questions, and polls while sharing essential event details. Share the event website URL in your Instagram stories to direct traffic to your live stream page. We suggest using the countdown feature to remind followers of the event's approaching date. Followers can opt-in to receive notifications when the event begins, further boosting engagement.
YouTube: Take advantage of YouTube's scheduling feature to plan your live shopping event well in advance. This allows you to build anticipation and engage your audience long before the live broadcast commences.
*The best way to get organic traffic and build awareness is by encouraging your social media community and followers to share the event in their stories and tag people in the comments that would love the show too!
2. Effective Email Marketing To Your CMS
Harnessing the power of your customer database presents an excellent opportunity to inform your audience about your activities and attract qualified viewers to your live shopping event. Since these customers are already familiar with your brand, they're more likely to join in and make purchases during the event.
Inject a dose of anticipation into every customer email with a special section hyping up your upcoming live shopping shows, and reward them for their current loyalty to you by giving them the VIP feeling with a unique discount code/something extra special that can be used during the live show. Don't forget to drop the link to your live shopping page where customers can find both upcoming and past events.
Strategically send reminders one day, ten minutes, and even one minute prior to the event, optimizing attendee readiness. Incorporate personalized touches, compelling subject lines, and proven tactics to optimize engagement and drive action.
*To bring even more traffic to your website, add a link to the email with your live shopping page where customers can find both upcoming and past events.
3. Run Paid Ads To Maximize Reach
Paid advertising is a great way to promote your live shopping show through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube and these platforms offer targeted advertising options that can be a great way to reach your desired audience. With targeted advertising, you can tailor your campaigns to specific demographics, interests, and behaviours that align with your ideal viewer profile. This strategic approach ensures that your ads resonate with the right audience, thereby increasing the likelihood of them attending your live stream.
While paid advertising does require a budget allocation, the potential returns can be substantial if executed effectively. To get the best results, we recommend running paid ads 10 days before the event, and increase the spend in the last few days before the live event. It's an investment worth considering to grow your community and increase your visibility to people who don’t already follow you but are interested in discovering your brand.
*Don’t forget to choose a hashtag for your event, and encourage attendees to use it when they post on social media and other platforms too.This not only create a sense of unity and community, but also amplifies the event's visibility across various platforms!
4. Programmatic Ads For Brand Awareness
We highly recommend incorporating programmatic ads into your pre-promotion strategy to boost brand awareness effectively. This cutting-edge feature is available through LiSA's video commerce platform and specifically designed in mind for small and medium-sized businesses aiming to enhance their branding visibility. Programmatic ads cleverly show the current live stream of your live shopping event in the form of dynamic widgets on the side of a webpage.
Without you needing to do anything, this innovative tool intelligently transforms snippets extracted from product videos or live shopping events into dynamic banner ads.These ads are strategically positioned across a network of websites, ensuring maximum visibility and interaction with your target audience. Not only do these ads grab attention, but they also create a direct pathway to your brand's website, whether leading to a specific product or live show. With programmatic ads, you can supercharge your brand awareness, drive more traffic to your site, and cultivate a loyal customer base—all managed conveniently through the LiSA Social Commerce Suite.
5. Push Forward with Mobile Marketing
Don't rely solely on emails—send push notifications to your customers just before, when it is starting, and/or during the live shopping event! Most people check their phones when they receive a notification, making this a super effective way to get more views. It's quick, direct, and guarantees your audience will be in the loop.
Plus, with push notifications, you have the advantage of reaching your audience instantly, without needing an email address or phone number; users just need to opt-in to receive messages. This is an excellent way of ensuring potential customers don't miss out on your brand’s exciting live shopping show.
6. Ready, Set, Socialize with Influencer Marketing For Huge Engagement
Team up with industry experts or brand advocates to spread the word about your live shopping event on their social media platforms. Working with the right influencer not only attracts viewers but also enhances your brand's image. Even if the influencer isn't hosting the show, collaborating widens your reach and introduces your brand to new potential customers.
You can also collaborate with other brands to jointly promote live shopping events to their followers. These partnerships benefit both parties, creating a win-win situation.
A social media takeover is a combined effort, tapping into the audiences of both the influencer and the brand. By joining forces, you can boost exposure for both accounts, making the promotion process more effective.
7. Add a Live Shopping Stream Schedule to Your Site To Encourage Signups
To maximize viewership, it's essential to streamline access to your live shopping shows for your customers. Avoid burying them deep within your website unless it's intended for a private, exclusive audience. Instead, create a dedicated section for live shopping prominently displayed in your main menu, just like our client Marks & Spencers that show upcoming and past shows—check out their dedicated live shopping page on their e-commerce site.
Additionally, we recommend using banners on your e-commerce site just before and during the shows to attract visitors who may not have been aware of the live shopping events—just like our client AVON.
Once you've driven traffic to the landing page, take advantage of LiSA's 'Add to Calendar' feature. ‘Current live show’ feature on your brand’s main home page.
This allows your audience to save the event and its link to their Google and/or Outlook calendar, serving as a helpful reminder and boosting views during the live shopping event.
8. Offer Incentives, Show Exclusivity & Create FOMO
While building excitement through promotional videos is essential, consider adding tangible value for your audience. If you plan to offer discounts, complimentary demos, or exclusive materials they can’t get anywhere else during the live show, create a video showcasing these perks. This approach creates a sense of FOMO and urgency for viewers to tune in live.
We see that brands that provide incentives generate high audiences because viewers have a clear gain for investing their time in your live stream. This is one of four golden rules you need to know about live shopping. For example, Charlotte Tilbury uses LiSA’s video commerce to run masterclasses that are only accessible to CT members, and this urges consumers to sign up to your brand and access exclusive events.
9. Post Teaser Videos For Curiosity & Excitement
One of the best ways to convince people to watch your streams is to show them what they could be missing out on. You could do this with the help of a video CMS like LiSA, which automatically takes snippets from live shows and allows you to grab sound bites from past streams, and promote them across different platforms as teasers. Whether you post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, cross-channel promotion is an effective way to reach as many people as possible and encourage them to sign up for your upcoming events or watch past shows.
Another idea is using behind-the-scenes footage from the event in the days leading up to your live stream. Although the live broadcast goes in real-time, you can create a video sneak peek of some of the major topics that will be discussed throughout the live event or show how your team prepares for the event.
Ready to start live shopping shows?
Live shopping is one of the highest converting methods amongst all online sales channels. But, before customers can actually purchase from your sessions, they first need to know about them. To maximize views on your live shopping events, leverage your client database, promote across social media platforms, and craft engaging content that keeps your audience coming back for more. If you don’t know how to get started with live shopping events, feel free to book a demo with us here!
These blog articles may also be of interest:
Live Shopping Mastery: 10 Key Tips for Unrivaled SuccessHow To Pre-Promote Your Live Shopping Show
Post-Event Boost: Maximizing Your Live Shopping Event
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