Live streaming – marketing tool or a Covid necessity?
Do you need to broadcast a message to clients or employees?
Then lets talk about live streaming.
If like me you’re a gamer, you’ll know that live streaming has been embedded into the gaming community for many years through Youtube and Twitch. In fact, there are now 26.5 million daily active users on Twitch (Twitch, 2021). This demonstrates the strong engagement levels live streaming attracts either as content creators or avid viewers.
Gaming aside, live streaming is now being utilised as a fast open forum for people to share and collaborate on ideas in real-time - with the benefit of getting live feedback. An incredible benefit to live streaming as a marketing tool is that it gives you a personal and creative approach to communication. Something Spotify really used to its full advantage with the announcement of its global parenting leave through live stream to all of its employees worldwide.
This method of communicating to employees and customers has the advantage of being simple to access globally. And, in my opinion, it is in many ways the best tool to broadcast a message to a large audience.
Why?
- Social media users comment 10 times more on a live stream than a regular video.
- The impact and necessity of the technology will increase rapidly becoming a factor in the recruitment landscape.
- Live streaming opens up the door to add flexibility to the work environment.
With the ability to open live streams up to worldwide audiences through events like seminars on social media, expect to see a significant rise in live streaming as a form of recruitment marketing in the coming months.
Video content – still binge-able or time to scroll past?
Social media platforms love video content so much so that it has become the main form of content consumed. Video is still growing rapidly according to a Cisco study – in fact, they predict that by 2022, 82% of all online content will be video content.
That’s huge!
Understanding the development and prevalence of video content and the way content is now consumed (and remembered) is key to getting the maximum benefit from video in recruitment marketing.
A well-conceived series that provides powerful content for job seekers in bite-sized chunks is exactly what candidates need right now. And, I believe, conveying your messages to prospective talent using this method will become pivotal in the recruitment process.
Video is a great way to communicate with and attract both candidates and new clients by increasing your brand awareness. With 78% of us watching online videos each week (HubSpot), video should definitely be forming a large part of your content strategy if it isn’t already.
Multifaced marketing – target one group or target multiple?
How do you get past the issue faced by many recruitment marketers of getting your content to appeal to everyone all of the time?
You can’t.
The key thing that successful recruitment agencies do is to segment their audience. They then target different ad sets at each of their target audience personas. Such as using LinkedIn to target by skills, thereby ensuring the audience seeing the paid ad are your ideal potential candidates and improving the recruitment process.
This powerful paid advertising technique means that the door to what you can promote on social media widens. New clients in different industries, experiencing different candidate shortages or trends specific to their sector can be targeted using this method as it isn't one size fits all. Changing your targeting for paid advertising campaigns in this way really can focus and develop your marketing strategy.
And, one of the best things about it, is that if you are unsure where to start with multifaced marketing, lookalike audiences will help you to find an audience in paid social media from your existing website visitors and target accounts.
Starting with lookalike audiences and adapting them to different personas, combined with using video and live streaming as a large part of the content strategy for organic and paid advertising, is a positive start to a successful paid social media recruitment strategy.
Final thought
Video’s hold on being the most prevalent and consumed content on social media isn’t going away any time soon. And live streaming is becoming one of the most useful and effective tools to help the recruitment process. Adding these into your recruitment marketing tool chest (if you aren’t using them already) will dramatically improve your content strategy to really support your brand building goals while attracting top talent.
Combining video content with targeting via paid social means you are putting your most engaging content directly in front of your specific target audience, which is a recipe for engagement - and will in turn increase ROI.
