How to grow your brand community with live shopping
Live shopping is not just a sales tool. Its true superpower is to create a community in an environment controlled by you, increase the number of loyal customers, and give you immense qualitative and quantitative customer insights. By focusing your live shopping efforts around community building and content creation, you’re rewarded with a stellar ROI on a strategy that only gets more affordable as it matures.
Why you should care about live shopping as a marketing tactic
First, let’s take a step back and understand what communities are, where they come from, and why it is important to build one.
Communities have always been a part of our daily life. As families, tribes, friends, and other constellations. Before the internet, you would get recommendations and information about products by talking to salespeople or asking a peer – or community.
As the internet evolved, online communities followed, and for many years they existed primarily as places to connect around shared interests. As these communities grew, companies discovered a powerful approach to increase brand awareness and gain loyal customers.
Enter social media. Until recently, social media was a (cost) effective way for companies to reach and engage customers based on their activity. The targeting was accurate and effective, and during the last ten years, businesses have, to a large extent, relied on social media for customer relations and interactions. But now, due to stricter privacy regulations, such as GDPR, companies face the downside of this strategy.
“As targeting is being capped, the exchange of social media marketing is becoming unfair,” says Tim Frank Andersen, CEO & Co-founder of Liveshopper. “The price – in terms of customer data, interactions, and content – is simply too steep. It is high time for a lot of companies to revitalize their company website as a destination for their community and reclaim ownership of first-party data”
Two-thirds of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and 78% of global consumers say that the shopping experience is as important as its products and services. One way to meet these demands is to ensure your content is relevant, inspiring, and entertaining .
Live shopping is a great way to accelerate community building, explains Tim Frank Andersen, as you can produce a lot of engaging content fast – and after airing, the show can be repurposed as product content.
“Remember, the show is airing from your own website. You control the tone and branding,” says Tim Frank Andersen.
The ROI of live shopping
Building your brand community can earn you compound interest. By caring about your community and replying to your customers openly and honestly, you’re also building trust and gaining loyalty, keeping your brand top of mind as a market leader. Loyal customers and even customer ambassadors translates directly to increased Customer Lifetime Value.
According to the average ROI on active, customer-facing communities is an astounding 6,130%. This value is primarily driven by three factors:
- Increased customer loyalty
- Lower support costs
- Improved awareness and branding
And it gets better. As communities mature, the costs decrease dramatically while the ROI goes up. This is the magic of community building: by being more and more valuable for every interaction and community contribution, it pays off dividends in the form of conversions and customer data .
“With live shopping, we get a toolbox to do things that traditional marketing activities are not so good at: to engage, entertain and inspire at the same time. The engagement level in our live programs has been overwhelming, and we are very excited about this new way of selling,” says Mikkel Sønderkær, Marketing Manager at Philipson Wine.
With Liveshopper you can interact with your customers live on your own website and keep your business top-of-mind across the customer base. First-party data, customer insights, and engaged community are all yours. Liveshopper is easy to integrate with any e-commerce system, and it will enable you to produce live video shopping experiences from your phone, ready to be consumed.
The rules of customer engagement are being rewritten, and live shopping emerges as a powerful tool for community marketing. There’s no better time to get started than now.
