Livestreaming is a kind of e-commerce and marketing and sales method. It combines live product demonstrations, time-limited pricing promotions, live negotiations, and instant ordering through online streaming services hosted either by an influencer studio, or online store.
Livestreaming removes barriers between brands and consumers. While it is focused on driving short term sales, livestreaming can enable firms to improve marketing efficiency by combining brand marketing and performance marketing. There are certain factors that will increase the chance of success.
Brands should not use livestreaming as a short-term sales booster but as a long-term way to remove barriers between brands and consumers. Specifically, brands could better demonstrate their products in this way, tell fuller brand stories, introduce emotional and cultural elements to their products, obtain instant feedback, conduct product trials, improve marketing efficiency by combining brand marketing and performance marketing, use different livestream hosts to build a bridge for the consumers and cultivate brand loyalty.
Of course, Livestreaming is not without drawbacks, however. For ads on TV, government has clear rules to forbid brands parading the before-and-after effects of health products. The restrictions are not clear yet for internet-based livestreaming, and health products are frequently promoted by livestreamers. We need to continue to monitor regulatory updates carefully.
As promoting products through live-streaming has been compared to "tuning clicks into cash," some people have made illegal profits by creating false prosperity. Through the purchase of fake followers to increase shares and comments, some live streamers can falsify their rate of engagement to cheat brands and companies in an effort to win more trust and make more money. Meanwhile, live-streams have also faced issues like the return, refund and exchange of products.
