Can Brands leverage Retail Stores when Selling LIVE? (Backed by Unique Research)
When selling LIVE it does have an impact on the Brand. Viewers can know more about the brand, what are their products & services? Do they a store? Where is it located? Not only that, it will attract more customers who would like to see the products in real life.
Live Steaming and The Store as a Stage
We have seen the effect that social media and influencer marketing has had on the way products of every nature are being launched and promoted across the web. This is being facilitated by both international, national, and now even a groundswell of local social media moguls, turning followings into tribes, clicks into cash and in some case fortunes.
Surviving retailers need to take note of what is happening in China, in its explosion of live stream shopping. Alibaba’s live stream network, called Taobao had 400 million viewers across over 60,000 live stream shows in 2019, which brought in over $28 billion, and has doubled every year for the past three years.
Think of it as a cross between QVC, Home Shopping Network, content marketing, influencer marketing and entertainment. The hosts are part celebrity, part micro influencers, and they actively promote products in real time, in an online selling format.
Aptos’s Nikki Baird recently noted, that China’s live stream juggernaut was facilitated in part by WeChat, which comes with a commerce-enabled platform. This allows their store sales associates to act as affiliate or commissioned sellers. And while Instagram may approach this, western companies need to get busy facilitating similar transaction capability.
Stores might then need to consider social media acumen in future sales hires, to further maximize sales potential, both on and offline. This has a substantial multiplier effect, way beyond simply selling an individual a single pair of jeans.
Fashion Needs Local Fashionistas
What better way for retailers attempting to lure customers back into stores, than to make the stores themselves the live stream sites, and their hosts local social media influencers, even if they are momentarily behind plexiglass.
Whether this facilitates additional online sales or becomes a draw to bring out followers, it has the potential to promote unified commerce in a manner that is more conducive to what the “New Retail” is becoming, as opposed to what channel-centric retailing had been in the past.
Is getting brands into live stream important to help their retail stores?
It’s crucial for brand owners to stay informed and aware of the changing online ecosystem as they invest in making social platforms profitable channels for their business. The shift toward live shopping and social retail will only continue to intensify; social media has undoubtedly become an integral part of our society, and advertising best-practices are known to follow consumer behavior.
Brands that are quick to pivot and adapt to new features and platforms will likely be those that succeed in performance marketing and in turn help shape this newly forming trend.
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