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Jen Lehner: You're listening to The Front Row Entrepreneur podcast, episode number two.
Announcer: Welcome to The Front Row Entrepreneur podcast, where you always have a front row seat for the best tips and strategies in online business, modern marketing, and productivity. Now your host, from her home studio in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Jen Lehner.
Jen Lehner: Hey there. Jen here. When you think about the whole point [00:00:30] of marketing, what do you think of? Getting more customers, right? Getting your message in front of more people. Getting your message in front of the right people. Yes, we've been hearing for a while now that content is king, and content is really important, but let me ask you this. If you have the greatest content in the world, does it matter if you don't have an audience? No, it doesn't matter a hill of beans. It is imperative to have [00:01:00] an audience. That's not a new thing.
Not too long ago, if you wanted to get in front of people with your message, you paid for big ads in the phone book. For those of you under the age of 30, this was a book of phone numbers. If you wanted to find an upholsterer, for example, you looked in the Yellow Pages part of the book under the "U"s. Usually, the biggest ad is the one that you picked, or the first one, which is why there were a lot of businesses back in the day with the name [00:01:30] A1 this or AAA that. If you had a large budget, you'd buy an ad on TV or a billboard or a radio ad. You sent postcards and flyers in the mail. Since that's how your competitors were reaching people, that worked well enough, but now, obviously, things look a lot different.
You know how we keep hearing the story about how the computers that sent the first man to the moon had less power than our iPhones? [00:02:00] That extends to marketing as well. In 2015, the Meerkat app appeared for personal live streaming. That is to say, you could pick up your phone, using this app, and press a button and broadcast yourself with video and audio across the globe. This was the beginning of a shift in a new kind of marketing like the world has never seen before. The thing is, to my amazement, not only are businesses [00:02:30] not taking advantage of this technology, there are many businesses that don't even know it exists, or they've siloed it into a category akin to selfies and silliness, like it's just for kids.
Meerkat was eventually overtaken by Periscope. Periscope is pretty much now being overshadowed by Facebook Live, but YouTube offers live streaming right from your phone, and Instagram. Honestly, we're still [00:03:00] just scratching the surface of what's going to be available. If you're listening to this podcast a year from now, we might be live streaming from our steering wheels. I hope not that, but you know what I mean.
We have this amazing technology, but only a fraction of the people are using it. People are consuming video, for sure. The statistics on that are staggering, but most people are not taking advantage of this. I bet I wouldn't be too far [00:03:30] off the mark to say that I would bet there's a parallel between the number of businesses who advertise on Facebook to the number of businesses who are using live streaming. That number is arresting. There are 70 million Facebook business pages, and only five million of those businesses are actually advertising on Facebook. While five million is a lot [00:04:00] of advertisers, certainly only a small percentage of businesses are actually taking advantage of Facebook advertising. I think you can see with your own eyes that businesses just aren't utilizing Facebook live stream, or any live streaming for that matter.
Here's a few statistics for you as it relates to live streaming. I'll put a link to all this in the show notes. Live video is more appealing to brand audiences. 80% would rather watch live [00:04:30] video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts. 67% of live video viewers are more likely to buy a ticket to a concert or event after watching a live video of that event or a similar one. 78% of online audiences are already watching video on Facebook Live. YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every [00:05:00] year. 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others. 100 million internet users watch online video every day. Four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. It's predicted that by 2019, online video will be responsible for 4/5th of global internet traffic. Businesses using video grow company revenue 49% faster year over year than organizations [00:05:30] without video. Here's another statistic that says that 79% of all internet traffic in 2020 will be video. 79%!
Here's the thing. You basically have a television studio in your pocket. We all have access now. There really are no barriers. How many times have you thought, "If I could just show people how good this thing is" or "If I could just get people to see how good I am at my job or my skill, I know it would take off"? [00:06:00] Let's talk about retail. What is the number one thing with retail? You have to get people in the store. How are they going to buy if they don't see what you have? Live streaming allows you to bring people into your store.
What if you're a boring old B2B company? Guess what? You have a lot to offer as it relates to live streaming. Let's suppose you sell insurance. Not exactly the sexiest thing, but look at the amazing ads by Geico and Progressive. They're [00:06:30] showing us that even insurance can be fun and it doesn't really have to take a huge ad budget. You could share tips on your live stream. You could take people on location and show them examples of stuff you've covered for your customers. Show us damage from the hailstorm and how your company came to the rescue, or go behind the scenes of your office, introduce your team. Let them tell their stories.
Here's the thing that's easy to miss. Whatever your business, retail, B2B, [00:07:00] B2C, education, non-profit, it doesn't matter, we all need an audience for our product or service. Live streaming allows you to reach an infinite number of people for free. Free! Can you imagine this? Every now and again, I'll work with a politician on their campaign, and it's so tough to get them to sign on for live streaming. Why? Because when you live stream, you are vulnerable, but guess what [00:07:30] else? You are transparent. Right now, transparency is a high priority for us as consumers and constituents. Live streaming is the ultimate display of transparency. When you live stream, your audience gets a sense of who you are.
In the marketing world, we talk a lot about the "know, like, and trust" factor, meaning people who become our customers and clients are people who know us, [00:08:00] like us, and trust us. You could write a 500 page book or you could have 100 blog posts, and both of those would be great and they're important, but what's going to develop a relationship with your audience more quickly? Those things or the living, breathing you who is actually walking the talk? If you're an amazing accountant, for example, you can have the slickest website, you can have a blog that is bursting at the seams, [00:08:30] but if you get in front of a camera and give me a few tips about how I could save money in my business or something like that, if you're looking me in the eye and also answering questions live, wow, now you're my guy or my gal. You are my go-to person for accounting tips. When I finally need to hire an accountant, guess who's going to be top of mind?
Someone said to me the other day, "Jen, live streaming is cool, but I don't think it's for my business." I said, "Well, [00:09:00] I guess you're right if your business doesn't require customers to succeed or if your business doesn't want to reach a massive audience", because in this conversation, we were also talking about live streaming on Facebook. This person thought his audience wasn't on Facebook. Yes they are. Everyone's audience, unless your audience is under the age of 30, is on Facebook. There are two billion people on Facebook. Your audience is there, but that's another podcast, which we are going [00:09:30] to talk about down the road.
Listen. One day, we're going to be telling our kids or our grandkids, "I remember when live streaming used to be free." Seriously, I am jumping up and down over here. Do not squander this tool. You might feel like you're late to the party, but look at your competition. Are they doing this? Probably not yet. If you're a digital marketer like myself, it may seem like you're being drowned out by all the other marketers on live streaming, but I would say no. You could still get tons of traction. [00:10:00] It's all about, at this point, consistency and really good messaging.
Now that I've hopefully convinced you that you need to be live streaming, let's talk about the nuts and bolts and how you could start and be successful with this. Don't worry about taking notes. I've created a great checklist for you that's going to be available for you in the show notes. Here are my top 15 steps to get started.
First of all, decide which platform you want to start [00:10:30] with. That's likely going to be Facebook or Periscope. At the time of this recording, LinkedIn is not offering live streaming, but with their recent addition of native video, I think live streaming is around the corner there too. Periscope is going to allow you to reach a larger audience because it integrates with Twitter. Even if you don't have any followers on Twitter, you just use the right hashtags and then you reach the right people. I don't usually recommend starting there [00:11:00] because you are more likely to get trolls, which can be distracting, especially when you're first starting out.
That leaves Facebook Live. The usual pushback I get here is that people are afraid of being seen by their brother or their sister or cousin or some old boss. Really, anyone they don't want to see them live streaming. Unless these people are following you on your business page, they aren't likely to see you. You definitely want to start your live stream from your business page because even [00:11:30] if you get more engagement on your personal page and you have a lot more activity over there, you could only use Facebook advertising from your business page. Eventually, you will want to start promoting these live streams and also creating custom audiences from the people who watch your live streams. We'll talk about that in a bit.
Decide what you want to talk about. Think in bullet points. This should not be scripted and should be really conversational, [00:12:00] but you don't want to drone on and on either. Put your bullet points on sticky notes or note cards that are printed out and in front of you so you can reference while you're live.
Number five, you can go live from your desktop or from your phone. From your phone, whether you use an Android or an iPhone, you'll need to download the Facebook app.
Select a spot in your office or your house that has good lighting. Natural light is the best. You want the light to be streaming [00:12:30] on your face, lighting up your face. You would be positioned, for example, facing a window, and then your camera would be facing away from the window at you.
Purchase a tripod. I've linked you to one of my favorites in the show notes. It's also really inexpensive. I think it's under $20. This is just a really important tool because you don't want your phone to wiggle. It's also nice to have your hands free.
Purchase a Lavalier [00:13:00] mic. I can't stress this enough. If the sound is not good, people will not stick around. I've linked to two of my favorite mics in the show notes. They are not expensive.
You want to make sure and put your phone on "do not disturb" so that your broadcast is not interrupted. When it's time to go live, whether you're on your phone or on your computer, you're going to go your Facebook page and proceed as if you were going to post a status update, but you're going to click on the "Go [00:13:30] Live" icon. At this point, you're going to decide if you want to have the camera facing you or if you want to start off with the camera facing away from you. Then click the "Start" button, and you're going to get a three second countdown.
Number 11. At this time, you simply introduce yourself and introduce your topic, but for God's sakes, please step back from the camera. I've made this mistake plenty of times and you see this everyday when you're scrolling through Facebook. You do not [00:14:00] want to be able to see up someone's nostrils. Make sure the camera is in front of you and not below you or you're also going to get that double chin action going.
Just relax, take a deep breath, and take comfort in these two things. First of all, it's very likely when you first start streaming, you're not going to have much of an audience. You probably won't be very good, but it's okay because no one's going to see you. Number two, if you really aren't happy with whatever it is that you do on your live [00:14:30] stream, you can delete it and no one's going to be the wiser.
Number 12. If you do this consistently, and by consistently, I really encourage you to do this if you're serious about building an audience, do it every single day. Yep. You heard me right. You could do it just once a week once you start gathering an audience, but if you do this every day and even better at the same time every day, just watch what happens. Your audience will grow exponentially. [00:15:00] This is also going to make you an expert in live streaming, and you're just going to get better that much more quickly.
Number 13. Once you start becoming happy with your broadcasts, you could start promoting them. You could promote them to your exact target audience with Facebook ads. From the moment you go live your very first time, you could create custom audiences in Facebook by asking Facebook to keep track of the people who watch. They'll divide it up for you too based on how long they watch. [00:15:30] For example, you could create an audience of people who watched only three seconds of your video, or you could create an audience of people who watched 95% of your video. This is going to come in really, really handy later when you start running Facebook ads to those audiences.
When your live stream ends, it stays on your page as a recording unless you delete it. If you don't delete it, you have [00:16:00] a video that you could repurpose on your blog, in a newsletter. You could upload it to YouTube. It's amazing.
Now you have all you need to go out there and live stream. I know it's scary to put yourself out there, but making moves like this is what it means to live life as a front row entrepreneur. You can find the show notes to this episode at jenlehner.com/two. If you aren't already subscribed to this podcast, make sure and do that. That way, [00:16:30] you're never going to miss an episode. You'll get every single broadcast without having to do a thing. If you aren't already a member of my free online classroom "The Front Row Entrepreneur", which was recently listed as one of Fast Company's top ten Facebook groups to join before quitting your day job, do a search on Facebook for "The Front Row" and join today. See you next week.