Everything you need to know about Live Blog for e-commerce is here. This practical solution for real-time engagement provides better customer experience and brings many benefits to the company — from audience growth to an increase in revenue.
In this connected era, people have become accustomed to a certain speed of consuming content on the internet. They want to know about things as they are happening at the moment. For this reason, Live Blog has been gaining more attention.
This tool is an alternative to provide interactive, real-time content to a brand’s audience. Rather than publishing static content, a Live Blog platform facilitates several sources in a single post. In other words, it pieces together information like images and inputs on social media.
A Live Blog solution is perfect for a strategy that aims regular updates posting, live events coverage, and breaking news coverage. Furthermore, Live Blog in the year 2020 has been used as an audience engagement tool for guaranteed success.
Curious, right? Keep reading to learn more about what Live Blog is, how it impacts e-commerce, and why you should use Live Blog for your e-commerce.
What is Live Blog?
The answer to this question can be summed up like this:
Live Blog is a type of platform where content can be published in real-time.
Even though the format remains a blog post, it works as an interactive piece, putting together information from several places online — images, videos, tweets, etc.
It’s an excellent tool for brands and companies that work with a high number of live events. Instead of writing insights about it for the Blog only after it’s finished, it’s possible to do it while it’s taking place. Moreover, it’s great for breaking news coverage as well.
Seeing it can create high-quality content from different sources, it becomes an advantage for both parts: company and visitor. That’s because the person would have to go all over the internet and do a thorough search to find all the information they now have in a unique blog post.
Reaction buttons, comments thread, sound notifications, and interactive pools are just a few possibilities with a Live Blog structure. All of these features make your content more interactive, thereby increasing audience engagement.
But how does Live Blog make a difference when we talk about an e-commerce company?
It helps in many ways, either increasing sales and revenue or improving customer retention and relationships. But, before we dive into the reasons why you should use Live Blog in your e-commerce, here’s a bit more about this new live commerce notion.
The concept of live commerce
With the advent of this publishing technology, many other things have started to change and modernize too. Online shopping is one of those things. Since it’s possible to work with live content now, e-commerce has begun to find ways to apply some Live Blog strategies to their benefit.
Thus, the concept of live commerce gained life. China is already a leader in this method of sales. If you look it up, you’ll see that most of their e-commerce is done through live content, primarily live streaming.
However, in the US and Europe, people still tend to turn to social media to learn more about products and services.
People love when things are done in the simplest way possible, and live streaming of products brings the benefit of the one-click purchase. Suppose the company already has a register of the customer with the required information (like name, email, card number, and address). In that case, they can easily buy anything they want from live content.
Overall, there are many benefits a Live Blog can bring to your e-commerce company. These are 20 (yes, TWENTY) reasons to acquire a Live Blog solution to your brand.
1. Be up-to-date
We live in an era of technology and immediacy. People don’t want to wait until the end of the day to hear about the news. They want information as it is occurring. Having that in mind, acquiring a Live Blog platform will showcase your business as modern and trendy.
It’ll always be on top of the news, sharing brand-new content and displaying products as soon as they come out.
2. Real-time engagement
Since publishing happens in real-time, it means everyone online at the moment will be able to see your content and talk about it while things are happening. The system of a Live Blog has features for real-time comments, shares, and reaction buttons. As content is being updated, people are talking about it.
3. Use Live Chat
When we talk about real-time engagement, there’s no way to leave out the use of Live Chat. Customers can interact with the brand and with each other to talk about the content, products, or events occurring right there and then.
More than that, a Live Chat can also be used for immediate customer support, marketing, and sales strategies. This research shows that companies that use Live Chat have a 48% increase in revenue and 40% in overall conversion rates.
4. User-generated content
Because a Live Blog can collect content from several sources, it can also use content that the users themselves are sharing. This approach connects the audience and makes them eager to share more and mention your brand online.
This is another reason to create hashtags in your online community. That way, people will share using your hashtag, and every content will have a category you can put under to make posts more organized inside the Blog.
5. Create a human connection
These factors, such as real-time engagement, sharing user-generated content, and communicating over Live Chat, make it easier to create a brand that’s closer to the audience. It builds a more human connection.
After all, the editorial team is a bit more vulnerable when they work with live content—going live means more significant chances of making mistakes and having unforeseen situations. Thus, the audience will see how the brand behaves in true-to-life scenarios — making the brand more sympathetic.
6. Improve customer relationship
When you build a human connection with the public, you get as a bonus, the improvement of customer relationships. Live Blog is highly associated with bringing a better customer experience.
You are sharing great content and creating a place where customers can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions with you and all other visitors of the page.
7. Watch live streaming
Like any other blog, a Live Blog can also share video content. Only in this case are we talking mainly about live streamings.
They are a big plus to increase sales. Remember when we mentioned China earlier on? While in the US, customers mostly use social media for product information, they go straight to live streaming in China.
If people can see the product being used in a real situation, with no cuts or edits, they are more likely to complete purchase since they know it’s “the real deal.” That’s why, among all these other reasons, e-commerce can benefit from a Live Blog acquisition.
8. Increase sales revenue
Simultaneously, the more people are connected and interested in your content, search engines like Google notice and value this. SEO tactics make a difference to rank your posts, but so does audience engagement. Because of that, your e-commerce will gain a boost in revenue.
Also, it’s possible to work with embedded links and promotional codes inside a Live Blog. It is increasing, even more, your revenue.
9. Launch new products
The release of new products will be exciting with a live stream and real-time interaction from the audience. Can you picture showing that brand-new item and capturing real-time reactions? This is doable with a Live Blog.
People love discovering new products, and they look forward to trying it as soon as possible. So providing them a live stream, with a real person showing what it is about and how it works will be a motive to keep them on your page — and interacting — for a long time.
11. Perform interviews
In the same way, you can use live content to show new products. You can use it to perform interviews. Whether it’s with the brand’s CEO or someone famous, that can be somewhat related to the product.
While the interview is happening on your blog, people can comment and even ask questions for the person being interviewed during the event.
10. Q&A panel
Likewise, question-and-answer panels are an excellent way to catch people’s attention. The audience loves it when they are heard and have their doubts answered. Nowadays, this mostly happens on social media since personal profiles seem more reachable than any other digital media.
However, with Live Blog, you will no longer need to depend on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. You just need to make sure to have a strategy that will lead traffic to your Blog, and then all your content, live streams, and event coverage will take place in a unique platform.
12. Branding
When a brand starts being seen as an expert in the field, things tend to only get better for the business. Sharing live content makes you look updated and concerned about bringing the top news for your public.
A branding strategy includes demonstrating the brand’s position in the market, purpose, and value proposition. All of which will be presented along with the content approach.
13. Dynamic communication
Because it’s simple to interact and share the content on a Live Blog page, the communication between customer and brand becomes more dynamic.
Liveblogging allows the delivery of interactive content at all times. Instead of having a static page, the public can feel like they are a part of what’s happening.
14. Make users spend more time on your page
With real-time engagement and having their actions show up on the streaming feed, the website visitors get so involved in the experience they end up spending more time on your page than they usually would if you were presenting static content.
Additionally, a Live Blog can be used as an area where people can go to talk about overall subjects. It’s up to the company to decide what topic makes the most sense for the business. For example, if you’re in the sports field, your blog can become a place where fans come to share their ideas on games and teams.
15. SEO Optimization
Even if the content is being shared in real-time, you can still work with optimizing it to have greater reach in research tools. First of all, the time people spend on your website already counts as an SEO indicator. That’s because it makes Google recognize your page as important, giving it a better ranking on keyword searches.
With Arena, all the hard work is done for you. This means even if you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll be able to; work on the optimization for your pages.
16. Boost conversion rates
The interaction and real-time conversations happen not only between content and readers or readers among themselves but also between brand and customer. In particular, by using Live Chat, customers can easily talk to an attendant to better understand the product, discounts, and shipping information.
17. Create an online community
By using this dynamic communication tool, people will start to give your blog more attention. Just like you can create a community on social media through hashtag use, you can do the same thing (or even better) in a Live Blog structure.
For instance, in collaboration with FoxSports, Arena’s live blog solution gave them a place where basketball fans could like and share updating posts about the NBA.
18. Make the audience more loyal
When you provide high-quality content, readers notice it. Even more so when they can easily interact and talk about it. Moreover, have a consistent and coherent content strategy to offer personalized themes for your audience.
More than that, listen to their feedback—customers like being heard and having their suggestions implemented. Keep an eye out for their comments, and make sure to answer them.
19. Customer retention
Providing a great customer experience is what makes a customer stick to a brand. Building a customer loyal is side-by-side with increasing customer retention. For both cases, your strategy will be to give them updated content, answer questions, solve problems, and give them a voice to be part of the overall experience.
Of course, personalized notes and emails are essential for this approach. However, Live Blogs are so connected with the customer experience that it plays a big part in making retention happen.
20. Promote user interaction
It’s more than the company creating a connection with the audience. It’s about creating an online community and making customers interact with each other. Liveblogging enables users to pose questions and have other users answer them.
Readers can also reply to pools, leave comments on your page, and retweet your content to their Twitter profile directly from the blog post page. All of this is done without the need to promote interaction, but it’s still worth applying some CTAs in association with the content.
How to acquire a live blog solution?
Arena has everything you need. Our Live Blog solution will help you stand out from competitors in the market and grow your audience with minimum effort.
In order to get the best Live Blog tool for your business, some factors must be taken into account. They include:
- usability for the audience and editorial team
- integration and features
- flexibility to run on multiple devices
- data privacy and safety
Of course, Arena offers all of that and even more. You can find out more about our platform by accessing the Live Blog tool’s FREE TRIAL. This is an opportunity you can’t refuse!
