What is Live Engagement?

Engaging with your customers — constantly and effectively — is essential in today’s online world. There are multiple ways to do this, from blog content and email campaigns to social media posts and YouTube videos.

Most engagement, while it’s highly effective, tends to fall short in one key area — it’s not live. Customers read blog articles published several months ago, they watch videos recorded last November. You’re still talking to them and engaging with them, but it’s not happening in real-time.

To really ramp up your engagement efforts, then, it’s important to think about ways to connect with your customer in a more immediate and live way. This is what we call live engagement, and we think it has the potential to transform digital marketing and sales.

Live engagement involves striking up a real-time conversation with your customers at any stage in the sales process. Whether they’ve just stumbled upon the first piece of content by your brand, or they’re getting ready to hit the buy button, or they’re already a satisfied customer, you can engage at any point in the best way for the situation.

It’s highly effective and represents a more intimate connection and deeper satisfaction. Before we move onto the stats supporting this, let’s take a quick look at some of the channels that are used in live engagement:

• Live videos. Unlike traditional video content, live videos are broadcast to your viewers in real-time. This means they feature cutting-edge information, a highly relevant vibe, and the opportunity for viewers to ask questions and interact with the host there and then. 

• Chatbots. Chatbots are an increasingly popular way for customers to interact with your brand simply by sending instant messages through a chat platform. Sales chatbots can solve basic problems quickly, refer users to sales staff, and guide interested customers through large chunks of the buying journey.

• One-to-one selling platforms. Chatbots have the ability to qualify leads and send these customers to a member of the sales team for one-to-one interaction. This is the pinnacle of live engagement, quickly putting an interested and engaged customer into contact with a human to complete the sale.

Live engagement allows brands to take a more hands-on role in working with their customers. Instead of relying solely on static content, they can engage with their audience in the moment, dealing with questions and issues as they arise.

It’s a much more dynamic way of approaching the sales process and has a huge amount of potential. In the next sections, we’ll show you how to use live engagement in your own business. 

First, however, let’s take a look at some statistics that highlight why live engagement is so valuable.