Live streaming has become mainstream in digital communication. Video content has been driving most of the traffic online and it represents a powerful tool to engage the younger generation who are leading the video and mobile-based media consumption. It also fills a gap for online customers who are missing the human elements of shopping, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Live streaming has become an alternative for marketers and businesses to interact with their customers.
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In China, live commerce has transformed the retail industry and established itself as a major sales channel in less than five years. Following China’s lead, global brands, retailers, and marketplaces are establishing their own live-commerce ventures and events to promote their products, especially in beauty and fashion. According to McKinsey’s analysis published in July live-commerce-initiated sales could account for as much as 10 to 20 percent of all e-commerce by 2026.
According to McKinsey’s analysis, live commerce creates value for brands, retailers and marketplaces primarily in two areas. The first area is the acceleration of conversion. The nature of live commerce keeps viewers’ attention span longer and guides customer decision journeys from awareness to purchase. Companies reported to McKinsey that the conversion rates can reach up to 30 percent, ten times higher than in conventional e-commerce. The other area, live commerce creates value is the improvement of brand appeal and differentiation. When done properly, live commerce can become a tool for brands to strengthen positioning among existing customers and attract new ones, especially with the younger generation who are always looking for innovative shopping experiences. According to McKinsey’s report, companies see their share of younger audiences increase by up to 20 percent.
Launching live commerce sounds like the perfect plan yet brands should take into consideration it can be challenging to adopt the right solution due to the complexity of the media technology and high adoption & operation cost. To tackle these issues and secure ROI, it is essential to understand how to leverage the right technology.
Retail in Asia looked into Channel Hyundai, StyleShare and Reviewty, which have address these challenges. With cloud and advanced technology, they optimised their investments and explored new ways of engaging customers while unlocking insights. Let us walk you through how to adopt live commerce for your business.
‘Channel Hyundai’
Global carmaker Hyundai Motor Company decided to launch a new video-based media platform ‘Channel Hyundai’. It not only plays a key role as a marketing platform for a new way of communication but also helps Hyundai Motor Company engage with global customers during the pandemic.
To enhance customer digital experience, Channel Hyundai allows users to enjoy branded content from any device and through 3 different channels: ‘The Live’ which broadcasts Hyundai’s major live events, ‘the TV’ which provides automobile-related lifestyle contents and the ‘Model’ which shows detailed looks of newly released models.
As Channel Hyundai is targeting global customers around the world from 197 countries, they wanted to quickly deploy the service across the globe ensuring audiences’ seamless access to the platform. To meet these requirements, Channel Hyundai built the media platform on the cloud, which is scalable and allows global customers to access the channel without any latency.
‘StyleShare’
StyleShare is an iconic fashion and beauty e-commerce platform, very popular among female customers in their 20s in Korea for its unique UI & UX similar to well-known social media. Before, product details were mainly delivered with texts and images, and the timeline was updated with user-uploaded pictures along with hashtags such as #ootd, #outfits, and etc.
In recent years, in response to fast-changing media consumption patterns, StyleShare had to constantly innovate the overall shopping experience. With the increasing demand for video content, the company changed its business approach with video by leveraging live streaming programs and VoDs from static images and text-based content.
With a successful adoption of video streaming in their own platform, StyleShare could expand its customer base and recorded 700 percent year-on-year revenue growth in Q1 2020 and 200 percent higher traffic than 6 months ago as of September 2020 and achieved great results in brand loyalty and growth in the customer base.
‘Reviewty’
Reviewty is a beauty community service platform in Vietnam where users can share reviews on cosmetics and ingredients information. With the business fulfilling customers’ needs for transparent information about cosmetics, Reviewty has secured 100,000 users within the first 6 months after launching in January 2020.
To take the business to the next level, Reviewty wanted to adopt live commerce leveraging KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). However, when Reviewty first launched the live commerce service on SNS, their competitors put their links that led the customers to their product purchasing website on live streaming chat windows. As a result, Reviewty’s content and customers were exposed to the competitors during the live streaming. Reviewty felt a strong need to have its own media platform to prevent it from happening again. The simple integration and pay-as-you-go-pricing features of Cloud-based media services made it possible for Reviewty to launch their new live commerce platform in a short period of time.
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Since Reviewty launched its own live commerce on its platform, its revenue has been increasing 30 percent every month. Now, Reviewty is planning to apply more advanced features and functions to their platform; a short clip video targeting Millennials & Gen Z and an AI-based recommendation function to constantly improve customer experience. Technology has been the key driver for Reviewty to take their business to the next level in every stage of growth.
As we can see from the cases above, Live streaming is a great tool to enhance customer experience and boost sales. In order to take full advantage of live streaming, the first step you should take is finding and adopting media technology that can release the burden to manage complex media technology with a reasonable investment.
“Most of our clients consider the media as a growth tool for their business performance and they expect to see an immediate impact but have difficulties to find the right solution due to lack of knowledge on media technology and cost concerns. We suggest an advanced cloud-based media technology that lowers customer technical and economic barriers especially at early stages,” said Jin-ho Jung, media expert at MegazoneCloud, a cloud-managed service provider who has been supporting the adoption of cloud-based media solutions for Hyundai Motor, StyleShare and Reviewty.
If you want to know more about MegazoneCloud Media service, visit: https://www.megazone.com/us/media-service/