Are you an e-commerce business owner who has just finished building your online store and is now looking for ways to attract new customers on social media platforms to sell your products? But with such fierce competition in the e-commerce market, how can a young and rising player like yourself gain a competitive edge over other brands? That’s right! You’ve guessed it – live selling campaigns.
Live selling is another method of e-commerce, in which an online seller uses a live video streaming platform, such as Shopee Live, Facebook Live, and TikTok Live, to demonstrate their products and sell them to a bunch of online audiences in real-time.
To give you more insights on the potential of live selling, a survey has recorded that 16% of Malaysian digital consumers made purchases from live selling by the end of 2022’s 4th quarter. With over 14.43 million online shoppers in Malaysia, 16% of the total sum would simply mean that you have a rough estimate of 2.3 million audiences waiting to discover your brand and products.
Now, wouldn’t you like to know how you can utilise the live selling method and create successful campaigns to boost your sales and give you the competitive advantage you need? Then keep reading! Because we’re here to spill the tea about live selling tips for Malaysian businesses like yours.
3 Tips to Create Successful Live Selling Strategies
The key to a successful live selling campaign has always been to think of ways to provide a fast-track, engaging, yet straightforward purchase experience for your shoppers. Thus, before you kickstart your live selling campaign, here are a few live selling tips for Malaysian businesses like yours to follow, in order to create a strategy that resonates with your audience and drives sales:
Tips 1: Identify your target audience
By identifying your target audience, you’ll gain a better understanding of your customer’s needs and understand the underlying motive of why they’re looking to purchase your products. When you know who your target audience is, you can gain insights into their purchase behaviours and preferences.
Thus, with all the data you’ve gathered from your target customers, you get to tailor more personalised live selling strategies by:
- Providing relevant experience:
Providing relevant and real-life experience on how your products can solve their pain points can spark your viewer’s interest and boost your engagement on your live sale. This also allows them to share their concerns, which you can then answer to build a sense of trust in your community.
- Creating more effective marketing messages:
By using the data to identify what motivates your customers to make a purchase and how your products can fulfil their desires, you can create marketing messages that resonate so closely with them. This will seem as if they’re talking to a trusted friend who always recommends good products when they need them most.
Building an online persona that coincides with their values and interests:
Building an online persona that aligns with your customers’ values and interests will allow you to connect with them on a deeper level. Do so, and you shall see that they’re sharing your live selling sessions and brands without you asking them to! This is because they’re starting to take a sense of pride in your online persona that speaks so closely to what they stand for.
Tip 2: Choose the right platform for your live selling in Malaysia
Did you know that just because each and every platform claims that they have an enormous amount of users doesn’t mean that those audiences using the platform will automatically reach their way to your live streaming?
This is why, when you’re choosing a platform to conduct your live selling, there are a few important factors that you should consider, which include:
- Audience reach:
When you choose a platform to conduct your live selling, you should look at the relevant audience that matches your target customers instead of the total number of active users they have on their platform. It’s always better to attract a small but right crowd rather than a huge crowd that isn’t looking for your products.
- Features and capabilities:
A live seller must look into what features and capabilities a platform offers, as some may even track your sales data, making your life so much easier during and after each live selling campaign! - User experience:
Choosing a platform that offers a smooth and intuitive user experience will help ensure that your live selling sessions are engaging and enjoyable, making it easier for your customers to make quick purchases. - Technical support:
Choosing a platform that provides reliable technical support will help ensure that little to no issues will arise when you’re conducting your live selling sessions. This is of utmost importance, considering you may lose your crowd even at the slightest lag.
Extra tips! To maximise your outreach to live shoppers, you can actually hold your live selling campaigns using 2 platforms. Yes! And among all the social media and e-commerce platforms that host live selling channels, the top 3 champions that dominated the live shopping industry in SEA are Shopee (27%), Facebook (25.5%), and TikTok (22.5%). So choose wisely!
Tip 3: Content planning matters
Have you ever had the thought of WHAT IF you accidentally said things you shouldn’t say or do something you shouldn’t have when you’re on live? Everything will be thrown into a state of chaos with hundreds or thousands of people watching. Well, content planning is your prevention plan for, you know, preventing such things from happening.
Content planning is essential for live selling for several reasons:
- Preparation:
Planning what products you’ll demonstrate, how you’ll present them to your audience, and what promotion offers you’ll provide, allows you to run your live selling session smoothly.
- Build anticipation:
Having to push out content on your social media platforms prior to your live Session event helps build anticipation that can give your audience a sense of urgency to join your live selling.
- Creativity:
Planning creative content can help capture your audience’s attention before they start hopping off to other platforms or live-stream videos. Thus, having engaging content, such as Q&A sessions or collaborating with influencers,helps you to stand out from the competition!
- Use relevant hashtags:
Incorporating relevant hashtags from the promoting stage of your live selling campaigns helps you to make it easier for social media users to discover your posts, which can increase your visibility and reach a wider audience.
Additionally, you can also track and analyse how effective your live selling campaigns are by measuring your engagement and reach of posts with said relevant hashtags.
BONUS! Now that you’ve imprinted some of the most useful tips in creating great live selling strategies in your brain, let’s talk about the tricks that can help you enhance these strategies to another level!
Trick 1: Use storytelling to demonstrate your product
Instead of just highlighting the benefits and features of your products, which is simply hard to watch as an audience, implementing storytelling techniques to demonstrate your products in a more relatable way to their specific needs will help you better engage with your customers.
Let’s take a look at Maybelline New York Malaysia. Through storytelling, the brand demonstrates its products by inviting famous makeup artists or beauty influencers to share some tips on how Maybelline’s cosmetic products can help them overcome specific issues commonly faced when they’re putting on makeup.
Through this storytelling engagement, Maybelline New York Malaysia is able to create successful live selling events to not only showcase the uniqueness of their products but also build brand awareness in Malaysia’s cosmetic markets.
Trick 2: Be authentic and transparent to your audience
Like a physical store, online shoppers who shop at live commerce often look for authentic and transparent brands during their livestream sessions to avoid getting ‘scammed’ or ‘ripped off’ for their purchases. Being transparent and authentic in your live selling events will help you build a better brand image, as well as establish your authority in your respective industry.
One of the best examples is led by The Body Shop Malaysia. As a global beauty brand known for its ethical and sustainable approach to its beauty products, The Body Shop Malaysia often demonstrates the behind-the-scenes on how they package and deliver their products using sustainable materials.
During their live events, they also show how committed they are to animal welfare by sharing stories about how they partnered up with local communities to get ethical sourcing of their ingredients.
By being authentic and transparent during its live selling events, the brand is able to build a loyal customer base which values its commitment to ethical and sustainable practices.
Win Over Your Audience: Download Our Whitepaper on Live Selling!
All in all, live selling has become a game-changer in the world of e-commerce, in which online businesses like yours are presented with a unique opportunity to directly build a personal relationship through engaging ways. By leveraging the power of live streaming, you’ll create an immersive shopping experience for your customers and help you to build trust, loyalty, and a sense of community.
So, you better not miss out on Ninja Van’s first-ever whitepaper on live selling in Southeast Asia, where we present you with more interesting and valuable insights that can help you to capitalise on live selling trends and take your business to the next level.
References:
- Emplifi – The Leading Unified Cx Platform (2023). The live video shopping statistics brands can’t ignore in 2023. Emplifi. Retrieved from https://emplifi.io/resources/blog/live-shopping-statistics
- John Koetsier (2022). Livestream Shopping: A $500 Billion Market In 2022 As Amazon, Google, Facebook, TikTok Jump In? Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/01/22/livestream-shopping-a-500-billion-market-in-2022-as-amazon-google-facebook-tiktok-jump-in/?sh=2598b0923bc5
- Kaleigh Moore (2022). Live Selling: Trends, Benefits and Best Practices to Grow Your Retail Business. Shopify. Retrieved from https://www.shopify.com/my/retail/live-selling
- Kayla Carmicheal (2022). Target Audience: How to Find Yours [+ 5 Campaign Examples]. Hubspot. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/target-audience
