Music festivals were some of the earliest live streaming adopters, capitalizing on the power of the live stream to exponentially broaden their reach with Millennials and increase brand awareness globally. One of our clients, Ultra Music Festival, started with just two festivals which attracted 200,000 attendees. While that number sounds substantial, it pales in comparison to the reach they now have. Once Ultra began streaming free, high quality live video from their festivals, they broadened their reach to over a billion fans across 21 festivals per year.

You don't have to be in the entertainment industry to use live video to drive your business goals. Any company that uses live events as part of their marketing strategy can benefit from using live video streaming to amplify the reach and effectiveness of these events. Even if events are not currently part of your strategy, you can use live video to educate or connect with your customers in a new and innovative way.

Here are four ways that live video can increase your marketing ROI:

1. Increase engagement with your audience
Live video is becoming a constant part of people's lives and is the most engaging content format available to marketers across all sectors. Last year, Facebook users watched over 100 million hours of video content every day, and 20 percent of those videos were live broadcasts. Facebook users spend three times longer watching live videos than videos that are not live, and they comment ten times more. There's something about the sense of community viewers feel when watching something live as a group that drives higher engagement than videos that are not live. In fact, it's so engaging that Facebook's algorithm gives live videos priority in users' feeds.

2. Boost your reach and brand awareness
High quality, free live video is very shareable and scales quickly, especially when hosted on a global social network. There are 192 countries in the world, and in one of our typical corporate live streaming events we will have viewers from 186 of those countries. Our most viewed live video garnered 120 million views. That's more than the circulation of The New York Times or the number of Kendall Jenner's Instagram followers. In terms of reach, live video is one of the most cost effective ways to get your message out to a huge audience.

3. Gain new customer insights
When a customer watches a live video on a third party platform or on your website, you have the opportunity to collect information about your viewers. On a basic level, you can collect contact information by requiring viewers to log into a user profile before viewing, or collect data from their social profiles for future retargeting. On a behavioral level, you can see watch how viewers react to your content in real time: what prompts them to like, what sort of comments they post, and when they enter or exit the live video. You don't always get this level of detailed reaction from in-person attendees.

4. Increase in-person attendance
Many companies worry that offering live video footage of an event will cannibalize in person attendance. But in fact studies have shown that the opposite is true - 30 percent of people who watch a live video of an event will attend the same event the following year. People are often constrained by time or distance from attending in person but still very interested in the content. Or they might be uncertain about whether they can commit and are looking for a taste of what the event is like. Either way these viewers are highly interested in your business and have high intent - they are great leads.

Come back in two weeks to learn which types of live video offer the highest rates of success and engagement.