How to Develop a Live Streaming Strategy to Grow Your Business
Video has become the centerpiece of digital engagement, and live streaming is now one of the most powerful ways for businesses to connect with audiences in real time. In 2025, video accounts for over 82% of global internet traffic, and more than 8 in 10 people admit that watching a video influenced their purchase choices.
But success requires more than simply hitting “Go Live.” A low-quality or off-message stream can harm your brand. What works is a live streaming strategy that’s clear and intentional, one that defines your goals, aligns format with audience, and uses professional tools to deliver high-quality experiences.
Whether you’re drafting a business live streaming plan 2025, exploring OTT live streaming strategy, or figuring out how to monetize live streaming content in 2025, a structured, thoughtful approach will help you grow your brand with measurable returns.
This guide walks you through how to develop a live video marketing strategy step by step, from setting goals and choosing between public vs professional platforms (like Dacast), to engagement, monetization, and repurposing content. Along the way, we’ll spotlight 2025 trends like AI-powered live streaming tools, multi-platform live streaming for brand growth, and low-latency live streaming solutions for business, while showing how a professional live streaming platform like Dacast can support each stage with confidence.
Table of Contents
- Types of Video Content in a Strategy
- What is a Live Streaming Strategy?
- Step-by-Step: How to Develop a Live Streaming Strategy
- Distribution Options: Public vs. Professional Platforms
- Professional Live Streaming Platforms
- 2025 Trends and Innovations in Live Streaming
- Dacast in Action: Use Cases for Different Industries
- FAQs
- Conclusion
Types of Video Content in a Strategy
A well-rounded branded video strategy isn’t reliant upon one type of content over another; instead, your overall video strategy needs to include each of the four main types of content, with a clear strategy for each type.
The four main types of video content all brands need to consider are:
- Branded video content
- Live streaming video content
- Video on demand
- Over-the-top video
Each type of video content serves a unique purpose, and understanding the differences between the types is key to building the right video strategy.
1. Branded Video Content
The phrase “branded video content” may feel as if it can encompass all video content put out by brands, that’s not exactly the case.
Branded video content, instead, is the content that’s specifically meant to be used to sell your company’s offerings or instruct employees. This type of content includes things such as company explainer videos, how-to instructional videos, and employee training videos.
Depending on how much content you have in this area, your videos may be hosted on an internal server, or they can be hosted externally on a professional video server.
This type of content typically is carefully planned and heavily edited, presenting a polished, finished video to your audience.
2. Live Streaming Video Content
Live streaming content is distributed and viewed as it’s made. This type of content can include live event coverage, podcast streams, and short videos posted to platforms such as Instagram.
Creating a live streaming video doesn’t have to be a complicated undertaking. Sometimes, the content you present will be more organized and planned, such as when you live stream a conference or other virtual event.
Other times, however, live streaming is spontaneous and unpolished, presenting a more “real” or immediate picture to your audience.
Because of the nature of live streaming, which requires a large amount of bandwidth to send the video out to viewers, live streaming video utilizes a professional server.
3. On-Demand and OTT
Video on demand, or VOD, can be used to distribute both planned, edited videos as well as recorded live videos. This model allows your users to access any piece of content they want at any time.
VOD content can be distributed via satellite or cable connection and is available at any time, day or night. This type of content is typically associated with pay-per-view video services, but can also apply to subscription-based video distribution models.
Live streamed content, however, cannot, by definition, be considered VOD content. In order for a user to catch content that is live, they must watch it as it is created. That content can be captured and recorded for later VOD release.
4. Over-the-Top Video
Like VOD, over-the-top video (OTT) allows viewers access to video content at any time they want to view it.
Unlike VOD, however, OTT requires the use of an internet connection. You still get access to pre-recorded content whenever you want it, but the means of getting that content is different than VOD.
Many people consider OTT content to also be VOD because viewers are able to see video whenever they want it, but the means of distribution between VOD and OTT differ.
Streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix are OTT providers, as are company websites that allow users to view a library of videos at their leisure.
What is Live Video Marketing?
Live video marketing is a form of content marketing that focuses on the creation, distribution, and promotion of live video content and how that content can support business goals.
Like all marketing efforts, live video marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To be effective, you must have an idea of the types of live content you want to create, when and how you’ll distribute them and how those pieces of content fit into your overall marketing strategy.
Why a Content Strategy is Important for Video Marketing
Marketing a business online requires a careful, data-driven strategy when it comes to the content you create and use to promote your brand.
Without a strategy for your video marketing, you will expend a great deal of time, energy, and money producing content that your viewers may never watch or that actually do more harm to your efforts than good.
Think of your video marketing content strategy like the map you take on a road trip: You have clear start and endpoints, and you create a guide for how to get there, but you’re also flexible enough to adapt your itinerary as the mood arises.
Your business’s video marketing content strategy is what you’ll use to get you from your starting point — where your business is now — to your final destination — where you want your business to be in the future.
Each step of your video content marketing strategy is a waypoint along that journey, as you create and release a new video. But, your strategy has to be flexible enough that you can adapt it, adding, deleting, and moving video plans around, as the need arises.
What is a Live Streaming Strategy?
A live streaming strategy is the portion of your video content marketing strategy where you create the roadmap for your business’s live-streamed content.
Step-by-Step: How to Develop a Live Streaming Strategy
Define Goals
The first step in a live streaming strategy is setting clear, measurable goals. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, drive conversions, boost audience engagement, or expand global reach? Your objectives will shape every other decision, from content type to distribution method.
For small businesses, a step-by-step live streaming strategy for small businesses may focus on maximizing ROI with limited resources. Defining goals also helps determine whether you need a multi-platform live streaming for brand growth approach or a targeted OTT live streaming strategy. Clear goals ensure your streams contribute to your larger marketing and business strategy.
Understand Your Audience
Next, dive into audience insights. Identify who will watch your live streams, what they care about, and how they consume content. Are they B2B decision-makers, consumers, or niche communities? Tailoring content to your audience increases retention and engagement.
Consider factors like device usage, time zones, and preferred platforms. A business live video platform can provide analytics to guide audience targeting. Understanding your audience also informs whether you prioritize low-latency live streaming solutions for business or if interactive, shoppable features are essential for engagement.
Choose Content Formats
Selecting the right content formats is crucial for a strong live video marketing strategy. Options include webinars, product demos, live events, Q&A sessions, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes streams. Consider integrating pre-recorded elements or on-demand clips to maximize value.
Combining formats allows for a flexible live streaming content plan, ensuring content aligns with both audience expectations and your goals. Additionally, recording streams for VOD or repurposing highlights supports OTT strategies and keeps content relevant beyond the live broadcast.
Select the Right Platform
Choosing the platform affects quality, reach, and monetization potential. Public platforms like Facebook Live and YouTube provide broad exposure but limited control, while professional solutions like Dacast offer branding, analytics, security, and OTT capabilities.
A professional platform allows you to implement a business live streaming plan 2025 with confidence, integrating features like AI-powered live streaming tools, multi-platform distribution, and low-latency delivery. Selecting the right platform ensures your live streams look professional and reach the right audience efficiently.
Plan Promotion and Engagement
Promotion and engagement drive viewership and interaction. Create a strategy to notify audiences via email, social media, or website banners. Use teasers, countdowns, and reminders to boost attendance.
During streams, encourage participation through live polls, chat, or Q&A, increasing engagement. For a more effective strategy, incorporate multi-platform live streaming for brand growth and live streaming for audience engagement tactics. Proper promotion also ensures your professional live streaming platform maximizes reach and ROI.
Monetize
To grow revenue from live streams, integrate monetization into your strategy. Options include pay-per-view, subscriptions, sponsorships, in-stream advertising, and shoppable video. Using a professional live streaming platform with secure payment features ensures smooth transactions. Consider bundling live streams with VOD content or offering exclusive access to drive subscriptions.
Effective monetization should complement your live streaming marketing objectives and align with the overall business live streaming plan 2025, turning engagement into measurable revenue.
Measure and Optimize
Finally, track results to refine your strategy. Use KPIs such as watch time, engagement, conversion rates, and revenue to evaluate success. Analytics from professional platforms like Dacast allow you to assess the effectiveness of your live streaming distribution strategy for global audiences.
Based on insights, adjust content formats, promotion methods, or platform choices. Optimization ensures your step-by-step live streaming strategy for small businesses evolves with audience needs and 2025 trends, including AI-powered tools and interactive streaming features.
Distribution Options: Public vs. Professional Platforms
Brands can distribute live streams using public tools or professional platforms, each with distinct benefits and limitations depending on content and goals.
Public Live Streaming Platforms
Public platforms like IGTV, Facebook Live, YouTube, and Twitch are popular for both short and long-form content. They are easy to use, with minimal learning curves, making them ideal for beginners.
Limitations:
- Content ownership belongs to the platform
- Promotion, monetization, and accessibility are controlled externally
- Limited control for businesses integrating live streaming into a business live streaming plan 2025
Best suited for:
- Businesses with minimal live streaming budgets
- Creators focusing on short, low-bandwidth videos
- Companies unconcerned with preserving content for future use
Professional Live Streaming Platforms
On the opposite end of the spectrum are professional live streaming platforms.
These platforms can range from easy to use and simplistic to feature-rich and complicated, and everything in between. They also cost money to purchase or gain access to, making them less accessible to small creators and startups than the public tools.
Professional live streaming platforms offer more bandwidth than many of the public options, allowing for longer live streams suitable for creators who want to stream events and lectures. Additionally, many professional platforms provide the option of recording a live stream, giving you the ability to preserve your live streaming content and offer it to viewers on demand through other means.
Choosing a professional platform that offers white-label capability also means that you retain control over your content and how you make money off it.
If you want to save your content and distribute it on your website, charging money for every view, you can do that with a professional platform. This means that content creators and brands have much more control over how the content they create is used and, ultimately, more control over their business’s success.
Professional streaming platforms are best suited for:
- Brands that have the budget to allot to live streaming and video hosting
- Companies that want extra features and tools to accompany their live streams
- Creators who want to be able to save their streamed video content for later
- Brands that routinely create long-form video content, including educational institutions, places of worship, and live event broadcasts
- Businesses who want control over how their content is stored, viewed, distributed, and monetized
Options for Distributing Live Content
Choosing the most effective method for distributing your live content is essential to execute your strategy effectively.
Live Streaming
The first method for distributing your live content is to live stream it. This option gives the video to your audience as it’s made, without editing or polishing.
Live content can be longer, more complicated pieces such as lectures, worship services, and question-and-answer sessions, or shorter pieces such as quick announcements and short tutorials.
The platform you choose to use when distributing your live streamed content largely depends on its length and its purpose within your content strategy.
For the shorter pieces of live streamed content, especially those designed to draw in new followers or entice people to make a purchase within a short period of time, platforms such as IGTV and Facebook Live may be better suited.
Longer live streams require more bandwidth than some of the free platforms allow, meaning professional live streaming platforms may be a necessity.
Video on Demand
If you want your live streamed content to be available to be played on an OTT platform, you will need the means to record the content as you live stream it.
For this, you will likely need some sort of professional capture and storage platform that can simultaneously live stream and record your content.
2025 Trends and Innovations in Live Streaming
Live streaming continues to grow at a rapid pace, with projections indicating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6% from 2025 to 2029. Businesses are adopting advanced technologies to enhance audience experiences, including AI-assisted streaming, cloud-based production workflows, interactive video, and low-latency protocols for real-time engagement.
Remote streaming powered by 5G and Starlink is opening new opportunities for global broadcasts without traditional infrastructure. These trends make it essential to build a business live streaming plan for 2025 that incorporates cutting-edge tools like AI-powered live streaming tools, multi-platform distribution, and interactive experiences to maintain audience attention, improve engagement metrics, and maximize ROI.
Dacast in Action: Use Cases for Different Industries
Dacast’s professional live streaming platform supports businesses across industries by providing reliable, scalable, and secure streaming solutions. Examples include:
- Sports & Esports: Live match coverage, behind-the-scenes content, and multi-camera streams with low-latency live streaming solutions for business to engage fans in real time. Recorded streams can be repurposed as highlights, VOD content, or social clips to maximize audience reach.
- Corporate & Training: Webinars, product launches, and internal training sessions benefit from AI-powered live streaming tools, automatic captions, translations, and secure access for global teams. This allows companies to reduce training costs and increase engagement across regions.
- Education & E-Learning: Universities and online learning platforms can broadcast lectures, workshops, and interactive classes with audience participation tools, polls, and multi-platform live streaming for brand growth. Recorded sessions can be reused for on-demand learning.
- Faith-Based & Nonprofit Organizations: Churches and nonprofits can reach dispersed audiences with live services, events, and archived content for later viewing, helping to increase engagement, donations, and community involvement.
These examples illustrate how Dacast empowers organizations to implement a step-by-step live streaming strategy for small businesses and large enterprises, enabling growth, engagement, and revenue opportunities.
FAQs
1. What is a live streaming strategy, and why do businesses need one in 2025?
A live streaming strategy is a step-by-step plan that defines your goals, audience, content formats, and distribution methods for live video. In 2025, businesses need one because live streaming is now central to brand growth, audience engagement, and measurable ROI. Without a clear business live streaming plan, companies risk wasting resources on streams that don’t align with their larger marketing objectives.
2. How can I monetize my live streams?
There are several ways to monetize live streaming content in 2025, including pay-per-view events, subscription models, advertising, sponsorships, and shoppable live video. With a professional live streaming platform like Dacast, businesses can integrate secure payment gateways, offer tiered access, and scale their monetization strategy globally. The key is choosing a model that aligns with your audience and business goals.
3. What’s the difference between public and professional streaming platforms?
Public platforms like YouTube or Facebook Live are free and widely accessible, but they offer limited control over branding, data, and monetization. A professional live streaming platform such as Dacast provides advanced tools for customization, analytics, security, and OTT distribution. For businesses, the difference often comes down to ownership. Professional solutions give you greater control over content, audience, and revenue.
4. How can I measure the success of my live streaming campaigns?
Measuring success requires looking beyond just view counts. Businesses should track KPIs such as watch time, engagement rates, audience retention, conversions, and revenue generated. A structured live streaming content plan includes clear goals and performance benchmarks, supported by analytics from professional platforms like Dacast.
5. Does Dacast support interactive or shoppable live streams?
Yes. Dacast supports interactive features like live chat, polls, and Q&A to boost live streaming for audience engagement. For businesses exploring e-commerce, Dacast integrates with shoppable video tools, enabling you to turn streams into real-time sales opportunities. This makes it easier to combine a live video marketing strategy with direct revenue growth.
6. Can I record live streams on Dacast for later VOD use?
Absolutely. With Dacast, you can record and repurpose live streaming content, turning your events into on-demand assets for continued audience engagement. This feature is especially useful for OTT live streaming strategies, training sessions, and step-by-step live streaming strategies for small businesses that want to maximize ROI from a single stream.
7. How can AI tools improve my live streaming strategy?
AI-powered live streaming tools are reshaping video production in 2025. They can automate captions and translations, optimize streaming quality in real time, and generate highlights or clips for repurposing. When built into your live streaming distribution strategy, AI helps improve efficiency, expand global reach, and deliver more personalized audience experiences.
Conclusion
With live video streaming on the rise — growing by more than 72 percent from the first quarter of 2018 to the first quarter of 2019 — it’s more important than ever for brands looking to break through to begin looking for ways to make live streaming work for them.
With the creation of a careful, calculated live video marketing strategy, businesses can go from clueless about live streaming to making the exclusivity and excitement of live video work for them. By taking the time to plan a live video marketing strategy, including the types of videos to be created, how they’re to be promoted, the right platform for distribution, and a connection to the brand’s overall business goals, live streaming can help skyrocket your brand.
And with Dacast’s feature-rich, professional live streaming platform—recognized as a top solution for small and medium businesses—you get full control over your content, the ability to record live streams for on-demand use, advanced analytics, and more. Experience the power of multi-platform live streaming for brand growth and AI-assisted tools designed to boost engagement and monetization.
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