Live-streaming is an innovative marketing strategy that has enabled top influencers to sell millions of products in a very short space of time. This study analyzes how rhetoric, voice, and facial expression lead to winning strategies for these influencers. In this work, we employ text, audio, and image analyses to discover top influencers' winning strategies based on 24 pretest videos of 6 influencers from Taobao with the follow-up experiment and 600 videos of 50 influencers from Douyin. Our study 1 (pretest on Taobao videos) identified three strategies – clarified jargon, voice arousal, and happy facial expression - employed by top influencers. In the follow-up experiment (study 2), we looked at the literature on persuasion and sales and formed the hypothesis that top influencers’ strategies could benefit purchase intention through credibility, product evaluation, and audience emotions. We designed the experiment videos mocking top, middle, and bottom influencers, and our results supported all hypotheses. Lastly, our study 3 (big data on Douyin) demonstrates how sales performance is affected by clarified jargon, voice arousal, and happy facial expressions in the influencer’s live-streaming content. We employ a multi-modality analysis and discover the significant result of employing clarified jargon, voice arousal, and happy facial expressions. Two interaction effects on sales were discovered: the interaction of clarified jargon and voice arousal, and the interaction of voice arousal and happy face. This research is one of the first to employ a multi-method approach to examine the content and non-verbal strategies in livestreaming marketing. It has important implications for influencers and influencers-to-be, for brands, and for platform companies hosting both influencers and brands.