Covid 19 pandemic (that is hopefully behind us) limited the possibilities for travel and face-to-face meetings. Luckily, adaptable business people quickly found a solution and turned towards online events. One such example are LinkedIn Events.
This networking feature enables LinkedIn members to discover workshops, meetups and other relevant events in their professional networks without face-to-face contact. They can use this chance to build relationships and join communities easily. With time, this setup became a less expensive option than its in-person counterparts and an excellent alternative to offline meetings.
So, how can you use LinkedIn events for your event marketing? Keep reading our guide and leverage this tool on the largest network for professionals in the world.
Why LinkedIn events?
First of all, a quick reminder about the size of LinkedIn.
Over 830 million members are using this network, making it the world’s biggest professional network. Moreover, there are more than 9 billion impressions on the LinkedIn feed each week! Add to this the fact that around 3 million people share updates on LinkedIn and you have a high organic reach with relatively low effort!
The numbers we mentioned make LinkedIn one of the most effective social networks you can use to promote your business. This means that:
- Many people will see the events you create. You can invite your connections to attend them. If you’re an organizer, page admin, or attendee, you can send up to 1000 invitations weekly. With LinkedIn connections limit in place, this is great value added that helps you increase your reach.
- You will be able to see the events of your interest easily and expand your own network as well. This works similarly to the way you see connection suggestions or groups that might interest you.
- You can manage large audiences in a few clicks – LinkedIn events features are developed in a way that will save you a lot of time and resources that you’d need when using multiple tools in event organization.
The feature was first launched in 2011, and upgraded with a new version in late 2019. Now, you can use extensive features to organize events through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn users are very proactive, so you can use it for more than just business events. You can use this platform to promote any activity – conferences, webinars, yoga classes, cooking courses, music events, etc. Attendees will be able to connect and engage through them, which means a community building and promotional tool for you.
Creating a LinkedIn Event to inform and promote your upcoming virtual summit, for instance, is a great addition to your virtual event plan.
In any case, don’t skimp on such a helpful tool.
How to create LinkedIn Events?
Let’s get straight to the business and explain how to create LinkedIn events with all new features that came in 2022. It’s easy to do it from either a desktop site or mobile app. You’ll need admin privileges if you’re doing this on behalf of a company page. Later, you’ll be able to manage it with other admins of the page. The process is pretty simple:
Click the Home icon at the top of the page.
You will see a panel on your left. Here, you will see Events. Click on the Add icon next to them.
A pop-up window will appear, asking you to add important information about your event. The event-creation mode is pretty detailed, so you’ll be able to customize the following:
Event name. You should add a unique name that makes your event recognizable and easy to find. For example: “Trends in Fraud Detection in the AdTech Industry”. This is how all the people working in business analytics in AdTech companies who are interested in keeping up to date with the trends will be able to find it.
Appropriate time zone. This comes in handy when you’re organizing international events.
Date and time of your event. Set the date and time when your event starts and when it ends.
If you create an event from a page profile, you’ll have the option of using a LinkedIn registration form. This is how LinkedIn members can register for your event if it’s not open for all. Keep in mind that you will also need to disclose your privacy policy to inform your attendees on how you plan to use their information.
Description. Type a brief description here to give more information about the theme of the event.
Speakers. Start typing the name of the speakers, and if they are LinkedIn members, you will be able to select them from a drop-down menu. They will all be automatically invited to the event as well.
After you fill the elementary information in, you only have a couple of steps left.
Share your event to promote it and type in a short description so people can easily get the grasp on the content. Then, select the attendees. Click Post, and your event is created!
Remember that you can change the event details after creating it. Simply go to the edit option of your events and update what’s needed.
Features and tools of LinkedIn events
There are so many great features you can use when creating online events on LinkedIn. To make all of them easier to implement we have separated them into two phases – before and during/after the event.
Before the event
LinkedIn events have unique features that enable you to reach your target audience. For example, they will get personalized recommendations via the “My Network” section.
Organic on-page discovery of the event works for you as well – it will help you match your audiences’ interests. In addition, you’ll have an option to share the event with your followers after you have created it.
Let’s say you’re targeting women in STEM who are interested in meeting people from the industry and keeping up to date with latest trends. Since they are likely to follow pages and groups on the topic, LinkedIn algorithms will show your event to them.
They will also suggest you the target audience for your campaign. You can use these suggestions, edit them, or reset the audience if you want to choose your audience by yourself.
LinkedIn has done an amazing thing here. Posts about events stand out from other content in the feed. This makes it harder for your events to get lost in the sea of content.
With LinkedIn, you won’t have to worry about reminding your attendees that an event is approaching. Your attendees will get a notification a week away, three days before, and a day preceding the event. They will also be notified if any of their connections are attending it.
Before the event starts, keep your attendees engaged and warm them up for the incoming event. There are plenty of options provided by LinkedIn, from asking questions, creating polls, interviewing your speakers, or posting frequently asked questions.
Source: Linkedin Blog
Start with such posts a couple of weeks in advance. This will help attendees get familiar with the topics. They can use it as an opportunity to meet other attendees as well. It will positively affect the engagement and networking potential that your event has.
Keep your LinkedIn event feed dynamic. For example, someone might prefer data visualization over videos, so be creative with your posts. The goal here is to post content that keeps your attendees interested.
LinkedIn event chat is one more great feature that you can use. Chat is where all your attendees can gather and build business connections. This means that networking can start before the event itself! Then, depending on the engagement of your attendees in chat, you can set the tone for the main event.
As you can see, LinkedIn has added useful features to their events, so use them wisely. Many LinkedIn events have too low activity. This is primarily due to the fear that their audience might get bored. But on the contrary, they can lose interest and feel unappreciated if you don’t entertain them before the event.
Put yourself in the shoes of your attendees. Imagine you signed up for an event and saw no activity from the organizers – you’d take them less seriously than if they regularly engaged in their pre-event activities.
During/after the event
There is an option for your attendees to receive a push notification once your event starts. This is one last chance to remind them about the due date in case they missed some of the previous alerts.
After the event ends, you should prioritize collecting impressions. You can use polls and feedback forms that are parts of LinkedIn event feed. This is also a great way to keep the engagement of your attendees high after the event. They can continue to interact with each other and stay close to your business as well.
Later, you can use the option of retargeting that LinkedIn has for similar future projects.
How to use LinkedIn events analytics
With LinkedIn Events Analytics, you can see if the effort you put into organizing online events paid off or if you need a change in approach. This is another great feature added by LinkedIn that helps you determine the quality of your activities and identify areas to leverage or improve. You’ll make data-driven decisions on follow-up steps and be able to improve your promotion, targeting, engagement, etc. if you’re not happy with how your events go.
Why is this a valuable feature for marketers? If you are like us, you have gone through the struggle of calculating ROI of your events, trying to find out the background of your attendees, ect, and spent a lot of time doing so. Here, you’ll get a lot of the data instantly, such as:
Visitor and attendee data. If you are the event organizer, you’ll be able to see all your event attendees (even if you didn’t require them to sign up via the registration form). You’ll also see the number of total and unique visits, which usually indicates how interesting or well-promoted your event was.
Demographics data. Here, you’ll be able to learn more about your audiences – their job titles, industries, companies they work for, etc. This is a great way to see if you managed to reach your target group.
Engagement metrics. You can track your attendees’ reactions and comments they made during your event. Why is engagement an important metric? Because it shows the level of interest of your audience. Zero comments usually means that you didn’t manage to engage your audience to participate, and you should work on it more in future events.
Can you promote LinkedIn events?
Of course. As with nearly any marketing activity online, you can pay for a better reach.
Even though LinkedIn events are great, they don’t come without challenges. Sometimes, getting people to attend your event can be slow. You need to invite your connections, post about the events in different LinkedIn groups, and do a lot of manual work.
In the end, all this effort might not pay off since you’ll be able to reach an insufficient number of people. So you better be safe than sorry. If you aren’t sure that your event will reach your target audience organically, you should run ads on LinkedIn. Simply go to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager Tool section and find Format Event Ads to promote your event.
A combination of organic and sponsored approaches in the promotion of your event will give you the best results, if your budget allows it.
Conclusion
Regardless of the niche you are in, LinkedIn events will help you in your event marketing efforts. With them, you get distribution, content management, and analytics of your event marketing for free (we’ll speak more about this below). You can use them as an exclusive networking event or combine them with other online channels and offline events. The events don’t have to be held on LinkedIn, which makes it a no-strings-attached engaging channel that can help you reach your target audience.
From online workshops and seminars to meetups and more LinkedIn events give you, as a B2B marketer, a powerful tool that can help you with brand development and influential reach online.
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