LinkedIn is evidently a key platform to host and market events for professional audiences. Are you hosting an upcoming event for professionals in your industry to attend? Even if you don’t use LinkedIn for streaming the event itself, you need to at least use it to promote your event to relevant professionals. They’ll be looking to LinkedIn to investigate which events they wish to attend. This was shown by Hubspot, who found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter.
So, would you like to take advantage of this extremely useful platform as an event organiser or marketer? If so, read our LinkedIn event promotion tips below.
1. Advanced Search
When you’re still in the planning stage of your event, you can use LinkedIn’s advanced search to search for speakers. For instance, if you’re hosting a CPD event which aims to provide expertise from senior construction engineers, you might want to search for engineers in the construction industry. You might also wish to filter by companies with a certain number of employees to ensure that these people are experienced thought leaders.
You can also use this feature to find new connections that your event might appeal to. You could search for a certain topic, add the Events filter to see similar events to the one you’re planning (and perhaps also the Location filter to only reach people from your geographic target audience if applicable), and click Attend Event to see a list of other people who are attending this event. If you think they’d also want to attend your similar event, invite them to connect – but don’t instantly pitch to them. Include a note in your connection request that makes it clear that the main reason you want to connect is because they’re in your industry (and perhaps that you like to share knowledge about this industry).
2. Using LinkedIn Profiles For Event Marketing
After using advanced search to discover your target audience in your industry, you can visit the Activity section of their profile to see what type of content they engage with. This could give you some excellent topic ideas, by helping you gauge what interests your target audience.
Don’t forget to also invite some of the connections you already have, that might be interested in the event. Don’t go overboard inviting connections you’re not close enough with; don’t invite someone who you’d be annoyed with if they invited you to an industry event out of nowhere to build attendee numbers. And make sure that your invite is somehow related to parts of their profile. For instance, state that you notice from their profile that they’re interested in a certain topic that your event covers.
3. Sharing Your Schedule
Building anticipation and excitement about your event is a crucial part of LinkedIn event promotion. Event marketing on LinkedIn is paramount, because this is where you have found your audience.
Documents, especially PDFs with multiple pages shown as slides that people can click through, can result in much higher views and engagements on LinkedIn. So, don’t forget to share your event’s schedule as a PDF on LinkedIn. You can use the company status update feature to notify your colleagues about this post. Hopefully, you can encourage them to reshare it to their network.
This is a great opportunity to get people to read about your event. This is because PDFs on LinkedIn have a long dwell time. In other words, people will view it for longer in the newsfeed and click through the slides, which’ll encourage LinkedIn’s algorithm to boost the post and allow it to reach more people.
This is a great way of letting people know why your event is relevant to them and which speakers they can look forward to hearing from. So don’t waste this PDF resource – share it in LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your industry to give its reach an extra boost, as the people in these groups may also share the schedule with connections that may be interested.
We have a LinkedIn group for corporate event planners. Its aim is to enhance your event organisation skills and help you promote your events to more professionals. If you’d like to promote your next event, for instance its schedule, in our group, join it here.
4. Other Pre-Event Promotions
Other than the schedule of your event, you can post about many other aspects to build anticipation. For instance, you could post LinkedIn articles giving biographies about your upcoming event’s speakers, partners, sponsors, and volunteers, or the behind-the-scenes of the event set-up. Your speakers or event planning team might also wish to write a featured article which you could share. Make it appear as though everybody’s talking about your next event, and it’ll happen. Details like making your profile banner about the event, can keep it front of mind for potential attendees.
You can also use LinkedIn Events to promote your event – once you’ve created an Event on here, people can click to share the event, view its details, be notified about changes to it, and even invite their other connections to it.
5. Using LinkedIn Live
Livestreaming an event to any social media page will inevitably increase your reach. People who may be unaware of it could get a notification about it when scrolling. They might alternatively see in their feed that you’re currently live. However, if your event is aimed at industry professionals and has the aim of presenting your organisation as a serious industry leader, LinkedIn Live is the best way to reach your desired audience and not have irrelevant viewers lurking on the stream without adding value.
Data source: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Do you want to cause conversations in your industry and make your organisation the most influential thought leader it can be? As the above infographic shows, LinkedIn Live can therefore be a great platform on which to broadcast your events.
If you have any enquiries about livestreaming your next corporate event, or you’d like an event recording to share on LinkedIn for promotional purposes, contact us here.
Do you use LinkedIn to promote your events? Did you know about these event marketing and promotion features on LinkedIn? Tell us all about your event marketing strategy in the comments.
Comments