How to Use LinkedIn to Market Your Events

Social media has become a popular tool for marketing events. It’s completely transformed the event marketing industry. This blog post will highlight how to use LinkedIn to market your events.

There are currently 3.196 billion active users on social media worldwide. And more than 610 million of them are actively using LinkedIn.

Contrary to popular belief, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network.

Talk about a sleeping giant that the business world may be ignoring. LinkedIn is no longer just a resume building tool, it’s an excellent resource for B2B marketers.

The professional network often gets overlooked in the event marketing industry. If you aren’t actively using LinkedIn and you are in the events industry, you are truly missing out.

There are millions of potential customers and prospective event attendees right at your fingertips.

In this blog post, we’ll highlight how to use LinkedIn as a tool to enhance your event marketing strategy.

Tap influencers, speakers, and employees to post a status update on LinkedIn

Start with the basics when promoting your event on LinkedIn.

Collaborate with industry influencers, conference speakers, and employees to post status updates about your event on their personal LinkedIn pages.

Provide them with a social media tool kit that includes sample content, graphics, and UTM tracking links to the registration page so that they have everything they need to post on their personal channels.

This is an easy tactic to use to get the word out about your event to a more extensive network.

LinkedIn users are typically active throughout the workday, so its best to post during the early morning or lunchtime hours to make sure your content is being seen by the right audience.

Geotarget LinkedIn postings to reach a niche audience

LinkedIn has a great tool for brands with corporate accounts with over 300 followers that allows you to geotarget your status updates by language, location, job function, university, industry, company size, and seniority level.

This is a great way to make sure your event content is viewed by your target audience.

For example, if you are trying to target accountants in the Toronto area who work for small to medium-sized companies, you can set parameters, so a small audience sees the event content in their newsfeed.

Utilize retargeting tactics to drive registrations

96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy tickets to your event right away. Retargeting is a relatively new tactic being used by event marketers to reach potential event prospects.

Retargeting technology lets you place an invisible code on your website to track the behavior patterns of website visitors who have visited your site and left.

Retargeting allows you to partner with a third-party platform to serve previous website visitors with specific ads on other sites enticing them to register for your event at a later stage in their decision process.

The whole goal is to convert them from a window shopper to ticket holder. With the help of retargeting through email, social media, and search engines, you’ve reminded them what they would be missing if they didn’t attend your event.

Research shows that visitors who see retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert to sales at some point on a website. Retargeting is essential for event marketers to push people down the funnel and increase ticket sales.

Leverage LinkedIn marketing groups to promote your event

2019 is the year of tapping into unique communities. LinkedIn groups are a great way to tap into an existing community that has a niche interest.

You can easily find groups by searching on LinkedIn. Before you go joining a bunch of groups on LinkedIn to promote your event, get to know the community first and nurture the relationship.

You don’t want to come off as a spammer which will prohibit you from re-joining other groups. Reach out to the group admin first to identify the group guidelines and make sure they are okay with you promoting your event or trade show.

Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If your organization has a robust marketing and sales organization, LinkedIn has a great social selling tool called “LinkedIn Sales Navigator.”

The “LinkedIn Navigator” feature is an add-on that allows your sales and marketing teams to identify prospects and engage with them directly through the platform.

Throughout the promotional process, your sales team can offer a discount to prospective event attendees who registered from the “LinkedIn Sales Navigator” outreach.

Invest in LinkedIn Video Ads

LinkedIn video content is starting to gain popularity. New research from LinkedIn shows that in the last year, videos received more than 300 million impressions, which is higher engagement than a standard text post has gotten.

So LinkedIn video content is where you should invest your promotional dollars. Develop a pre-conference teaser video to showcase what event attendees will experience while motivating them to register.

Research from multiple sources shows that brands that posted videos on LinkedIn saw a higher conversion rate and a 49 percent increase in sales.

Stay tuned for LinkedIn events

Toward the end of 2018, it is rumored that LinkedIn began to pilot a new tool called “LinkedIn Events,” aimed at promoting professional networking events on the social platform.

This new feature is being tested with a small group of LinkedIn members and has not yet been announced when it will be rolled out to a broader audience.

According to an article from Business 2 Community, LinkedIn users will be able to post events on their pages and invite attendees in their professional network. If this feature is available to corporate pages, this will be a game changer for event marketers to invite existing fans in their network to events and trade shows.

Final thoughts

As you can see, there are several great features available on LinkedIn at little to no-cost that you can use to market your next trade show or event. Like any other social media network, make sure to test what works best for your event marketing strategy.