LinkedIn goes all-in on Events 

LinkedIn has announced new ways to increase event awareness as it goes all-in on virtual events and ramps up its lead generation capabilities.

The updated Event Ads are designed to make sure that marketers get maximum bang for their bucks and as many registrations to events as possible. Alongside this, improvements to event analytics now help boost visibility for the campaign, with aggregated insights into:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Firmographic makeup of event attendees

These updates will provide more specific insights into your advertising efforts and allow marketers to plan strategy and maximise events.

Analytics can be viewed by the hosts. Organisers can view the total number of event attendees, total unique event visits, attendees top job function, number of viewers at the peak of the live stream (if using LinkedIn Live), attendee engagement with event posts.

One thing to keep in mind is that the host must attend the event to view analytics.

To view analytics, click on the home icon on the LinkedIn homepage. From the panel on the left rail, click the name of your event – which will be housed under Events. Click on the Analytics tab from the top of the page.

Rishi Jobanputra, Product Management, LinkedIn

"Marketers can ensure that they're getting in front of the professionals that matter most to them to drive registrations, and event organisers have clear visibility into how many LinkedIn members clicked on or saw an ad and registered for their event."

Create an Event Ad in three steps

LinkedIn has been working hard to make the platform the go-to place for virtual business events. Being able to promote across LinkedIn will help brands connect with more people that care about them.

Event Ads will appear in the LinkedIn feed and highlight key items like data, time, and how to join the event. It'll also show if a mutual connection has expressed an interest in attending.

In essence, they'll look, and function, a bit more like Facebook Event ads, rather than the botched job that LinkedIn initially launched last year.

After creating a LinkedIn Event, you can promote your event to a target audience with an Event Ad campaign. Create new event ads or sponsor existing posts with event URLs from your LinkedIn Page to increase event registrations.

To create an event ad campaign, you'll need:

1. Campaign Manager access or higher on the ad account
2. A LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page associated with your ad account
3. Super admin, content admin, or Sponsored Content poster access on the LinkedIn Page

Presently, Event Ads sit under the following advertising objectives: Brand awareness, Website visits & Engagement.

After your event ad campaign delivers impressions to your target audience, you'll be able to view the number of event registrations attributed to your ads in the reporting dashboard in Campaign Manager. Select the columns Performance or Conversions & Leads, or create your own custom view, to view event registrations.

Get clever with event retargeting

Improving event promotion should help boost event numbers and further enhance event retargeting on LinkedIn.

Event audiences are an option within Matched Audiences that allow you to retarget people who have RSVP'd to attend one of your LinkedIn Events.

When creating an event audience, you'll be able to choose between past or upcoming Events hosted by the LinkedIn Page associated with your ad account.

However, note that your event audience will need to match at least 300 members to be used in your campaign targeting.

Live streaming & Facebook style Boosting

Complementing events, LinkedIn has further opened up live streaming.

Over the past year, LinkedIn Live has grown by 400%. LinkedIn has decided to turbocharge this bandwagon and introduced Custom Streaming, which lets users live stream via broadcast tools like Zoom, WebEx, OBS and Microsoft Teams (coming soon).

Lastly, something which might be helpful around events, and indeed beyond, is the launch of easy post boosting.

LinkedIn will not let users do a Facebook-style post-boost, helping to turn Posts into paid ads, quickly increasing exposure and reach.

Rishi Jobanputra, Product Management, LinkedIn

"Starting today, you can easily "Boost" any high-performing organic post directly from your LinkedIn Page. With the click of a button and a few payment details, you can easily give your most engaging or time-sensitive content a little boost to quickly expand your audience reach."

To be clear, while post boosting within Facebook et al. is popular, it is generally inferior to running ads properly via Ads Manager style tools.

LinkedIn has been working hard on extra ways to drive revenue and help users increase reach and exposure as it continues its march towards becoming a serious contender for marketing budgets through 2021 into 2022.