Corporate Events Get Significant Boost On LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been tinkering with their Events offering all year. Have they finally struck gold?

In March they launched their beta version of Events, which required a lot of improvement (but that's fine because that's the job of a beta launch).

Since then, LinkedIn added an integration with LinkedIn Live in May, before the integration of company pages was announced in September.

An Improved Organic Discovery Function

Marketers welcomed these changes but still struggled with a few aspects of LinkedIn's Events offering – such as Event discovery, advertising and lead capture.

These new updates are designed to address these issues.

A new organic discovery option will unlock a brand new way to get your Event noticed by the right audience, which LinkedIn is very excited about.

Ajay Datta, Head of Product, LinkedIn

"We're rolling out new organic discovery features like personalised event recommendations in your audience's "My Network" tab and a new weekly Events digest email.

So far, we've seen a +40% increase in event attendees from recommendations found in the "My Network" tab."

When an event is posted from your Page, LinkedIn will notify your followers of the Event, based on who is most likely to attend. This feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks and will allow brands and marketers to expand their reach to even more potential attendees.

Something which will be important for lead generation, as you'll see soon.

Collect Leads With A Registration Form

The inability to capture leads from events was a major bug-bear of marketers and thankfully, LinkedIn has made moves to fix that issue. Businesses can now include a registration form, for free, for your Event and collect names and emails of attendees.

The list will be downloadable, shareable, and you'll be able to upload the names to a CRM. Enabling a registration form includes the additional benefit of gating the Event, which means only those who register can join in.

It's real easy to implement an Event registration form. Be mindful that this feature is still in its beta phase and may not be available to everyone.

To use a registration form, follow these steps:

• When creating a public Event, select the option that requires members to submit a registration form. Be warned; once you choose this, you can't undo it.
• You can download this info from the manage attendees section or attendees registration section within your Event.
• Members who click attending on the Event will see a prefilled option with all their contact information in it.

Sponsored Content Ads For Events

Hosters will be able to promote their Event via sponsored content. LinkedIn has found that Page followers who see your organic content are 61% more likely to convert when they see your paid advert – so it makes sense to hit your existing followers with sponsored content first.

Pages will now be able to run Sponsored Content Single Image Ads alongside organic posts to promote an event.

Ajay Datta, Head of Product, LinkedIn

"Single Image Ads can get your event in front of the right professionals and hard-to reach audiences, like executives and decision-makers?."

Page Admins can track how Single Image Ads perform by including the Event URL as the campaign destination URL. From there, brands and marketers will be able to see the total number of registrants, views and ad clicks that lead to a registration.

Create an Event ad campaign by using the following steps:

• Log in to your LinkedIn account and create a campaign and campaign group
• Select your audience and pick an objective for the campaign
• Fill out the Budget & Schedule and Bid sections, make sure that your ad doesn't run past the Event date
• Hit create new ad from the ads in this campaign section. Once all the fields are completed, hit create
• Review and launch your campaign

Retarget Event Audiences To Gain Leads

Prior event registrants can also be retargeted to nurture leads or carry on the interaction between the individual and the brand.

LinkedIn has made it simple do to so – all you need to do is create a custom target audience within Campaign Manager that's based on who sent in an RSVP to any of your LinkedIn Events.

Creating an Event audience to retarget goes like this:

• Sign in to Campaign Manager
• Select the account name
• Click account assets on the top of the page and hit matched audiences
• Click on create audiences, it'll be on the top right corner of the page
• Click on Event
• Name the audience, and chose which events to include this audience in
• Hit create