Seven months into our new reality, organizations around the world have had to quickly pivot to find new ways to engage with the audiences that matter most to their business, and it’s working. Traditional event marketing had to transform to a virtual format seemingly overnight, being one of the biggest adjustments organizations have had to make. In May, we introduced Virtual Events to help you connect with your community and make this transition to virtual gatherings easier - and since then, more than 200,000 events have been hosted on LinkedIn, touching nearly 10 million attendees.
Organizations like L’Oreal have used LinkedIn Events with LinkedIn Live to set new records for reach and engagement. For instance, they saw over 2,000 unique viewings for their annual Brandstorm competition, where students had the chance to submit sustainable innovation ideas for the L’Oreal brand. The extended campaign reached over 8.5 million members and generated over 33,000 engagements, more than double the reach of the previous year.
We’ve spoken with many of you about how we could add more value to your virtual events and learned a lot about what you need most. Today, we're excited to roll out the most highly requested updates to help you organically grow your attendees and collect leads, and boost your reach with ads and retargeting capabilities.
Grow your attendees
As more organizations adopt virtual events, it’s become harder to get noticed by the right audiences. That’s why we're rolling out new organic discovery features like personalized 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.
Also, when you post an event from your Page, we'll automatically notify your followers who are most likely to attend based on various criteria, including their interests. This will be rolling out in the next few weeks.
Collect leads from event sign-ups
One of the biggest feature requests we’ve heard is the ability to capture leads from your events. In this quarter’s update, you can now include a free registration form for your event and collect the names and emails of people who signed up. You can also download the list from your event page and send them a thank-you email, upload the list to your CRM, or share it with your sales teams. When you add a registration form, you “gate” your event, so only registered attendees can join the event and participate.
Promote your event with Sponsored Content
Although virtual events and gatherings have become the norm, getting people to attend your event still requires a mixed media strategy. In fact, our internal data shows that LinkedIn Page followers who are exposed to your organic content are 61% more likely to convert on your paid ad.
To leverage that momentum, you can now run Sponsored Content Single Image Ads alongside your organic posts to promote your event. Single Image Ads can get your event in front of the right professionals and hard-to reach audiences, like executives and decision-markers. By including your Event URL as the destination URL in your campaign, you’ll be able to see how it performs against a new set of event-specific reporting metrics, like the total number of registrants, as well as views and clicks on the ad that led to an event registration.
Retarget your event attendees
Once you know who’s interested in your content or brand, you can continue the conversation and nurture leads by retargeting your prior event registrants. All you have to do is create a custom target audience in Campaign Manager based on those who have RSVPed to any of your LinkedIn Events.
Stay tuned for more updates In the coming months, including advanced event analytics, a new Events Ad format, and attendee networking options that help capture the magic of in-person events. Until then, we can’t wait to see the events you host on LinkedIn.
Want to learn more about the features in today’s update? Visit the LinkedIn Events website and attend our launch event on Thursday, Oct. 22nd.
