The How to Promote Events on LinkedIn Guide for 2023

LinkedIn has long established itself as a social network with 850 million world wide users within many companies and offers exciting possibilities to draw attention to your event. Especially if you organize B2B events! In this article, we’ll tell you how you can successfully promote your next conference, trade fair or business networking event on LinkedIn.

Why is LinkedIn suitable for marketing your events?

LinkedIn is a professional social media network that helps people and companies make business contacts. However, it is also an advertising platform and allows companies to market themselves and promote their events.

Here’s why you should market your events on LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn is the best lead generation platform in the world: according to studies, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn
• Content achieves high organic reach
• Competition for impressions is very low
• LinkedIn’s event feature makes it easy to create and promote events
• Use your LinkedIn network to draw attention to your event

Bottom line: If you are active on LinkedIn, you have a greater chance of standing out from your competitors, reaching a wider audience, and successfully promoting your event.

How to promote your event on LinkedIn?

On LinkedIn, you have been able to create and promote LinkedIn events for some time now – regardless of whether you manage a profile or a company page. This feature can be used wonderfully to give your events additional exposure. However, as soon as it comes to managing attendees or implementing ticketing, you should turn to an event platform. However, LinkedIn is great for advertising your event.

In the first step, create your event on LinkedIn, either with your personal page or your company profile. LinkedIn explains how creating events works step by step in its guide. Once you have created an event on LinkedIn, you need to promote it. Also, don’t forget that when you create your event, you need to make an initial post. The event is not public until you do so.

Good to know: There is a special feature if you create an event via your company page. In contrast to a personal profile, you can integrate a form with which your participants can register with their e-mail address. You can use these addresses later to address them individually. This increases the commitment significantly.

You have created your event page on LinkedIn? Great! Now you have a variety of ways to get people to participate in your event:

First steps to promote your event

1. Invite your contacts: A useful function of LinkedIn is the option to invite contacts specifically. This way you can filter who of your contacts you would like to invite to your event. The invited people will see your invitation under the “Network” tab. However, be aware that these types of “acceptances” usually don’t mean anything commitment-wise. The no-show rate is very high.
2. Tell your network about the event: You can publish posts in the feed of your event page. However, these posts will only be seen by confirmed attendees. Therefore, it makes sense to share your content in your existing network as well. Use your personal profile and your company page to increase the visibility of the event.
3. Create a group to match the event: You can create a group specifically for your event and invite all attendees to join the group.

Promote events with a personal profile on LinkedIn

To promote your event on LinkedIn, you should use your personal profile and your company profile – but be sure to use two different types of communication. On a private profile, you can present and promote the event on a more personal level.

Personal status updates

Status updates can be posted on LinkedIn. As with other social media platforms, status updates with pictures and videos get the most engagement.

Pimp your profile with event information

Use the headline and summary of your profile to promote your event. In the contact information section, you can link to the event registration website or create a project section and link it to the event registration website.

Storytelling

Tell the story behind the event from a very personal perspective in posts.

Share progress and emotions

Share your planning, difficulties and successes live with your followers.

Engage in exchange

Engage in exchanges with your contacts. Get in touch with everyone who has liked, commented, shared or otherwise expressed interest in your event

Get prospects to share

Encourage prospects and third-party vendors to share your event with their network.

Find interested individuals in groups

Become active in appropriate groups where you leave comments. However, be careful not to spam these groups with your event promotion. Instead, build a relationship with group members first before sharing event details. Help others and they will visit your profile and event by themselves.

Write personal messages

You can and should also promote your event with instant messages. With a free account, you can contact 50 contacts at once, or use “Sponsored InMail” to contact as many people as you want. As with all instant messages, be sure to address each individual personally.

Promote events with a company profile on LinkedIn

As mentioned before, you should use the full potential by promoting events on your personal profile as well as on the company profile. Therefore, we will give you some tips and ideas on how to promote your event on the company page.

Company status update

If you have created a page for an event, status updates can also be posted and pinned to the company page feed so that important information is displayed right at the top. You should also encourage all other event stakeholders, for example, location management and the catering company, to post similar status updates.

Share posts on the company account

Matching posts build excitement and redirect users to the associated LinkedIn event. This is a great way to reach followers of your company account.

Communicate professionally

Share posts and elaborate on what makes your event special! Convince by introducing your speakers and the line-up of the event.

Share your values

Explain the motivation behind your event and what values you hold dear as a company.

LinkedIn Ads: Promote your event beyond your network

Of course, you also have the option to promote your event to a larger audience via paid advertising on LinkedIn. You can choose from the following three advertising formats:

• Sponsored Content: Sponsored content is displayed directly in the LinkedIn feed of the professional groups you want to reach.
• Message Ads: This type of advertising reaches your target audience directly through LinkedIn messaging.
• Text Ads: Text ads appear on the right side of each user’s news feed. A headline, some text and an image (50×50) and your ad is set up.
• Dynamic Ads: With Dynamic Ads, you can target your audience with automatically personalized ads.

Our tip: Create a video from your previous events focussing on emotions & testimonials. Simply ask your participants “why did you show up today?” and present their reaction to your target audience.

How to reach your target audience with LinkedIn Ads?

To run LinkedIn Ads, you must first create an account in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. In the Campaign Manager, you can set the budget, select your marketing objective, and you have full control over the timing of your campaign.

Follow these five steps to effectively promote your event with LinkedIn Ads:

1. Set a goal: At the beginning of any campaign, it’s important to set a goal. Choose the most important goal for you from the areas of awareness, consideration or conversions.
2. Target your audience: LinkedIn’s targeting tools help you reach your ideal audience. Choose from the following categories to determine your target audience (occupation, location, skills, age, company, company size, industry, and more)
3. Select ad format: You can choose between Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, Text Ads or a combination of these four formats.
4. Set budget and schedule: Choose the cost model that’s right for you: Cost per Send (CPS) for Message Ads, Cost per Click (CPC), or Cost per Impression (CPM). Also enter a daily budget, the start and end dates, and the total budget.
5. Design your LinkedIn Ad: The design of your ads is the most important element in attracting attention, getting your message across, and moving your audience to action. LinkedIn recommends 4 to 5 ads per campaign to increase campaign reach and ensure optimal performance.

3 LinkedIn Ad Tips for Event Promotion

Virtual events benefit from large potential target group

If you are planning a virtual event, you are not bound to a room size or a geographical radius. Take advantage of this and target a larger audience than live events.

Appealing visuals: using video and image content

Use engaging visuals for your event promotion. According to an analysis of LinkedIn posts, video posts are the absolute leader and generate the most interactions. Be sure to use this knowledge to promote your event. For example, by posting an effective video of the last event and drawing attention to the upcoming one.

Use LinkedIn’s insider knowledge for your event promotion.

LinkedIn has created an ebook with lots of insider event promotion tips. Use this knowledge to successfully promote your event.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a wonderful platform to promote your event. Use the B2B platform as a free marketing channel for your B2B events such as conferences, trade shows or business networking events and promote your event to your network. With the event feature, you can create event pages and promote your event. Additionally, you can run LinkedIn Ads and promote your event beyond your network.

Note, however, that events cannot be managed through LinkedIn. For execution, ticketing, matchmaking, and other smart online solutions, an event platform is worthwhile.