You’ve done cold calls, hot lead messaging, countless email campaigns, and even run social ads. But there’s still no luck on the prospecting front. If you’re in this boat, we recommend you set aside some time for a LinkedIn event — which is a powerful, albeit overlooked, method of lead-gen.
In this article, learn why event prospecting works, how to set up an impactful event campaign, tips and tricks to make starting easy, and how to measure your results. Now, let’s dive in and discover how LinkedIn Events can revolutionize your prospecting efforts.
If you don’t want to read this article, don’t. What we mean is… watch the video version instead right below:
Why Choose LinkedIn Events For Prospecting?
If you’ve never event prospected before, then you’re probably wondering what the facts are. According to Spotio, 34% of people are more open to communicating with a salesperson after meeting them at an event. But, if that’s not enough, here are three more reasons LinekdIn Events are the ideal place to find your next customer:
- Targeted Audience: LinkedIn Events attract professionals who are genuinely interested in your event. For example, SaaSTR (one of the largest B2B annual events) attracts only B2B and SaaS companies. This targeted audience makes it easier to engage with potential prospects who align with your ICP.
- Enhanced Visibility: By creating and promoting an event on LinkedIn, you gain increased visibility within the LinkedIn community. This expanded reach allows you to attract a wider audience – including prospects who have never heard of your brand before (meaning more leads).
- Networking Opportunities: Even if you don’t find prospects, LinkedIn Events are the prime spot to network. Simply put, a bigger network means more contacts – which can be beneficial in a job hunt.
Of course, LinkedIn Events aren’t the only way to find prospects on LinkedIn. One of our favorite methods is mass messaging. Read about how you can start your first mass messaging campaign here.
How To Set Up Your First LinkedIn Event Campaign
It only needs to take five steps to set up your first LinkedIn Event campaign. Here’s how to do just that:
1. Define Your Campaign Goals
Just like you would with any campaign, you want to start by defining your campaign goals. The following things are questions you should ask yourself whenever you implement a new campaign:
- What do you hope to achieve with this campaign?
- Who is your target audience (or ICP)?
- What is your company’s unique value proposition?
- What deliverables will you need to make this campaign successful?
- What KPIs can be used to measure your success?
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Most companies may already have a target audience. However, if you don’t, now is the time to do so. While this process can be incredibly detailed, here’s the short version:
- Define your campaign goals.
- Match these goals to your ideal customer.
- Conduct market research on your ideal customer to understand their needs.
- Use your findings to define a campaign strategy.
- Test and iterate your targeting strategy based on campaign performance.
3. Deliver on Your Deliverables
In step one, we asked you to do a lot. One of these things was to make a list of your deliverables. Now it’s time to ask your team (or do it solo if you’re a one-man show) to deliver on these. Here are some examples of common deliverables:
- Design: Landing page for the event.
- Event graphics: This includes posters, headers, booth graphics, and one-pagers.
- Copy: This includes copy for your landing page, one pager, booth, and any promotion for the event.
4. Promote Your Event:
Here’s our eight-step checklist to successfully promote any event on LinkedIn:
- Optimize your event page: Create a compelling event description that includes eye-catching visuals, searchable keywords, and your company description.
- Leverage your LinkedIn network: Share the event with your connections, post about it on your feed, and encourage others to share it within their networks. If you’re at a larger company, encourage others to do the same. Learn more about LinkedIn promoting and cold emailing techniques here!
- Share among LinkedIn groups: If you’re a part of any LinkedIn groups, share it there. If you’re not a part of these groups, look for relevant groups and join.
- Run targeted advertising campaigns: You can use LinkedIn’s advertising options to reach a broader audience. While we always recommend using a more organic approach, this is a good option for companies with a wider budget.
- Collaborate with influencers: Influencer marketing is now bigger than ever. For that reason, we recommended partnering with industry influencers/thought leaders to promote your event.
- Cross-promote the event: Share your LinkedIn event on other social media platforms and on your website for the ultimate reach.
- Send personalized invitations: Always have a VIP list. This list should include prospects that match your ICP to a tee.
- Engage, engage, engage: Respond promptly to comments, questions, and inquiries related to the event for maximum engagement. Don’t act like a robot in your responses — have fun and share your personality. We recommend automating this to save time!
5. Monitor and Iterate
Once your event is live, it’s important to monitor its performance. Remember those KPIs we talked about in Step 1? It’s time to bring those back.
Track your KPIs in detail to keep a pulse on how your event is going. We recommend tracking things like:
- Registrations
- Attendee Engagement
- Conversion Rates
- Feedback
Now, let’s talk more about how to measure the success of your campaigns.
How to Measure Success in LinkedIn Event Campaigns
Measuring your success is key. If you don’t, how will you know if your effort is spent worthwhile? The answer is you won’t. Now here’s how you can measure and track your success:
Track Event Registrations:
Event registrations provide an initial gauge of interest for your event. Keep a close eye on the number of registrations and analyze trends over time. For example, you might have a spike in your trend after promoting the event on social media or through an email campaign.
By monitoring your event registrations, you can find what channel is best to promote your events – making future promotion easier.
Monitor Attendee Engagement:
Second up, we have attendee engagement. As we’ve already mentioned, you should do your best to engage with attendees of the event. Additionally, you should be tracking this as well.
We recommend tracking metrics such as views, likes, comments, and shares on event posts and updates. Additionally, analyze the level of engagement during live sessions, Q&As, or email campaigns.
Oftentimes, you can learn more about what attendees are excited about or what they’re concerned about when it comes to the event.
Assess and Obsess About Lead Generation:
Tracking lead gen is often done after your event. Take into consideration the other factors you’ve tracked (like engagement, registrations, and follow-ups) to determine the number of leads you’ve gained.
In short, the more leads, the better. However, you can also rank the type of leads you have. For example, a company looking for a product similar to the one you’re selling is a lot hotter than a company with a very tight budget for additional tools.
Send Post-Event Surveys and Review Feedback
To do any event right, you should send a post-event survey. Depending on the number of responses, it will show you what you’ve done right (vs. wrong) and may give you some fantastic testimonials.
Even if you don’t have any glowing testimonials in your feedback (remember, negative feedback is more common in a survey), you can learn how to better target your audience next time.
Conclusion
Often overlooked but all the more powerful, LinkedIn Events are truly the secret giant. While there’s a lot of legwork to get one off the ground, they’re an incredibly powerful way to prospect. Not to mention, it’s a great way to get your hands dirty in networking and event planning. Soon you’ll be on your way to starting a wedding planning business!
If this sounds like a whole lot of work (*cough* *cough* it is), then you should automate it. Try We-Connect’s 14-day free trial to learn how you can send thousands of custom prospecting messaging with a few clicks of a button. Who said prospecting had to be boring?
