by Ryan McGeary on
LinkedIn is one of the best places to promote your next event. This social network has over 238 million members in 200 countries who are looking to network and educate themselves about their industry. LinkedIn also provides a number of tools which make promoting your event much easier. Here you will find five tips for marketing your next event on LinkedIn.
Promoting your event on LinkedIn begins with you company page. When you have an upcoming event, update your company page. This update will appear in the news feed of LinkedIn members following your company page. To use your company page effectively, you need to begin your promotion well in advance of your next event. The more followers you can attract to your company page, the wider your audience will be when you start marketing your event.
A recent addition to LinkedIn’s serve-selflink advertising platform is the ability to create sponsored updates. The sponsored updates allow you to select any update on your company page and pay for it to reach a wide audience. Because LinkedIn knows a lot of information about their users, you can target updates using criteria such as age, location, job title, company and gender. Using sponsored updates you can ensure that your promotion gets in front of exactly the right audience.
It is to your speakers advantage to promote the event. Ask your event speakers if they could promote to their own networks. LinkedIn members are much more likely to be receptive from event promotion that comes from the speaker than from an event company that they may not be familiar with. Consider doing a video interview with your speaker in order to encourage them to share content with their network.
Look for groups that your event attendees are likely to belong to. You can find a list of all of the LinkedIn groups at the LinkedIn Group Directory. Keep in mind that some groups will require you to be approved before you can join, so allow time to be accepted by the group moderators.
Before promoting your event in the group, you want to familiarize yourself with the type of content that people are already posting there. You want your promotional content to be congruent with what is already being posted. You also need to avoid being perceived as hard selling your event. This can upset other members of the group and may even result in you being banned.
Instead, you want to viewed as a useful contributor. A good way to do this is to bring up an interesting topic that will be covered in the event and encourage other group members to share their opinion. You can then include a link in your content to a page where they can find out more about the event.
When it comes promoting an event, one of the most effective techniques is to leverage the network of influencers in your industry. For example, if you were promoting an event in the tech marketing space, then you might want to reach out to influencers such as Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki. Whatever industry you are in there will be influencers that have massive LinkedIn networks.
These influencers are trusted by their network who will respond positively to recommendations that they make. Asking these influencers to immediately promote your event is rarely effective. Instead, you want form a relationship with them well before you start asking for favors. Think about what you can do for them as way of introduction. For example, you could recommend their latest book with your own network. If you already have an existing relationship with these influencers, they will be much more likely to respond favorably to a request to promote your event.
In order to use LinkedIn effectively, it helps if you have plenty of quality of content to share. Videos, blog posts, infographics and white papers should be prepared ahead of time to assist with your event promotion. Remember, no matter who your ideal event attendee is, they are already on LinkedIn. Take advantage of the possibilities offered by LinkedIn to ensure your next event is fully booked.
