Friction is uncomfortable. Too much in a user’s journey and they’re interest is likely to fizzle out. LinkedIn offers an elegant solution to driving registrants to your events and webinars with LinkedIn Events. Read on for steps to test out a LinkedIn event strategy that will set your audience’s interest ablaze!

What are LinkedIn Events?

If you are a page admin, you can quickly and easily create an Event and house all of the details around it under one hub. If I have an upcoming webinar I would create an event to set the day and time, give a little bit of background, post the link to “save my seat” and set my audience targeting. I can choose to make it a public event or tailor it down to follower subsets. Now I have a well organized, organic feed to post updates about my webinar, build excitement through conversations, post polls, and collect feedback after it’s over! All Organic. All Free.

Okay, Now What?

So now I have a place where I can stay engaged with people who are interested in my webinar. As the interest grows I can send reminders or promotional messages organically so I don’t have to pay for remarketing this particular event. Neat! The foundation for a successful webinar is there but now I need to leverage my ad account to fill those seats. 

This is where the friction reduction comes in. I’m going to create a single image ad that promotes my webinar and set up my campaign’s prospect targeting like I normally would. Instead of using my “save my seat” url as the landing page I’m going to instead grab that LinkedIn Event url and paste it into the Destination URL field. Once I’ve filled my event with people from LinkedIn I can engage with them through the event to remind them to save their seat and post some fun updates. Your audience doesn’t have to leave LinkedIn when they click your ad. They can sign up to save their seat later.

I like this approach because it gives me a way to guide my audience to the action I want them to take without constantly paying to re-engage with them. Also, I think it makes sense in a prospecting relationship to take steps. I wouldn’t ask a stranger if they wanted to come to my house and listen to me talk at them for an hour on the first meeting. 

My Webinar was a Smashing Success! Is there anything else I should know?

  1. Although I don’t like paying for retargeting on the same message, I do like retargeting interested audiences with new messages and ideas! The audience you built for your event can now be used as a remarketing audience so you can reach those same people with a new bit of content.
  2. Start promoting your large events (like conferences) 90 days in advance, mid-sized events 30 days in advance, and webinars 7-14 days in advance.
  3. Optimize for clicks, not conversions