Follow These Steps to Maximise Performance Before, During and After Your Next Event

Welcome to the main event! Is your brand ready to shine on the digital stage?

Running a successful online event, whether on LinkedIn or elsewhere, is not just about putting on a great show. For marketers, maximising the impact of events requires laying proper groundwork in the lead-up and following through after the stream concludes. What it doesn’t require, necessarily, is a huge budget.

Events provide an opportunity to showcase your brand, employees and customers. Be sure you’re following proven best practices before, during and after your event to achieve your goals - from reach to engagement to sales impact. Read on for a framework, use cases and resources to plan your next event.

Developing a Framework for Successful Virtual Events

Every event is unique. Naturally, your approach to event marketing should be tailored to the goals, audience and platform for the event you’re bringing to life. However, there are some universal principles that can be applied as a framework for planning, executing, measuring and learning from each virtual event.

You can find an in-depth exploration of these principles in our guide, The LinkedIn Event Framework, but here's a quick overview of what's covered inside. Best practices are broken down by each phase:

Before the Event

• Plan: Choose your event objectives, format/type, and team roles/responsibilities
• Set up: Select the right platform(s), conduct training/rehearsals
• Promote: Event marketing and promotional ad campaigns
  

Success metrics before the event: Registration diagnostics (number, rate, and quality of registrations)

During the Event

• Engage: Use key engagement strategies to activate audience members
• Survey: Solicit live feedback from the audience
  

Success metrics during the event: Viewer engagement (number, rate, peak, quality of viewers)

After the Event

• Follow-up: Marketing nurtures and sales outreach
• Measure: Evaluate marketing impact and ROI
• Learn: Debrief and document learnings for the future
  

Success metrics after the event: Post-event opportunities (sales leads, opportunities to network, post-event actions by attendees)

Best practices for planning your next event

Keep these considerations top of mind as you start putting your next virtual event into motion:

• Be strategic from the start. Map out specific goals and measurement metrics for each of the eight framework steps above.
• Go live to engage audiences in real time. Research has shown that LinkedIn Live videos, on average, get 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than native video produced by the same broadcasters.
• Build engagement-focused moments into the experience. Make attendees feel like they're part of the show.
• Use the right platforms and partners. This can be make-or-break for putting on a great event. LinkedIn Live works with a variety of trusted third-party broadcast partners: SocialLive, Streamyard, Switcher Studio, Restream, and Vimeo.

Market your event robustly. Use different tactics to get the word out about your upcoming event with relevant audiences who are likely to be interested. The next section covers these tactics in depth.

Event marketing on LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers a range of products and tools to help you raise awareness of your virtual event and drive quality registrations, whether or not you’re hosting it on the platform. Use these marketing actions at different stages of your event.

4 weeks before the event: Drive organic and paid discovery

• Get discovered organically by linking to speakers' LinkedIn profiles and sharing the event with your Page's followers.
• Scale awareness with paid promotion. Start amplifying with event ads early using Live Event Ads so your campaign can run throughout the event lifecycle. 
  

Pro tip: Unlock efficiency with LinkedIn Event Ads, which will dynamically change during each event stage and have been shown to reduce cost per registration by up to 40%.

1-2 weeks before the event: Amp up engagement and excitement

• Expand your audience by encouraging employees, speakers and leadership to share the event in their networks. You can even sponsor your leaders’ posts to maximize reach with LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads.
• Attendees are automatically notified when the event is one week away, making this milestone a great time to post about it from your LinkedIn Page while top of mind.
  

3 days before the event: Ensure attendance

• Automatic reminder notifications are sent before events that are hosted on LinkedIn. If you're hosting elsewhere, consider sending your own email reminders to stay on the radar.
• Share event preview content on your page, such as topical teasers and Polls.
• On LinkedIn, speakers and panelists can prime the audience by posting in the event's networking tab and interacting with attendees.

Pro tip: Go mobile-first — 70% of viewers on LinkedIn watch live events on mobile devices.

Day of the event: Manage attendance

• Have a dedicated person managing audience engagement during the event, sourcing questions from the audience and making note of potential leads.
• Give a final prompt for registrants when the show is about to start. On LinkedIn, attendees automatically receive a final reminder 15 minutes before the event goes live. You can start warming the audience up in the networking tab before the event begins.
  

Pro tip: If you’re using LinkedIn Live Event Ads, your ad content will dynamically change to a livestream view once your event goes live.

After the event: Continue the conversation

• Make the on-demand version of the recording easily available to those who missed the livestream. If the content is evergreen, consider hosting it on your LinkedIn Page or website.
• Use organic and paid promotion to reach a broader audience beyond those registered for the live event.
• On LinkedIn, marketers can nurture attendees by targeting them in follow-up campaigns using Event Ads targeting retargeting attendees, and sales reps can connect with high-value prospects.
  

Engaging, measuring and reporting event success

Use both quantitative and qualitative measurements to assess impact. If you’re hosting an event on LinkedIn, Event analytics can help you measure attendees numbers, minutes watched and peak and lifetime views. However, to truly understand your audience, you’ll want to look beyond just the number of people who registered and/or attended. With LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager Analytics, you can report on the professional attributes of registrants as well as the sources of sign-ups, helping you understand the relevance of your audience and which channels are contributing most to attendance.

Learn more in our pocket primer: Getting Started with LinkedIn Live Event Ads

The same principles can be applied during and after the event. Look not just at how many people attend, but who they are, how long they stay, how active they are. When evaluating leads and sales opportunities after the event, account for where they came from and how qualified they are.

Make Your Virtual Event a Success from Start to Finish

Professional audiences generally need fancy, big-budget livestreams. More often, they want interesting, authentic and timely content that provides value and helps them network. Your brand can deliver on this, even with limited resources, by adopting the right engagement strategy.

Whether you're using LinkedIn Events or another platform to reach your audience in real time, be sure you're taking the right steps before, during and after your event to maximise performance. You can download The LinkedIn Event Framework now for a detailed guide to these steps, and then head to Campaign Manager to get your event marketing campaign started.