5 Powerful Steps to Promoting LinkedIn Live Events in 2022

Add commentSeptember 25, 202015 min read

What are LinkedIn Live Events, and how can you promote them with paid LinkedIn advertising? Keep on reading to find out!

The global coronavirus outbreak has undoubtedly accelerated the adoption of many new technologies. As we are spending more time at home than ever before, there is no surprise that our ways of consuming content are changing, too.

Nowadays, and this is a tendency that we have been observing even before the pandemic, people are consistently switching to the consumption of online content as opposed to plain old TV.

According to Livestream, getting more behing-the-scenes content is one of the reasons why:

87% of viewers would prefer to watch online vs. on television if it meant more behind-the-scenes content.

With the current and future global tendencies in mind, last year LinkedIn launched a new product: LinkedIn Live. It allows companies to stream live video content directly from their Company Page, without the need to send the audience to a third-party website.

This means that companies can organize and stream their events directly on LinkedIn, engaging with their audience in real-time. And the best part is, LinkedIn members can stumble across a streaming event even if they never signed up in the first place.

Promoting LinkedIn Live Events

There are multiple ways to get your LinkedIn Live events in front of a qualified audience on LinkedIn, including:

Sending direct invitations to your first degree connections;
Publishing a post with a registration link from your Company Page;
Posting about the event from your own personal LinkedIn profile;
And even share your event page to your LinkedIn page followers.

These are some of the most efficient organic ways of increasing visibility on LinkedIn. However, there are hundreds of other ways to promote LinkedIn Live events across different channels including Google, Facebook, or Instagram, among others.

But this is not the point of this article. Today, I wanted to focus on paid promotion.

Event Reporting

Before we move on to our next step, there is another thing that I wanted to mention – event reporting. When launching and promoting your LinkedIn live events, you will also be able to see performance metrics such as:

Event registrations – or the number of people coming from your ads who clicked on “attend event” or “request an event”;
Click registrations – the number of ad clicks that led people registering for your event;
View registrations – or how many ad impressions were needed to generate event registrations;
Engagement metrics – including the likes, comments, and shares of the event;
Awareness metrics – such as lifetime watchtime, lifetime views, lifetime viewers, and live viewers at peak.

With this in mind, I wanted to show you the 5 steps that you need to take in order to promote LinkedIn Live events through Event Ads. So, let’s dive right into them:

1. Become a Live LinkedIn broadcaster

Before you are able to create any LinkedIn Live events at all, the first and most important step that you will need to make is to submit an application in order to become a Live LinkedIn broadcaster. Here is how you can do that:

1.1. Meet Live video access criteria

First, you will need to make sure that you meet certain criteria. You can take a look at the full information here, but to summarize, you should:

Have at least 1,000 followers and/or connections if you are a LinkedIn member, or at least 500 followers if you are a company with a Company Page.
Be posting original content (posts with text, images, articles…) regularly so that LinkedIn can evaluate if you will make the most out of LinkedIn Live events.
Have a history of abiding by LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies, meaning you haven’t infringed or violated any of their guidelines.
Not be based in mainland China, as this product is currently unavailable for members and Pages based in China.

If you think that you are already meeting all of this criteria, we are ready to move to the next step.

1.2. Fill out LinkedIn Live’s contact form

Once you are meeting all criteria, the next step to be able to launch LinkedIn Live events is to go this page and fill out the contact form to begin your application. You will have to let LinkedIn know if you are applying as a member or as a company.

LinkedIn Live events: Contact form

If you are applying as a company through your Company Page, you will also have to provide LinkedIn with the URLs of your Page admins so they can be able to go live on behalf of the Company Page.

Once you’ve submitted your application, you will have to wait to see if you are approved or not. At this time, they are only contacted accepted applicants, and you may not be notified if you haven’t been aproved.

2. Select a broadcasting tool

If you’ve been approved, the next step that you will have to make in order to promote LinkedIn Live events is to select a broadcasting tool. Currently, LinkedIn is only working with a few approved third-party broadcasting tools, and they don’t have their own solution.

Here is the full list of the currently supported third-party broadcasting platforms:

Unfortunately, since each platform is different, and I haven’t used all of them, I can’t really give you very detailed instruction.

However, in most cases it would require to create an account and purchase a monthly subscription depending on the services and amount of events you are planning to make. Some platforms like StreamYard offer a free plan as well.

If you are having any trouble with the broadcasting integration, you can get in touch with the platforms’ tech support, and they will be more than happy to help.

3. Create your LinkedIn Live Event

Now that you have everything up and running, the next step before promoting your LinkedIn Live events is to create them first.

This step is very intuitive and surprisingly easy. I actually wanted to write a separate article on it, but because it was so straightforward, I thought I wouldn’t be able to bring any value to the table.

Anyways, all you need to have for this step is a Company Page. During the event, it will serve you as your own live streaming platform. In case you don’t have one yet, you can check my article Create a LinkedIn Company Page in 3 Steps (+7 Tips).

From your Company Page, scroll down to the Events section located to the right of the feed, above the section Hashtags, and click on the plus button to create an event:

Creating LinkedIn Live events

Once you’ve clicked on the Create event button, as I already mentioned, the rest is pretty straightforward.

You will have to fill out some key information such as the name of your event, the date and time, a brief description to let people know what the event is about, the ticketing website (if any), and so on.

Pay attention to adjusting the time to the correct timezone – this way, people from different countries will not get confused about the time of the event.

Additionally, you can select if your event is going to be online or face-to-face, and whether you want to post it publicly – or make it exclusive for particular attendees. Keep in mind that currently, you can only promote LinkedIn live events if they have a public URL.

Promoting events that are private is not available at the moment.

Once you are done filling out your event data, simply click on Create, and it will be posted on LinkedIn. For the next step, you will need to copy the link of the event, or simply leave the tab open so you can copy it later.

Note: Only members who are admins of their LinkedIn page can create an event associated with it. If you don’t have an access to do that, you might need to get in touch with the current page admins to assist you with the necessary access.

4. Create an ad account

Now that you have your LinkedIn Live event created, the next step will be to launch your Event ad campaign. Previously, you could promote your live events through Single image ads – but now, you have an entirely new LinkedIn ad format especially designed for them.

But before you launch your Event ad, there is an extra step that you might have to do. If you have never launched any campaigns on LinkedIn before, you probably don’t have an ad account yet. However, creating one is very easy to do in just a couple of minutes.

If you need a step by step detailed guide on how to create a LinkedIn ad account, just click here.

5. Create your LinkedIn campaign

From your Campaign Manager, click on the Default Campaign group that LinkedIn has already created for you. If you want to create a new one group, you can do that, too. Groups are simply there to help you organize your campaigns better.

Objectives

Next, click on the button Create campaign in the upper left corner, and you will be taken to a new page to start defining your segmentation. The first thing that you will have to do is to select your objective.

LinkedIn Live events: selecting a campaign objective

Your objective will define the goal of your campaign; what you aim to achieve with it, what is the purpose behind it. Some of the most popular goals include getting more website visits, generating more leads, or spreading brand awareness.

Now, if this was an ordinary campaign, you would be able to select from any of these objectives, depending on how they fit your goals. However, in this case, our goal is to promote LinkedIn live events.

Currently, there are only three objectives that you can choose from for this purpose:

Brand awareness;
Website visits;
Engagement.

The reason why is because if you select these objectives, you will be able to get specific data about your events. For example, the number of event registrations that are attributed to this particular ad, which is a really valuable information for businesses.

You can also see your View registrations – which are the impressions on your ad that led to an event registration.

So, before you move on, make sure to select one of these 3 objectives. If you need help on which one to choose, you can also check my article The 7 LinkedIn Objectives & How to Use Them.

Personally, I would go with Website visits for LinkedIn Live events.

Target audience

Promoting LinkedIn Live Events requires a good definition of your target audience. In other words, who are the people that you want to register for your event? In many cases, events are a way for companies to find qualified leads that could later purchase from them.

In these cases, you can use the same target audience that you would use as if you were doing a regular campaign for lead generation.

In other cases, events can be purely informative, for the purpose of educating people on a certain topic. If this is the situation for you, you might want to expand your audience a little bit more than in a regular lead generation campaign.

After all, your goal would be to educate as many people as possible rather than generate very high quality leads.

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager offers a lot of different audience attributes to choose from. For example, if you are organizing an event on Venture Capital, you could go with the attribute Company Industries – Venture Capital & Private Equity.

Or, if the goal of your event is to promote your product to small businesses, you can filter by Company size. And simply include companies with less employees:

You really have a lot of filters to play around and narrow your audience.

For more help on how to select the right audience attributes, you can also check my comprehensive guide on LinkedIn ad targeting.

Ad format

The next step towards promoting LinkedIn Live events is selecting the right ad format.

As I previously mentioned, you can promote your event with Event ad. This way, you will have access to a variety of event performance metrics to help evaluate your results and the engagement of your audience.

So, click on the Event ad icon, and let’s go right to the next step.

Budget & Schedule

Next, you will have to define the budget and the schedule of your event.

If you’ve read any of my previous articles on LinkedIn, you probably know that I don’t recommend setting an end date for any campaign.

Sometimes, if your audience is very small, you risk that the campaign ends without spending its whole budget just because of the date. However, in the case of events, it is an acceptable step to avoid spending any unnecessary budget after the event is over.

And of course, the chances are that your event doesn’t have an endless budget, so make sure to set your lifetime limits as well. You don’t want your campaign to run forever…and ever…and ever…(leave me a comment if you get the reference!)

Bidding

The next step to promoting LinkedIn Live events successfully is setting up your bidding strategy.

Bidding refers to the way you want LinkedIn to spend your money. For example, if you select Manual bidding, you set a limit on the maximum amount that you are willing to pay for a single click.

LinkedIn Live events: Bidding

If you select Automated bidding, the platform will bid instead of you.

Usually, and especially in the case of LinkedIn Live events, I will go with Manual bidding. The reason why is because I get a better control over the ad spending, and I won’t spend crazy high money for a single click that doesn’t even guarantee a registration.

You can also click here to learn everything about bidding on LinkedIn.

Conversion tracking

This step is highly recommended for regular campaigns. However, it is not available for LinkedIn Live events because it requires the installation of a pixel on your website.

In this case, because the URL of your event remains on LinkedIn, you can’t really install any pixel there. But don’t worry, we already saw that the platform has its own way of showing you all the valuable metrics.

Campaign

And the final step towards promoting your LinkedIn live events is to actually create your campaign! At the bottom right corner, click on Next, and you will arrive at the next page. Then, click on Create new ad.

Now, all you will need will be your LinkedIn event URL, and an introductory text and ad name if you prefer. However, these two elements are optional, and you can really launch your ad with just the event URL. And you are ready!

Click on Create, and just launch your ad. And remember – pay attention to the metrics so you can continue optimizing your performance and find out what type of LinkedIn live events people interact the most with.

And that was all from me for today! Thank you for taking the time to read my article on promoting LinkedIn Live Events, and I hope to see you in the next one! 🙂 If you have any questions, observations or doubts, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments below.