In the five months since the launch of the LinkedIn Virtual Events platform, LinkedIn has hosted more than 200,000 events. Now, after consulting with organizations on how to add more value to the platform, the company is rolling out a series of new features designed to help event professionals organically grow their attendees, collect leads from event sign-ups, and boost reach through sponsored ads and retargeting capabilities.

Growing Attendees Organically

To help event pros promote their events to specific audiences, LinkedIn has added new organic discovery features that include personalized event recommendations in the My Network tab and a new weekly Events digest email. When organizations post an event on their page, LinkedIn will also automatically notify those followers who are most likely to attend based on various criteria, including their interests.

Collecting Leads 

One of the biggest requests from organizers involved the ability to capture leads from events, so LinkedIn now provides groups with a free registration form that allows them to collect the names and emails of the people who sign up. They can then download the list from their event page to follow up, upload it to their CRM or share it with their sales teams. In addition, the registration form allows organizations to limit an event to registered attendees.  

Adding Sponsored Content

With internal data showing that LinkedIn Page followers exposed to organic content were 61 percent more likely to then click on a paid ad, LinkedIn now offers the ability to run single-image ads alongside organic posts as a way to amplify the promotion of an event. If organizers include the LinkedIn event URL as the destination URL in the ads, they will also be able to see how the ad performs against a new set of event-specific reporting metrics that include the total number of registrants and the ad views and clicks that ultimately led to registration.

Retargeting Attendees

In another new feature, organizations can nurture leads or continue the conversation with prior event registrants by creating a custom target audience in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager based on those who have RSVPd to their previous LinkedIn Events.

LinkedIn expects to make more updates to its virtual events platform in the coming months, including advanced event analytics, a new ad format and increased attendee networking options. 

Learn more about LinkedIn Events here.