Consultants: Getting Clients with LinkedIn Events – What’s Working Now

Consultants: Getting Clients with LinkedIn Events – What’s Working Now

Gary explains how consultants can use LinkedIn Events to fill their sales pipeline by managing the before, during, and after phases. He recommends running events as native LinkedIn Live streams from a personal profile, not external Zoom links or registration forms, to reduce friction, increase attendance, and maximize replay views, noting LinkedIn promotes events and replays on-platform. Key tactics include building a purposeful network, crafting strong event titles, inviting up to 1,000 targeted connections (and leveraging team members to expand invites), sending manual reminders, and following up afterward with replay messages. He emphasizes the long tail value of replays and suggests repurposing recordings into short captioned clips, ideally using separate recordings, and mentions tools like StreamYard, Apollo, and Quso.ai.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
03:30 Housekeeping And Replay
04:46 Agenda And Q And A
06:01 About Gary And Framework
07:59 Benefits Of Events
12:29 Why LinkedIn Events
15:29 Network With Purpose
18:42 LinkedIn Promotes Events
20:59 Native Vs Zoom
23:37 Event Setup Pitfalls
25:14 Replay Value Proof
27:12 Replay Promotion Boost
28:05 Invites Over Ads
30:06 Team Invite Strategy
32:56 Reminder Messaging Tactics
34:52 Day Of Execution
37:44 Retention Sweet Spot
40:50 Post Event Replay Push
42:52 Repurpose Into Clips
45:07 Tools For Repurposing
46:49 Wrap Up And Q&A

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to today’s event When we’re talking about. Getting clients with LinkedIn events. so I know it takes LinkedIn usually a minute or two to get notifications and stuff going out to people. so I’ll give everybody a couple minutes here to start coming on and then we’ll get the, the show started.

If you’ve been to one of my events before, you know how I like to get started on time ’cause I know your time is valuable and I don’t want you sitting around waiting for people who are late. So, We’ll give everybody a couple minutes to come on in the meantime. Where, where are you guys calling in from today?

I’m up here in the suburbs of Detroit. It is a, I’d say kind of a gray day out there, but the heat is, has finally, subsided a little bit. It’s not so hot today, which is, is great. I felt like it’d been been warm, at least by Michigan standards. It’s been been fairly warm, so. it’s nice to get that kind of cool, almost fall like weather right now.

So how about, how is it in your neck of the woods? Are you still still baking under the heat or is it a little better in your, in your, space these days?

oh, mark in Orlando, is it hot and hot and humid? Oh, Eric, you’re, you’re, you’re just down the road there in Ann Arbor. Nice. Nice to have you here.

Shandor Birmingham. let’s see. That one didn’t come through for me in New York. Lemme see if I can drive it. Matt, in New York. Nice to have you here. And Timothy in Bloomington. Great to have you here. And Brian and Raleigh. Glad, glad to hear that, that it’s getting better for you. There. There. Alright.

Appreciate everybody being on. I’ll probably give it here. I’m probably gonna give it about 30 seconds and then we will get things, going here today. ’cause I know we had a bunch of people registered. I last, I checked, I think it was a little over 800 people registered. I know. Not, not everybody’s gonna show up live.

We’ll actually talk about that and how to, you know, use that as, as kind of dealing with, dealing with that part of the, the process, knowing that not everybody’s gonna show up live to an event, even if they said, yeah, yeah, I’m, I’m planning to come because. Right. We’ve been, sending out reminders today and a lot of people say, yeah, stuff’s came up.

Or, or, I didn’t mean, some people say, Hey, I didn’t mean to sign up for that. You know, things like that. well, good, good. let’s see here. We got, Milland. I hope I’m saying that right. And Novi, Lars in Denver. Melissa and Durango, great to have you all here today. And I think that is enough of me, making small talk.

you’re here to learn about LinkedIn events and getting people to come to ’em. So without further ado, let’s do that. Shall we? change my view here. There we go. Alright. Welcome everybody to how to use LinkedIn events to fill your Sales Pipeline. we’ll be focusing on consultants today, but obviously anybody can use this strategy.

It’s just, I tend to work with consultants, so that’s kind of the space I know best. so lemme get my, Things moved around here just a little bit. Bear with me for one second while I get my monitor where I want it to 

[00:03:29] be. Alright, so just a few quick housekeeping items today. There is about a 20 to 32nd delay when I talk.

So when I say something, you probably won’t see it on your side for about 30 seconds. Doesn’t affect really much of anything except kind of comments. If I see a comment, it won’t, you won’t see me responding to it for, for a little bit of a delay. Otherwise, I know replay, I know we had a bunch of people saying, Hey, please send me the replay when it’s available.

We will certainly send those messages out to everybody. but if, you wanna check it out or you wanna revisit something after the event, it will be on this same page. It’s usually within about five minutes, but that depends on how LinkedIn feels that day. We’ve seen sometimes where it takes an hour.

For the whole thing to process. Sometimes it just depends on how long it’s, and if you’d like to be notified of future events, I do try and get at least one email, hopefully more than one email. I think this, this week it was only once. but I do send out an email, to everybody, letting ’em know about events.

So just in case you didn’t get an invite from me or one of my team members, for every event, I know with my network it’s, I can’t invite everybody anymore. LinkedIn says, no, that’s too many people. So, If you’d like to make sure you get notified of future ones, please, you can sign up on that 

[00:04:45] page there.

So the agenda today, what are we gonna be talking about? We are gonna be talking about. LinkedIn events, and we’re talking about kind of the, the kind of three phases. The before or the before, the during and the after. So we’re talking about kind of the, some of that setup, stuff. it’s not that hard, but if you’ve never done it before, also it can be kind of intimidating and you think all this looks good.

There’s some there, I would say there’s some kind of, potholes with it. some things that sounds like they make sense and then, well, not so much. They kind of, they tank your, your, Your attendance, we’re talking about promoting your event so you can get maximum impact with it. It’s probably easier than it sounds.

and then we’re gonna talk about some of the post-event stuff. What do you do after the event to really kind of keep the momentum going that you get for all the effort you put into doing these? and then we’ll even talk about kind of repurposing that event for even more exposure. And we’ll finish up with some q and a ’cause I’m sure you’re gonna have questions.

If you’ve got questions during the, during a certain section. I will try and keep an eye on the chat and address them if they’re relevant to that particular topic. Otherwise, I will come back to them at the end. And. answer them at that time. Alright, fair 

[00:06:00] enough. Real quick, about me. Here’s the 15 second version.

I am the founder of Pipelineology and host of the Pipelineology podcast. Been doing marketing now for about 24 years. in my corporate career, I actually ran call centers for car dealerships. So, basically my team would take all the incoming leads. We had 16 stores around the country. Our job was to schedule appointments.

So I worked on building a lot of those processes for, for following up and messaging people and all that kind of stuff that would lead to appointments these days. I take a lot of those lessons learned along with many new ones. Learning how to leverage LinkedIn to help our clients get more meetings and LinkedIn events is one portion of those things, that we do, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today.

So I know this is small on the screen. This is the flow chart that we’re gonna kind of base everything off of. I just figured one kind of slide with everything kind of visually represented. And if, if you just need one quick sheet to reference, if you want looking to set one of these up to promote it, or you’ve got a, you know, assistant who’s gonna be helping you do, manage these things, hand, hand them this, this sheet and say, here’s kinda what we want to do.

Put a game plan together. like I said, I feel free to screenshot it, but if you’d just like a copy of it, I will email you the PDF version of it. just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com and I’ll send it over. Give me gimme till probably end of the day, maybe tomorrow morning if things get real busy.

but we’ll try and get that over to you so you can, can take a look at it. But essentially, kinda what we’re looking at is. Before we even do an event, is just making sure that we’re connecting with all the right people that we want to attend our events. we’re talking about, you know, picking the topic and the event type, inviting people, sending out reminders, sending out replays, right?

All stuff you probably know, but you’re like, how do I, how do I do it efficiently? And then we’re gonna talk about repurposing. So again, if you’d like a copy, Gary at Pipelineology dot com, just shoot me an 

[00:07:58] email. So what are the advantages of LinkedIn events? There are several, and some of these, here’s the, here’s the nice thing.

Even if nobody shows up to an event, there are still advantages to it that make it worth it. Even if you play to an empty house, which ideally if you follow all the steps we’re doing today, that is not gonna happen to you. But just know that even if it doesn’t, even if the attendance isn’t what you were hoping for.

You can still get a lot of value out of doing one of these events. So some of the things that, we’ve kind of found, from doing. hundreds of these. Now, at this point, between ones I’ve hosted myself or ones I’ve I’ve done for clients is that, you know, one of the big advantages is it kind of elevates your authority, right?

You, if you’re, especially if you’re, you know, trying as a consultant, your expertise, has value. Sometimes doing outreach or or other types of prospecting, it’s harder to convey that value. Whereas doing an event where you are on video, making a presentation, engaging with an audience, those things all basically get you viewed in an entirely different light.

So now, instead of being that that person, you know, sliding into someone’s dms, you are that person presenting essentially from a virtual stage. So you’re looked at a bit, quite a bit differently in that, in that light. one, I I also like that it just, it really helps you engage with your network in a, in a way that doesn’t require you to be on LinkedIn all the time.

Right? It’s great to make posts and comments, and I recommend you do all those things, but this is kind of one of those, I would kind of say kind of a tent pole type of activities where it’s, you know, you’re gonna put some effort into it, but you’re also gonna get the return back from it. it’s, it’s great for your prospects as well because, well, this is kind of a no pressure environment.

They can engage with you, they can see your style, they can see is this somebody I’d like to work with? and yes, it does in fact bring in new leads, which is probably why most people are gonna do ’em. But we also find that it’s good for reducing price resistance. it’s, it helps convert some of those people who are.

Thinking about it. In fact, I will often invite people that I’ve talked to throughout the month onto one of these events just so they can check it out, see what it’s like. And, it does actually make a difference in the people who end up working with us along the way. just one of those kind of little, little bit of inside baseball there for you.

also it helps with retention. Right As, as people kind of, they, they feel like they’re working more with an expert versus somebody, they’re like, I, I don’t know, is this working type of thing. and even can help bring back lost clients. So we see a lot of value in doing these. And keep in mind, it’s not just limited to presentations like this.

I’d say this is where most people start, is kind of basically PowerPoint presentation or a slide deck of some sort. and, talking head on a screen. but, I would say, you know, interviews, think, think like podcasts. In fact, you could do an interview with somebody and up do it on LinkedIn and then upload the recording as a podcast.

certainly another way to get extra mileage from. From, from doing one of these events where you get all the value of doing the LinkedIn side of it, and then you can take all of that and, and put it on your podcast for, for, For, for the, your whole new audience to watch. but I’ve had clients who will do things like do round tables where they’ll bring on a panel of experts, and interview them and talk about it.

you can even use ’em for LinkedIn events, or excuse me, for networking events if you feel so inclined. I don’t know that that one to me has the most value. I think the first, you know, I think the interviews are great. I think round tables are great. I even like this format, which is why I’m doing it, where it’s the presentation.

But ultimately you do what. Do what works for you and do what you like. That’s probably the big thing to understand about these, is you don’t have to do it the way I’m doing it. do do the format that you think is, is gonna be best for you. And you can even do it with your own internal team. Talking about, you know, we, we see that one quite a bit too is, is just kind of an internal team, you know, bringing somebody on from a different department or talking, you know, talking through a case study.

I’ve had clients, you know, who’ve. You know, done things like in manufacturing and stuff like that, and they wanna highlight, you know, a case study for an example, or they wanna go over like one part of a white paper, something like that in a bit more detail. So lots and lots of ways that you can cover, cover something like 

[00:12:28] this.

So why, why LinkedIn events and not just a webinar. or a podcast for that matter. And it’s because of the audience you can bring in from LinkedIn, right? If you wanna do a webinar, you need a list. You actually need a fairly big list most of the time, of people you can email and promote it to. podcasts, same type of thing.

Podcasts don’t come with any built in audience. It’s an audience that has to be built up. And I think LinkedIn is kind of the easiest starting point because most people have some sense, some type of network on this platform. It may not be huge, it may not be tens of thousands of people. might, might only be, you know, a couple thousand people, might only be a few hundred people, but it’s a starting point, for, for something like this.

And of course you can, you know, you can use it to kind of help build your list or build an audience for something else. But, the nice thing is it’s, it’s a great starting point and LinkedIn makes it easy to accept invitations and easy to, to basically engage with your network. To bring them on, right?

I’ve got a screenshot here of, and it’s an old screenshot. ’cause once you know, I’m, I get all kinds of in invites every single week, and most of the time it’s ignore, ignore, ignore. And I went in this morning to grab my screenshot, and I only had one new invite, so I was like, I wanna show people what at least three look like, for different stuff.

But you right, you’ve all seen these, right? People want to connect with you, or they want you to subscribe to their newsletter or they want you to come to their event, but it all gets put right here, right in front of you. So that makes it real easy. Accept or ignore. So that’s, that’s why I wanted to show you this part of it here.

Of course, you can click into the name, but this is what it’s gonna look like when somebody else is receiving your invitation. So, one of the things here, we’ll probably jump into this a little bit more, is your title is really important. so you want, you know, basically let people know who this is for, especially if it, if you work with one specific industry, for example, right?

The name of mind is tells you, I, I’m looking for, you know, Hey, this is probably most relevant to consultants and I would say, I didn’t check the analytics on this one, but usually that’s, that’s who’s coming to things like this. so, you know, title is, you know, make sure that if the title can kind of do the bulk of the heavy lifting, does it let people know who it’s for and what it’s about?

And is that enough to get somebody’s to peak somebody’s interest to click the accept button versus ignore? That’s what you’re going for in the title. and yet, like I said, you can click on it and get all the details, but about 50% of people are just gonna make a decision, probably actually a little bit more than that are just gonna click accept or ignore.

Only a certain percentage of people will even click into it at all and learn about it. So just keep that in mind is that this is one of those decision points right here where they’re trying to decide to like. Do I learn more about it? Does that interest me? Or, Hey, I like that, that sounds good. Or nope, ignore not, not for me, not 

[00:15:27] relevant.

And if you’ve been on any of my events in the past, you have seen this slide. I think it pretty much is just, it’s, it’s like chiseled in stone in my PowerPoint presentation at this point. Is this how you build your network? And the reason that I, I put this one in probably every presentation I do, is that this is probably kind of the, the cornerstone to does, even, even if you’re not gonna do events, even if you’re not gonna do any outreach, if, if you’re just trying to use LinkedIn to build a, a following, you want to use content.

This is, this is probably the most relevant slide, is you need to build your network with purpose. You wanna be adding connections all the time, and I absolutely recommend you proactively go out and request to connect to people that you don’t know that are relevant to your network, to your, I, you know, your, your ideal client profile, those type of folks, because.

You know, you can, you’re, you’re gonna get lots of, you know, in invitations to connect with people, especially the more active you are on the platform. But what’s gonna happen is that, you know, if you’re not curating that, that list yourself, you’re gonna end up with a whole bunch of people who wanna sell you something and.

I’m not saying that that’s not valuable, but it’s probably not quite what you’re looking for on LinkedIn. So by you intentionally going out and curating your own network, you’re gonna have a lot better luck no matter which path you go down. And for events, you need to be connected with people to send out invites.

And we’re gonna get to that in, in just a few minutes here. But that’s gonna be the kind of, that’s what does the heavy lifting to get you people. To attend your events. So, and also you can do things like newsletters and it makes it easier to message ’em, so there’s lots of benefit to it. But for the purpose of events, we really, really need that network and we want to add, be adding the right people and new people to it all the time.

But it is a slow grind. I’m actually at the point here, I think this week we’ll probably fi, I will finally hit the 30,000 limit. I was at 29,900 and. Something earlier when I checked. so I’m almost to the limit, but that took years best, you know, probably best case, it’s gonna take you at least six years to do it, and that’s every week, week in, week out you find a hundred new people to connect with you.

Which is not an easy task, trust me, given, given LinkedIn’s limitations on how many people you can send requests to, it’s, it’s a lot of work to do that. So think about that. So, you know, so start now and you know, even once you hit, you know that if you’re at only at, if you’re only at a thousand.

Great. Just accept everybody right now, you know, and then work to get to 5,000 and then 10,000 and just keep building. ’cause it, like I said, it takes a long time. And then when you get to 30,000, you know, you’ll, you’ll, you at least have a sense of what you wanna do when you get there. but you don’t have a pro.

Once, you know, when you have, when you get to 29,000, you can start to think about it a little differently, but don’t worry about it until then, just build, build that network. But like I said, with intention, find the right people. ’cause you want them in your network. ’cause obviously it’s much easier to build a, a book of business if you’ve got the right people in your, in your 

[00:18:40] network.

And next thing about events is that LinkedIn is gonna help you promote them for free. And I like to include the slides. It’s a little bit old now, but this particular graphic is I think from 20 20, 23. I think it’s the last data I had on it. but LinkedIn wants to be complete people to spend more time on their network.

Right. If you look at this one here, it says people spend an average of 17 minutes on LinkedIn a month. now how does that compare to other social media? Well, you probably intuitively know that it’s a lot, lot less than you know, depending on what you use. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. I think YouTube right now is sitting around 47 minutes of act of active usage.

A day, not, not a month, a day. So more than a hundred. A hundred times more time is spent on YouTube’s platform. And what does that mean? Well, for a platform like YouTube, that means they can sell more ads. so LinkedIn is trying to get more people to spend more time on their platform because that looks good to investors, and ultimately that means they can serve more ads or sell more premium subscriptions to people who, who don’t want that.

things like that. So. so by LinkedIn wants to promote these because what is a LinkedIn event tool? It brings people onto their platform that are gonna spend time on their platform. and that’s, we’re gonna look at kind of that versus doing these events like, zoom or Microsoft Teams or, or some type of thing where you take ’em off.

Well, LinkedIn’s got less incent. LinkedIn’s got a little bit less incentive to really write for help push those. they will to some degree, but I you, you’re gonna find better results by sticking on the, the platform. And well, like I said, we’re gonna, we’re gonna jump into that here in just a few minutes.

you can see here, here’s kind of a screenshot. If you went into, this event page, you probably saw something like this, that there on the right hand side of the screen, there are other events for you. so other ones that are either happening now or that they think are relevant based on topics you’ve engaged with recently, or liked or commented on, things like that.

so, LinkedIn’s kind of trying to, to get people to spend more time 

[00:20:56] here. So let’s kind of jump in a little bit more here to that native versus, off platform. So by native livestream, I mean, kind of what you’re, basically, what you’re watching right now, which is this is being streamed to LinkedIn.

You didn’t have to click any other links. You either clicked, you clicked a blue join button, or you just clicked on the video because it was already playing. and then you, you were here, there was, so, there was no friction of. Clicking a link and then getting a popup that says you are leaving LinkedIn, right?

LinkedIn has a big, right, a big page that shows up and says, Hey, are you sure you wanna leave LinkedIn? You don’t really wanna leave LinkedIn. Right? You love it here. basically, right. So, so let’s talk about that a little bit, and if you do have any questions kind of about the pre-event stuff, I’ll kind of take a, I’ll take a breath here and we’ll, I’ll cover any questions here for kind of setting these up.

and then we’ll kind of jump into the, we’ll do the during, which will be pretty quick, and then we’ll do the post post-event stuff. But essentially what does that look like? So if you’re doing kind of the native event, right? You had the blue join button. Yeah. You go, you click on the video and it was playing already.

If you are doing an off platform on, so here’s an invite to one I got right. Had a good title, was looked, sounded interesting, but it’s a zoom. like, and then you gotta register and then they want you to register for the Zoom. So basically you’re taking, you know, you’re getting, you’re getting people interested.

Then they have to click on a Zoom link. So they’re already going off platform, so that’s gonna lose a bunch of people. And then on top of it, they ask for a registration. So now you’re getting a page like, you know, of a bunch of questions that say, Hey, you know, here’s, you know, fill in your information.

You’re, you’re gonna probably see maybe one in 10, not even people show up for, we’ll, we’ll even, you know, get that far that may have, that would’ve attended. So if 10 people would’ve attended the live stream like this. One person is gonna make it to the Zoom. So that’s, that’s the kind of people you’re already seeing drop off.

so I stick to the live streams because more people will attend them. I get more engagement, which makes these a lot more fun to do. ’cause then I feel like I’m not talking to an empty room, which the very first one I did, I did all, everything wrong and. Two people showed up and by the end of it, nobody was there.

It was just me. So I know what it’s like to play to the empty room and it’s, it’s a little awkward. but, but you are here today, and I can see there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 of you here to right now, which is, which is great. I’m excited to have you 

[00:23:36]  here. So basically, what am I saying is when you’re setting up your event, here’s what it looks like, by the way.

So you get the, you get a page here, you can upload a cover image and it says choose your event format. so you can choose a LinkedIn Live or an external event link. I’m saying pick LinkedIn live. That’s the one you want. And over here, if you’re doing it through a company page, so I always say do it through your personal page.

’cause again, more people are gonna come, more people are gonna show up. You can do these through a company page if that’s, you know, if you work for a large organization. And that’s, that’s the requirement. And you’re gonna see one of these little pitfalls here that says, Hey, I would like to req use a registration form.

You look at that and you say, that sounds great. I would like to use a registration form because now I get the list and I can just download it at the end. Only problem is nobody signs up for those. You gotta send out, you’re gonna lose about 80% of people, right? LinkedIn will even pre-fill it in for you, and you’re still gonna lose about 80% of people who will not fill it out because they’re like, it’s too much friction.

All they had to do was click submit. All their information is prefilled and they’re like, I, I don’t think I want to do that. That’s, so again, that’s why I stick to the stick to doing ’em on my, on my personal page as a LinkedIn Live, no registration required. All you have to do is click accept, ’cause it gets, it gets the right, it gets the people here.

And that’s what I’m going for on these events as I’m doing them. So, and I’d say do it for the replay. this is, this is one of the benefits that. Probably gets overlooked here. You say, well, it doesn’t matter if I don’t get as many people here. You know, zoom is a, is a better environment, 

[00:25:13] right? I can talk to people back and forth, which is true here.

We can’t talk back and forth. All you can do is comment, So, what I would recommend though here is do it because you can have the replay on the platform. If you don’t, if you do it off platform, your replay is off platform somewhere, and you probably have to now set up a separate page on your website, and then you gotta set everything up and format it and process it.

If you’re doing it here, guess what? You know the replay, as I mentioned at the very beginning. It shows up somewhere between five minutes, an hour after. Click on the same page, come back here. It’s archived, it’s there and you can watch it. And this is the analytics from one I did back in April. So you can see we had 415 unique people.

Watch the video. Only 37 people showed up live though. Everybody else came back for the replay. They watched it later. They got a notification, right? ’cause they had, they had signed up for it. But they couldn’t attend live. Right? You people are, people are busy, especially probably a lot of the professionals you wanna work with.

You know, ultimately you can, you know, like I say, oh, that’d be cool. Or if I’m, if I’m not busy, I’ll come and they, they were busy, so they didn’t show up or they had a fire to put up. Something came up. So. People will come back and watch that replay though. I just had a person reach out to me from, from an event I did back in May saying, Hey, you know, thanks for that event in May.

I just watched that, that, watch that one. It was great. Do you have that flowchart? And I said, well, yeah, here’s here, here you go. Thanks for watching it. So, right. These things can last for, have, have, you know, kind of that long, long life to ’em if you let ’em live on the LinkedIn platform versus, you know, they just kind of go to die, on, on Zoom or something like that, where it’s kind of one and done.

So, Don’t sleep on, on the replay. Is, is all I’m saying there. and we’ve covered 

[00:27:11] that kind of. Here’s just one more example of kind of how LinkedIn helps promote the replay. As you can see that somebody, you know, you can see people were, were at a live event that they spoke there, that somebody was live.

This is how you get people getting pushed back to that replay, after the, after the fact and Right. You’ve probably seen it too, where you looked at your notifications and you saw that somebody had an event. You said, oh, that looked interesting. I’m, I’m, I might’ve gone to that if I’d known about it. Or you’ve just ran out of time.

So the replay is, is one of these not to be overlooked type of things. And probably the, the best argument for saying do it as a live stream is ’cause more people are gonna see it. Alright, I see a couple questions here. I will get to them and, right kind of at the end of this section, and then we’ll go into kind of the, the, the next, the next parts 

[00:28:04] here.

so let’s talk about promoting your event. So, by all means, you should share the event. You should, you know, post about it, tell other people that it’s happening, but by far the, and you could even run ads to it and I don’t recommend that because. You’re gonna spend a bunch of money and you’re not, you’re gonna get like four signups and nobody shows up.

So do do the event invites like this. So when you go into your event, you’re gonna see the ability to share it. You click on that blue share button, click on the invite button, and you’re gonna get a popup over here, kind of like on the right hand side where you can see somebody’s location. different types of companies, schools they may have attended, are the important one, which is off to the right hand side and doesn’t show up very easily.

Click, click on the little arrows to scroll over to it. You, you’ll find the industry so you can invite people from the industries that you work with. So if you work with manufacturers or you work with financial advisors, or you work with real estate agents, whatever it is, you can pick people from that industry to invite.

and I will tell you that the first few of these I did, I was, I was really particular about it. I would very carefully go through and curate and make sure I individually selected just the right people. And then I did a couple of events where I ran out of time to do that. So I would just click select all at the top, and boom, invite the people.

And you know what? because I just. Made sure I was hitting a 1000 person max every week. More people actually showed up by just being a little less selective about it and just getting, making sure I got the invites out. And that’s probably the big thing I want to emphasize here is make sure you get the invites out.

This is how people are gonna find out about it. The, the majority people will find out about it, right. Is there, is there anybody here who, who actually I’m curious if, if, if, did anybody attending today, did you find it a different way? Is it from a post or from, events happening today? Or was it because somebody from my team invited you?

Right. I may not have, you may have gotten one from Evan or 

[00:30:05] Kaylee or Katie. ’cause when we do it, it’s all a team effort. that’s probably another thing is if you’ve got a team of people. Everybody can invite a thousand people a week. so do that. ’cause that will get, again, that will help kind of get more people to show up to it.

’cause it just gives you basically more bandwidth to do invitations. And people won’t get multiple invites. By the way, as soon as somebody’s invited been invited by one person, they don’t, the other one, they’re not shown as an option to anybody else. So. Don’t worry about people getting four invitations.

You’ve got a team of four people or anything like that. okay, so I got a couple questions here. so Melissa asks, how do you collect email addresses if you do it on platform? so I will, what I will do here is I’ve got kind of a couple steps. To, to do this. probably, this is probably not a LinkedIn approved way of doing it, but the best way I found to do it is I will go through and I will copy all those, all the people who basically r svp.

So I’ll go through each page of, of people who’ve r SVP to the event. We’ll copy them all down. We’ve got a script that just pulls out their LinkedIn URL, and I’ll just feed them into an enrichment tool like Apollo to, to pull back their email address. But, that’s, that’s the way we found it to kind of get the best of both worlds where we can get as many people as we can to, to attend the event.

And this gives us the ability to contact them, afterwards. And I’ll, I’ll, I, and it’s not, you know, for me, what if you’ve, if you’ve ever been on one of my events before, it’s, I put you on my list so that I can email you after the fact and we’ll, we’ll cover a little bit more in detail kind of post event on some of that stuff there.

Can you download the video to your YouTube channel? you can download the video and do whatever you want with it. So if you wanna upload it back to YouTube Yes. wherever you wanna put it. You certainly can. if you’re live streaming it like this, the platform I’m using, we’ll live stream wherever you want it to.

So if you wanna live stream this to. LinkedIn and YouTube and, Facebook or, or any of these places that will allow it. You can, you can do all, all of the above. so it doesn’t, you don’t have to stick to just LinkedIn if you’ve got audiences in a bunch of different places where you think they’d want to.

I, I’m mostly a LinkedIn person, so that’s where I tend to focus, what, what I’m doing, doing there. and let’s see, I’m just kind of looking here. Yep. Everybody. I think just as soon as I saw it, I opened LinkedIn. I got a popup to join via invite. So just about everybody got an email via invite. Dan, Dan happened to get one of my emails, promoting it, but, most people will, will come via that, that invite.

so thanks, thanks, thanks for the, the feedback everybody. Appreciate 

[00:32:53] it. so one more thing that we do is the morning of the event or the day before kind of time permitting, is we will manually send out reminders to everybody. So, one thing to keep in mind is LinkedIn will, basically, LinkedIn knows your attending.

So LinkedIn will say, Hey, hey Gary, or, Hey, I saw you, you’re in, you know, the event you signed up for is happening tomorrow. Just a reminder. So they’ll send you a notification, and they’ll send you an email about it. And if you sign up for one, they’ll typically, Hey, you are attending this event. Do you want to add it to your calendar?

so they’re, they’re trying to get you to, you know, basically put it on your calendar. But we found that by going through and actually messaging everybody, just sending them a quick, Hey, just wanted to make sure you had the, the link to the event. Do you think you can make it live or would you like me to send you the recording?

I don’t wanna pressure anybody, and I like to give that option up so I kind of have an idea who’s attending. And then I know who would like to see the replay. ’cause I know my replay numbers are gonna be better if I get replays out to people too. So some of those, some of those there. So we do go through and message everybody.

not everybody, as many as I can. When, when I was doing smaller events and there would be like 200 people signed up, we did message everybody. Now that you know, there’s any, once we, once we started hitting like 500 consistently and not everybody got messaged ’cause we ran out of time or LinkedIn would say, Hey, whoa, pump the brakes everybody.

That’s a bit too many reminders. So just, just one thing to keep in mind. But while you’re, when you’re getting started, definitely do this as much as possible in terms of just messaging the people and just asking if they’re gonna gonna be able to make it today. so day of the event, so that, that’s everything that goes into pre-event.

I know, right? Bunch of it. It feels like a lot. it’s one of those just, just get one done. Get, get something going. Don’t worry about getting everything right. Just do it. And, it’s not gonna be too 

[00:34:49] bad. So what do you do day of the event? Day of the event is, is really about, you know, how are you, are you doing a presentation?

Do you have, you know, somebody coming on with you? you know, get, come on a little bit early, make sure right. If you’re that way in case there’s any technical difficulties, somebody’s mic isn’t working right. We, I show up 15 minutes early to do all the checks. Even though, like I said, we’re, we’re at the hundreds of point now of doing events.

It almost, it, it really, I think we’ve had one major hiccup in the, you know, three or four years we’ve been doing these. But, you know, I just like to be on to, to make sure things process, like my, my slide deck took. Three minutes to process today when I uploaded it and I was like, it usually it only takes 30 seconds.

What’s going on? But we had plenty of time. So just give yourself a little bit of time and then nobody needs to panic and then you don’t start late and any of that. But when you’re coming, coming on, bring your energy. It’s fun. It’s time to engage with people, right? The hard part’s done so, and just remember that the first one of these, I like to just remember the first one’s probably gonna be bad.

Don’t worry if nobody shows up. It was probably bad anyway, so. So don’t worry too much, let’s just get it done. And then the second one will be better, and the third one will be better. And, and you’ll once you, once you’ve done ’em a few times and you realize if you stumble over your words or you, you, or you leave a bunch of dead air like that, or you couldn’t think of some something, you’re gonna, you’re, it’s gonna be okay.

The world didn’t end. and, and people, people didn’t leave. so anyway, the first one’s the hardest. Just get that one done. If, if that’s the only takeaway you have today is just, just get one done. ’cause it’s not that bad. Even if you did a terrible job, it’s not the end of the world. You can delete. If it’s that terrible, you can delete it.

Just delete it and forget it ever happened. So. But that’s, that’s really kind of what I think about like day of the event stuff, is that it is really all about, you know, what, what’s your presentation about? Or if you’re having a guest on, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, making sure that guest is, is, you know, ready to answer questions and that you’re prepared for it.

but big thing is, is just, just do it. Just get it done. So I know that this, this is it, this is the only slide I have for, for during the event because this is, is just all about, just bring energy, be happy, have fun, engage with the audience. Buy the other one. Just engage with the audience, especially, especially when you’re kind of in an environment like this, like where people can only comment.

It’s not like Zoom where you can pick on people in the, in the video, which people don’t like by the way. But you could in Zoom here, you can’t, So, but just, just some things to keep in mind there is to try and try and keep the audience engaged a little bit and they will stick around a little bit 

[00:37:42] longer.

I didn’t, didn’t keep a slide for kind of analytics for retention, which is one of the things if you do live streams, you will get retention analytics. And what you’re gonna see is you’re gonna see it kind of slowly climbs for about the first 15 minutes. And basically, you know, ’cause people are getting notifications and they’re coming on, you’re gonna get some stragglers that are a little bit late, and then the third after 15 minutes, that’s kind of up to you then how many you keep.

So. The, the flatter, it stays after thir after 15 minutes means the better job you’re doing and the more interested people are. If it starts to fall off real quickly, it means, yeah, not yet, not so, not, it’s not so good. you know, the topic’s either boring or you’re not engaging, or they just, they’re just not interested at all in what’s going on.

and basically. So you want it to stay about flat for about 30 minutes. If you’re doing really good, you can hold them for about 45 and then it’s gonna fall off a cliff. So basically, I tell people, right, we’re at 30, 39 minutes now. We’re, we’re holding pretty steady. I’m so, but I probably have about five minutes before people are like, all right.

I am done and I’m gonna lose a bunch of people no matter what we’re talking about. Right. They’re just, they’re gonna, they’re gonna get bored and they’re, they’re gonna leave. So just some things to keep in mind in terms of, of kind of retention is I try and I recommend when you’re getting started, shoot for 30 minutes.

’cause that’s, that’s really what the sweet spot’s gonna be. if you’re, you’ve done a bunch of these and you like, I like to talk about a lot of stuff, or you want to use a lot of things for repurposing later on, like we’re gonna talk about here in the next section. Then you can make your, your presentations perhaps a little bit longer.

George’s question here, let’s see what George has. Gary, does it help your metrics to tie in post website content, et cetera, looking at a broader ecosystem or story arc? A little. but I, I would say, you know, the, the bigger your following is and the more engagement you get from general activity on LinkedIn.

which it’s, it’s, it’s kind of one of those ones where I’m like, broader ecosystem or for when I’m thinking about how do I present this, I feel like at some point I said like, I think that gets beyond the scope of this presentation. So yes, if you can tie it into a broader ecosystem, do so. I, I kind of wanted to keep the, the focus a little bit narrow here.

’cause as soon as I start telling people, well yeah, you need to post two or three times a week and then tie ’em back to your event, and things like that is, would certainly help. But if you’re just kind of looking for that biggest bang for the buck is kind of doing those invitations. That’s, that’s gonna kind of drive the, the majority of the, the attendance until you get to a point where you really do get that much engagement, from the type of, of post you’re doing.

but at that point your, your LinkedIn strategy is probably quite a bit different from the, the typical normal, anybody can do it type of, of, of approach. So, good question though. Really good 

[00:40:48] question. All right, so let’s kind of move into post event. You did the event right? Where everybody’s here, they said thank you.

Great, thanks. Appreciate you, you doing the event. Alright, now what, well now we’re gonna do the same thing. We’re gonna go back into that event and we’re gonna message everybody again, except this time we’re gonna send out the replay. and this is how kind of help, we help drive those, those analytics, right?

We saw right. Only a small number of people show up to ’em. And, and you know, you’ve, it’s one of those ones where you can try and bang your head against the wall thinking, how do I get more people to attend? Or you can realize that a certain number of people are gonna attend. We’re gonna message ’em, we’re gonna take the right steps, and then we’re gonna rely, rely on the replay to do the rest of the heavy lifting.

So first step of that is to just send the, send it out to everybody who signed up. You know, they’ve already received a message that, Hey, we were doing this event, now we’re just gonna let ’em know, hey, it’s done. Here’s a replay. And some people will watch. Now, I believe, who was it? Was it, Melissa? It was Melissa who asked, well, how do you get the contact information, if we’re doing it, if we’re not having a registration form?

Right. and that’s where some of the other tools, this is, like I said, this is a little bit more of an advanced, technique because now we have to use another tool. you can use, use whatever you like. there’s certain, there’s, there’s lots of tools that will do this, I guess is the short version.

So, I, I don’t have any affiliation with Apollo. I just know that one tends to be pretty economical. But use whatever you’d like, or hire somebody to, to do it for you. but I find that what I can do there then is that I can add those people to CRM, so now I can message ’em about future events or I can put ’em, you know, messaging ’em about newsletters.

I don’t get real pitchy about it because I, I feel like that really wasn’t what they signed up for. but adding ’em to a list, we, we’ve not really found really any issues with that because, if they don’t like it, they can unsubscribe from it. But they were 

[00:42:51] interested in the event. So letting ’em know about the next one is, is oftentimes pretty, it seems congruent to me when we’re, when we’re talking about what do we do, so, and then kind of this last section I wanna talk about here is how do you get more mileage from the event, right?

You put the effort in it to doing the presentation, or maybe you took the time to coordinate with a guest. So you’re saying, well, now what else can I do? So a few hundred people have seen it. That’s cool. That’s cool. Maybe you got some leads from it. I hope so. but. But what else can I do? Right? It was, it’s when I, how do I make sure it felt like it was worth the worth, the time and effort to do?

And one of the things you can do is now take this long form, comment, or content, and turn it, break it into little short little snippets. So you know, maybe like a little one where you talk, you are answering somebody’s question. Just 30, 30 to six 30 to 92nd kind of video clips is kind of what I aim for.

kind of that style with the captions beneath it. so that if people are not watching with their audio on in their feed and right. A lot of people don’t want the audio on in their feed. but if they can see the captions, they can get the gist of it. If they’re really interested, they’ll click on it.

But now you’re getting that exposure. Now you’re getting back in front of your audience. And the nice thing is, is that it’s content written in your voice. ’cause you said it, it’s, you’re not relying on some ghost writer, you’re not relying on AI to try and say something insightful. Now you can just pull the best clips of things that, you know, maybe you talked for, if you talked for 45 minutes, you probably said at least one or two things that.

Somebody else would, would like to hear in a little snippet. so like I tell people, it’s, these aren’t gonna go viral, but you’re gonna, you’re gonna get more views and you’re gonna see more views and it, it really starts to add up. And the nice thing is you didn’t have to come up with any new content for that day.

You have to try and come up with a post, but now you’re back in front of those people. So, and, and you’re on video, which it tends to be better for kind of building that relationship with people. Where they feel like they, they know, like, and trust you, versus just straight up text. so that’s kind of where, where I like the video, aspect of 

[00:45:05] it.

quick pro tip, if you are going to, if that is what you’re planning to do, you’re gonna want to record your video stream separately. because if you’re trying to repurpose ’em, it’s really tough to make a good quality video. All you’re doing is sitting in the top corner of the screen here, right? If I was full size here, it’s a little easier, but you, or even more full size here, but then I don’t have my presentation.

And then, you know, then, then the actual presentation, this part of it doesn’t land as well with people. So, having that separate recording makes it really easier if you’re gonna repurpose it or have somebody else do it for you. So we use StreamYard for doing this part of it here. Not an ad, not affiliated.

I’m not affiliated with anybody. I don’t have any relationships with these people. They’re not paying me to tell you their names. so use ’em if you like ’em. Use, use whoever you like. for repurposing, the one I’m using is called qso, QU. so.ai. I don’t even know if I’m saying that right. ’cause they rebranded this year.

D Script is probably the one that’s a bit more popular. I just found the learning curve on that one was more than I cared to do. So I used the one I knew how to do already. But that’s, you know, that’s kind of the approach there is you can take these and now you can, can push them out to your stream.

Or if you’ve had a guest on, now you can send those so they can share, you know, their experience there and kind of, it all, all can kind of tie back to you. So lots of good things you can do there to, I say, like I said, to kind of keep that momentum moving. You did the event, now what? Now what happens next?

And this is kind of one of those great things you can do to keep, keep things moving along. 

[00:46:47] So. Thanks so much for coming today. If you need some help with this, right? I know it’s a lot of steps and, and I know if you just sit down and do it, you can do it. But I know sometimes time gets it, you know, gets away from all of us and we run outta time and we just say, I just need some, I just need to give this to somebody.

I need them to handle it. So if you need somebody who can help, do your LinkedIn events, set ’em up, handle all the heavy lifting. So all you need to do is show up and present. And have somebody else handle the rest. You know, feel free to message me. Happy to have that conversation with you. You know, talk about what that looks like, see if it’s a good fit for what you’re looking to do.

or you can schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com. either way is totally fine with me, whatever you prefer. So, and do a little bit of q and A here with anybody who would like to, has a few questions, needs clarification on some things, and then I’m gonna let you go because I know this is, like I said, we’re a little around, right around that 45 minute mark.

And this is when everybody’s ready to go. So thanks so much for coming every today, everybody, if you do have questions, I’m gonna stick around here for, you know, a few more seconds. if any come in, I’ll make sure we get ’em answered. Otherwise, I appreciate everybody hopping on today. Great seeing you.

We’ll be back again at the end of September. I don’t think we’ve picked the topic yet, but hopefully we’ll see you there. I’ll try to make sure I get replays out, to as many people as possible. If, if one of my team members invited you, they will probably message you. mine, mine are a little, you know, a little less consistent.

But, again, appreciate everybody hopping on, not seeing any more questions here. nope. Nothing else. Pop, nothing, nothing else popped in. Thanks so much everybody. Have a great rest of your day and we’ll see you hopefully next month.