Using LinkedIn Events To Generate Quality Leads & Fill Your Sales Pipeline

Using LinkedIn Events To Generate Quality Leads & Fill Your Sales Pipeline

In a live streamed LinkedIn event, Gary explains how to use LinkedIn Events to build and fill a sales pipeline, outlining an agenda covering why LinkedIn events work, how to grow a relevant network, how to choose strong topics/titles (within LinkedIn’s 75-character limit), and tactics to maximize attendance and repurpose content. He recommends having about 2,000 total connections and 1,000 relevant ones, proactively connecting (often without a message), and using Sales Navigator for targeting. He advises using LinkedIn Live via a personal profile rather than requiring registration or hosting via a company page, notes invites go only to first-degree connections with a 1,000-invites-per-week limit, and shares benchmarks for RSVPs, live attendance, and post-event views. He also describes manual reminders, replay sharing, analytics access, repurposing clips, and his company’s new managed events service offering.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Roll Call
02:50 Event Kickoff and Goals
04:33 Agenda and Housekeeping
07:52 Host Intro and Mindset
09:44 Why LinkedIn Events Work
12:19 Build a Relevant Network
14:40 Connection Request Pro Tips
17:22 Pick a Winning Topic
20:52 Event Format Options
23:41 Registration Form Pitfalls
26:34 Invites Targeting and Limits
28:35 Invite Limits Explained
29:21 Business Page Livestream Q&A
31:26 Scaling Invites With Teams
33:02 Getting Attendees To Show
35:26 Reminders And Replays
38:22 Benchmarks And Metrics
40:51 Turning Events Into Sales
44:28 Analytics And Privacy
46:21 Repurposing Event Content
49:54 Service Offer And Pricing
51:57 Final Q&A And Wrap Up

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to today’s live streamed event using LinkedIn events to fill your sales pipeline. it’s just a few minutes before, two o’clock Eastern time right now. So, if you’re watching live, we’ll get started here right on time at, at two o’clock, which, showing me about three minutes from now.

So, in the meantime, where, where are you, where are you calling in from today? I’m in, the Detroit Metro area, a little bit north of the city in the suburbs I’m in actually, Troy, Michigan, if you’ve ever heard of that. I know, I certainly hadn’t before I moved here. But yeah, we’d love to hear where, everybody’s, calling in from today.

And, just keep in mind, I have about a, a 30, 20 to 32nd delay in being able to kind of see comments. So, just keep in mind, I’m, if I, I may see your comment, but I may not, be able to respond to it right away. ’cause like I said, there’s a little bit of a delay on the live stream. But it looks like stuff’s starting to come in here.

John, great to have you here from, park City, Utah. Welcome, Stephanie from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Great to see you. Hey, Nick in Milton, Florida. Welcome. Great to have you on today. So, like I said, we’ll be, we’ll be getting started here quite shortly, so, oh, from, from Brazil. Welcome. Oh boy. I’m not gonna be able to pronounce that right.

Cle I, I, I’m gonna apologize, in advance for butchering your name. Hey, Justin from Toronto. Welcome, glad to have you here today.

All right. I know I’m, I’m excited to do this one. This is our, kind of our first time really focusing in on, on this part of the, you know, content Normally. Our, topics are a little bit more, you know, outbound focused and, you know, more lead generation types of focused. So this is actually kind of a, a cool one that we’ve been working on for a while, and I think we finally have kind of the, the formula down for it.

So I’m kind of excited to do this one. Hey, crystal, welcome, welcome from Boston, welcome from, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say that one’s also gonna be Toronto, Ontario. fortunately your name isn’t showing up for me, and I, I cannot. I don’t recall how to pronounce Mrs. Mississauga. I don’t remember how to say that one.

Ken, welcome. Elizabeth. Welcome, Percy. Welcome Vic. Victor Victoria. Welcome from Ukraine. Tony, welcome from, from Dallas in the great state of Texas. Victoria. Welcome from Virginia 

[00:02:49] Beach. All right, and my clock is showing me that it’s two o’clock, so it is time to get started. So thanks everybody for coming on.

Welcome to today’s event. This is gonna be all about using LinkedIn events to fill your sales pipeline. So, like I said, really excited to be doing this event today. I know we’ve been kind of working on this one internally, kind of trying to figure out what are the best practices? How do we get the maximum number of people?

How do you get engagement? How do you actually use it as a sales tool for your organization? And the the cool thing is there’s, there’s lots of ways to use it for your sales pipeline. It’s not just. You know, get on and pitch your pitch, your services type of thing. you can use it for all kinds of things from showing different case studies to different types of demos, capabilities to even, you know, getting very specific in certain capabilities and all kinds of things.

So we’re gonna go over some of that today. We’re gonna kind of go over some of the nuts and bolts as well about best practices in terms of setting stuff up, things that we’ve found that have helped us get more people to actually watch them. and show up to these, as we’ve done them. if you, if you were on my very first event that we did, this was back in November of 2021.

You probably weren’t there because only three people ever, ever showed up. So, and I think we’ve got 976 people registered today. So, pretty big, pretty big, change, since then. so even if, even if you decide to try this and your first event is a terrible flop, you can still still figure this out.

So. Alright, so welcome everybody. Let’s, let’s jump into 

[00:04:31] it. today’s agenda, why LinkedIn events and kind of some of the stuff that sets them apart from other types of webinars and things like that, and some of the advantages specific to LinkedIn. we’re gonna talk about your network and how to keep growing your network so that you can have more people to invite to these events like this.

Talk about setting things up, talk about picking the topic and title because that’s actually really makes a big difference in terms of getting people to even agree to show up. And we’re talking about some of the things that we found that help maximize attendance, get more views, and even on small events, to, to get, you know, more people to, to show up.

’cause like I said, events don’t necessarily start out as big. I, I know when you start. Seeing them in your stream, typically they’re big. You know, you’ll see ones with, typically if they’re being featured by LinkedIn, they’ve got at least 500 people registered for ’em. But I just wanna let you know that it is totally okay for them to be smaller than that, especially at first, and they can kind of grow over time, but they can be really, really effective even when they start out small.

So. Don’t worry about that. If you’re, you’re saying, you know, I’ve got a small network, and, but I want to, I wanna do these. You don’t have to wait two or three years for your network to grow. You can get started usually, pretty, pretty quickly, if not right away. And then we’re gonna talk about some techniques for repurposing, LinkedIn events and, and types of content like this.

And then we’ll open it up for some q and a. first, just a couple housekeeping things. As I kind of mentioned before we were getting started here, my livestream has delayed about 20 to 30 seconds. That’s just the way the, the livestream software interfaces with the LinkedIn and, and everything. So basically what that means is if I see your comment, I may feature it and I may may answer it, but it’s, I can’t really necessarily have a conversation real time, back and forth with you.

’cause I’m, I’m seeing it, you know, a few seconds delayed. the replay will be available on this page a few minutes after the event ends. So, there’s nothing extra you have to do to, to get it. no extra hoops you have to jump through. Basically, as soon as I’m done publishing it, it usually processes in about five minutes.

So if you jumped on late. You can just, kind of go back and refresh and you’ll be able to kind of see everything after and, you know, catch the beginning if you want. if you have any questions, just put them in the comments and I will do my best to answer as many as I can. I try and take breaks, kind of.

Periodically throughout, the presentation. this one’s a, a fairly short one. I’m, I’m shooting for about 30 minutes of content and then q and a after that. So, should have you on your way pretty quick today. but yeah, I’ll, if as you ask questions, especially if they’re, they’re relevant to what we’re talking about right away, I’ll try and not get them answered.

Right. Otherwise I’ll save him for the q and a at end. And I do have my right hand man, Evan Kosner. He’s kind of the, the silent, the silent type there in the background. But he’ll be on to kind of read through things and he may just jump in and re respond to people. throughout the process in case, you know, I, I missed something.

’cause I know sometimes these, the comments come through pretty quick. So, and if you do want to get notified of our next event, we do one of these every month. you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events. put your email address in there and we will let you know the next time we’re gonna be doing one of these live streams.

So. With that all out of the 

[00:07:51] way. Real quick about me, I’m the founder of Pipeline Allergy and host of the Pipeline Allergy Podcast. and I promise we’ve got new episodes of the podcast coming soon. We’ve, first quarter was a little busy, so we didn’t really do a lot, but, second quarter here where we’re planning to put some more, episodes out, very soon.

been doing marketing for 22 years now. I am, I am an old man in the, in the old, in the digital marketing space. I used to, in my corporate career, I ran call centers for car dealerships, which most people find surprising ’cause I hate the phone. I don’t like being on the phone, I don’t like talking on it.

But, I just found out I was pretty good at, you know, writing scripts and creating processes for it. these days I run a, a marketing agency, consulting firm where we help clients fill their sales pipeline. so we do a lot of outbound, we help with, doing events and podcast interviews and things like that.

And I’m constantly looking for some new bourbon recommendations. Good stuff that us mere mortals, mortals can buy. So you got any bourbon recommendations? I’m, I’m all ears. ’cause it’s, it’s tough to find anything that’s, good that you can actually purchase. Right. You know, there’s, there’s some real fancy stuff out there, but I don’t, can’t ever find it and probably don’t wanna spend that much on it.

but anyway, real quick before we get started on this. I just wanna mention that there, there are many ways to successfully run LinkedIn events. I don’t have a monopoly on all the good ideas for this. I just wanna share what’s worked for us, for us internally, what’s worked for our clients. there may be, I’m sure there are many other ways that are, are just as effective or might fit your context better than mine.

So just kind of keep that, in mind that this isn’t the only way to do it. This is just a way to do it. So if you’ve got a different way of doing it. Great. keep, keep doing what works for 

[00:09:42] you. So why LinkedIn events? Here’s the thing that I, I really kind of like about them, and there’s, there’s several reasons here, but one is I like that it doesn’t require kind of having that huge list or that huge network.

you know, at least by LinkedIn standards you can start relatively small. You don’t need to have a supplemental. You, email lists and things like that, you can kind of do it all from, from LinkedIn. And the nice thing about LinkedIn is it’s relatively easy to keep your network growing and get relevant connections and things like that.

plus the fact that LinkedIn kind of helps do a lot of the, you know, the, the making certain things like in terms of notifications and reminders, they just kind of build it into their system. It makes it easy to, well set ’em up and promote ’em and, and even get people to attend compared to trying to, to do it the old fashioned way where it’s you, you’re kind of running it all through, some email sequences.

So I think it’s a little bit easier, especially the live streams. I mean, what do you guys think? Is it. It’s crazy to attend a live stream, right? Because you, you got a notification, you probably were on the page, you pushed a join button and, and, and boom, all of a sudden it was there. You didn’t have to, to sign up for anything.

I didn’t require you to fill out two pages of stuff and tell me, you know, your life story and, you know, it’s all, all, all these, you know, hoops and things like that. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s really simple to see. And it, you can do topics that are kind of, you know, for, for large audiences and you can even focus in on, on small topics.

’cause it is pretty easy to, to set, set stuff up. So, and for example, you don’t have to say, oh, I’ll, I’ll only do one a month. You could, you could do weekly ones. I see people, I get invites for ones where people kind of do little small events every week or pretty, pretty frequently like that. I know there’s some people, like I see ’em live multiple times a week.

So just keep that in mind that, you know, even if you’re not aspiring to do, you know, bigger events with, you know, a thousand attendees or more, you don’t have to, there’s, there’s plenty of ways to, to make this effective on, on a small case by case basis. And since you’re not, you’re not like trying to rent out a hotel conference room or a, a, any type of convention center, right.

The, the investment is, is very reasonable. right. If you, if you’ve got all the equipment already, right? I mean, really you can do it from a smartphone if you want to. So free, that’s the minimum required amount of, of stuff, of, of money to do it 

[00:12:17] now. so before we can run an event though, we need people to invite.

So my recommendation for people who are trying to get started on, on kind of doing these to. Kind of fill their sales pipeline and really want to use LinkedIn as part of a a, a client acquisition strategy is you probably are gonna want to have at least 2000 total LinkedIn connections and at least 1000 relevant connections.

What do I mean by that? 1000 relevant connections is, you know, kind of people who’ve got the right titles, work in the right industries of places that might be clients of yours. So if you’re a consultant and you work with people in, let’s say you work, they work, you work in supply chain while having connections that are relevant to that industry or that are at the, you know, the right companies that would be.

You know, clients of yours, you’re gonna want to have those people as connections. Now it is possible certainly to leverage other people’s connections for this, and we’ll kind of talk about some of that a little bit later. but, you know, if you’re doing interviews with other people, you can certainly, you know, have them invite their network as well.

And, Some will, some won’t. It’s, this is, it’s a little bit, can be a little bit tedious to do the first couple times you try it. So if somebody’s never done one, they may not be great at sending out all the invitations. but it’s not that hard and it doesn’t, doesn’t take as long as you think it would.

and there’s, you know, ways to make it much, much easier. So, we’ll, we’ll get into that in just a little bit. so that kind of means connecting with the right people, like I said. So I would recommend you be proactive in inviting people you want to connect with. I know there’s kind of, some people on, on LinkedIn who say, you know, I’ll just kind of, you know, share some of my expertise and then whoever kind of tries to connect with me, connects with me.

and I’ll tell you that it’s, it’s hard to get, you know. Exactly the, the right people. And one of the, the great things about LinkedIn is there’s so many targeting tools to really dial in and connect with just the right people and fill your network with basically, you know, potential clients of yours that I would highly, highly, highly recommend kind of taking a proactive approach.

Invite people that you want to connect with, so you can kind of see 

[00:14:38] here. oh, quick, quick tip here because I know, I know people ask it all the time. These, you know, in terms of, you know, connection messages, what’s effective, what’s gonna work well, and I’ll tell you here you can see like, here’s a handful.

I described a screenshot earlier, when I was finishing up this presentation of some recent ones I’ve received, and, some of two of them have messages. One of ’em doesn’t. These days, if you’re putting a connection message in, like a message here where it says, Hey Gary, I’m a product designer specializing in operations and marketing these days, that probably means you just wanna pitch the person.

so it didn’t used to be that way. It used to, you know, connection messages used to be, you know, you know, a little bit more effective. But these days, unless it’s, Hey, hey Gary, we met at that, that trade show last weekend in San Diego, or, or whatever. I, I, you’re probably gonna get the, you know, this person wants to pitch me.

And a lot of times that’s gonna get ignored. So if you actually know the person and have met him, go ahead and use that. Otherwise, just leave it blank. Believe it or not. Still works, the best. So just a quick little pro tip there. sales navigator. while not a free tool is a great tool for targeting the right people, and if you’re using it for business, absolutely worth the investment.

’cause it lets you really kind of hone in on finding just the right types of connections. You’ve got the right experience or work at the right size companies. So really great tool LinkedIn groups from a just a growing your network perspective can also actually be productive, from an overall. Outbound type of thing.

We don’t really use ’em, but yeah, from a just connecting with people perspective, absolutely. can be pretty useful there. The thing I wanna recommend here is that you try and be someone they want to connect with. The thing to remember here is that humans meet with other humans, right? It’s not, you know, business to business is kind of one of those, you know.

Monikers or, or acronyms that really doesn’t make sense. It’s still human to human. It’s humans meeting with other humans. Though I guess. I did read an article that, you know, Walmart’s now using, automated chatbots to, to talk to suppliers. So, you know, maybe, maybe B2B will not be human to human for much longer, but at the moment it’s still mostly humans connecting with other humans.

So we go back to this slide here. Right. You’ve got pictures of people, actual pictures of at least probably pictures of them. And, you, you don’t have to be super stuffy about it. You can kind of just use any types of pictures you want, but it should be a picture of you, it should exist. No pictures of your logo or pets or anything like that.

If you wanna connect with people, have real pictures 

[00:17:21] there. Alright, topic and title of your event. So if you’re getting to the point where you wanna set one up. What are you, what are you gonna do with that? I think this is kind of where, this is usually probably where people start to get stuck is they say, well, I don’t, I don’t know what to present on.

And here’s, if I’m talking to a client, here’s what I tell them. Well, what are, what are some of the things that. You know, what are some of the pain points somebody might have that your clients might be experiencing before they would hire you or what are, you know, some of those things at the beginning, they might have an issue or maybe it’s, they’re fairly down, far down the road and this is kind of something that might happen here that all of a sudden.

If this happens, they, they, they’re gonna need you. So, you know, a lot of times it’s kind of doing things that will eventually lead them to the road of, Hey, you know, I might wanna work with this company more. It sounds like, you know, they, they’ve got, you know, a solution that would help us. you don’t have to spend the whole time pitching.

I don’t, for us, you know, it’s usually we spend almost the entire time kinda sharing content and, and teaching. And then there’s usually a one minute spent doing an offer at the end for anybody who needs something a little bit more advanced or a little bit. You know, more hands-on. and, and that’s usually kind of the way you want to try and structure things on, on LinkedIn as well.

but I mean, there’s, there’s tons of ways to do it. So, like I said, don’t, don’t say that. That’s not the only way to do it, it’s just one of the ways to do it. you do want to pick topics that are not too broad. for example, if you’re a, you know, a company that, you know, a full service digital marketing agency, right?

That’s a, you know, a fairly common thing you see is, you know, you know, all the, all the different marketing strategies you can use in 2023 is pretty broad. But if you say, you know, Hey, this is how plumbers can dominate Google Maps, You know, in, in 2023, that’s a much more specific, it tells who should be attending it, you know, and it’s a, it’s a very narrow focus type of topic.

And what you’re gonna find oftentimes is that those types of more specific topics are gonna get a better turnout provided you have provided it’s kind of fit in that second one on the, on the screen here, which means relevant to your connections and network. So if, obviously if you’re gonna do that one for plumbers, you wanna make sure you have a lot of plumbers in your network.

if not, then, don’t, don’t say it’s just for plumbers. and one thing to keep in mind with the titles, of your event is you only have 75 characters. So do make them count. Matt, I do see your question there. And actually let’s bring it up. We’ll cover that one right now. Is it probably a good time to answer this one?

Are you only able to invite certain first connections, potentially even invite second and third degree connections to Matt when you’re doing the invites. It, it is just to the first degree connections. I’ll kind of show you what that, that looks like here in a second. It’s, a few slides down the road here, but we’re almost to it.

But yeah, when it comes to that, that’s why. We wanna proactively build your network, is to kind of get, ’cause it’s, the invites really can only go out to your first degree connections. Now you can run ads and things like that. Though the effectiveness of them is, is per, is is not that great, is kind of what we found from there.

So I don’t usually encourage people to do it ’cause the number of people that end up attending from it is usually very, very low. you might get a few people who sign up, but I haven’t seen too many people actually 

[00:20:51] showing up. So when it comes to actually setting things up, my recommendation is if, if you’ve got the equipment for it, a live stream is kind of be your best bet.

for example, just to kinda let you know, you are watching this, where the software we are using is called StreamYard. use anything you’d like, They’re not paying me to, to say their name. obviously I don’t have their logos on the stream ’cause we have a premium account so, we don’t have to have it on here.

but they do have a free account if you, that has just their watermark in the top corner. but again, you don’t have to to use them. There’s a few different ones out there. we find this one works really well with LinkedIn. It plays real nice, it connects pretty well. And it works well. So, but your choices, you know, you’ve got three different choices, of online events.

you can do LinkedIn audio events, LinkedIn Live, or, which is what we’re doing right now, is a LinkedIn Live or an external event link. that one’s probably still the most common. And external event Link means either like a Zoom or a Teams or any type of conferencing software you want to use. You can use whatever you want.

You know, all you’re doing is you’re setting it up and you’re putting a link to it. So that can, if you’ve got a specific use case for it, you say, Hey, you know, I’m gonna do it as a Zoom meeting. ’cause I want everybody to be able to be on video and on the screen, and I want everybody able to kind of talk to each other.

you know, with, with video and audio. That would be one of those cases, like I know people who, you know, maybe they do weekly networking or round table types of events where they’re all small. There might be, you know, 5, 10, 15 people tops. So that would be a kind of a time where doing them as a, as a zoom meeting or with the external event link would make the most sense.

But if you’re, you’re trying to get the most views and, and kind of have the, the easiest experience for the viewer. The LinkedIn live is, is definitely the way to go. I’ll tell you, we’ve never tried the LinkedIn audio event. there’s a lot fewer of them that are done. It seems to be kind of, it was the, I think they kind of started doing that right at time, around the time when Clubhouse was popular for that two weeks, if you remember.

was that a year or two ago? You know, that, that brief, flash in the pan where hey, everybody’s doing audio events. but, we don’t see a lot of that and we haven’t really tried ’em. So we kind of stick with, either the live streams, we used to do everything, on Zoom and, really, We’ve found that kind of, it maximizes our attendance and, and engagement and we get just, probably about three to four times as many people to actually see the, see it, when we do it as a live stream.

So just kind of keep that in mind. but, you, you can always pick what you want, but if you’re looking for a default option, live streams are kind of the way to 

[00:23:40] go. In terms of requiring registration. this is another big one, and I’ll just tell you right now, I do not recommend it as it will cripple the number of attendees and registrations that you get now.

So why do people use it? so it looks like my, I had it circled here. I know it’s a little bit hard to see on this, on this slide. but this is for, if you’re kind of setting it up through a company page and you want. Basically all the email addresses of the people so you can download them and then potentially follow up with them.

right. It, it sounds really good and I, I’ll tell you, I oftentimes have to talk clients out of it. but here’s, here’s the thing that I’ll, I will tell you about it is that compared to livestreams, you’re gonna see about 85% fewer people drop off. So, If you were gonna have a hundred people for every a hundred people who said yes, now you’ve only got 50, 15 people who are gonna say yes to it.

So it’s a huge, huge drop off in terms of what you’re gonna gonna see in terms of, of people responding. The attendance might be a little bit better, but not anywhere near what, What you would see is if you just didn’t require registration and set it up through your own personal profile. So, right.

If we go back to here, where I was kinda showing you this here, where you can pick from these, this is being set up through your personal profile, where you go up on your screen, you click my network, and then you click events, and then you click the create event button. that’s what this, this slide is showing you where you’re gonna have the choices of audio event, LinkedIn live or external event.

And if you do it as through your company page, you’re only gonna see external event link. ’cause they’re gonna assume that basically businesses can’t go live. They’re not set up that way. and you can set up it with a, a registration form. And even though LinkedIn will pre-fill in your contact information as best it can, people just, it, it, it creates more friction and, you get just a really small turnout.

For example, when I told you our first event that we’ve done. That we did back in 2021 where I only had three people show up. That was what I did. I set it up through the company. if you go to my company page, you can find that, it’s still a remnant there, it’s still around that. I set that one event up that one time, and never again since, even though, you know, you had, you had people sign up probably, I don’t know, 30 people or so, but very few only, only a few showed up and, ultimately it just was, was not successful.

So. you, again, I’m not telling you never to do it. There might be a case where you might want that, but just keep in mind kind of the, what the differences are and the, the pros and cons of 

[00:26:33] each. So when it comes to doing event invites, this is where it kind of comes back to really having those relevant connections, because you can target people and you can kind of specifically choose, but And there’s a typo on the dark doggone slide. This is what happens when I, you know, don’t, don’t go back and check them as carefully as I should have. So, but event invites, so you can target people here, by geography company. Which school or university they attended, or industry. The ones you’re probably gonna use most often is gonna be the industry targeting ones.

but you can’t kind of do the same level of targeting, you could say, through like a sales navigator search or some of the specific ones. So it ends up being, having to go through and look at each person one by one, to kind of find the best fit of people. And really with event invites is you, you want to be able to kind of say, here’s the broad parameters and just invite everybody that, that fits that, type of, of qualification.

So this is kind of is why I, I kind of recommend to people to say, really focus on building your network with quality people. And then everybody else can be a follower, but you need connections. to do the invites. So this kind of goes back to what Matt asked earlier in terms of can you invite first degree connection, second degree, third degree.

It’s only people that you’re directly connected to that you can invite. so having those people be the most relevant you possibly can, is is highly recommended. There is software out there. so if you. Where to, you know, type in LinkedIn event types of software that can help do some of this and even has a little bit better targeting stuff.

And so far I can tell you I don’t recommend any of it. In terms of reliability and getting your account flagged for using automated stuff, we have not found something. It’s really, you know, safe to use and then I could, could recommend at 

[00:28:34] this point. So, it doesn’t take that long to do it by hand, especially if you’ve got a good, good, relevant group of people in your network, to do it.

You can usually, you know, knock out a thousand invites in, you know, about 10 minutes. So, and we’ll get to get to that in just a second, but overall, it’s not too bad to try and do By hand, it sounds tedious. It’s, it’s not too bad if you’ve got a good network. So let’s talk about why I said, you know, you can do a thousand in a few minutes because that is your limit.

That is the hard limit that LinkedIn has per week. So if you’ve got, those 2000 connections that we said earlier, that means it would take you two weeks to send out all the invites for your event. I. Elena, real quick here, I’ll get 

[00:29:20] your question here. Can you please repeat why it is not advisable to host a livestream event with a business LinkedIn profile?

you can’t do livestream Elena with a LinkedIn, business profile. because only people can do LinkedIn livestreams. You have to do it as an external event. IEA Zoom a Microsoft teams, Whatever some of the other, you know, kind of conferencing software out there is. So, you, you end up just kind of getting a, a smaller, you know, viewing of the, of the thing.

So it’s better to use, if you’ve got a business profile, have the leadership, do the invites and send them out. You know, if you’ve got, can run ’em through the CEO or you know, somebody visible in the C-suite much, you are gonna get a much better response and more people showing up to that. So, does that answer your question, Elena?

but anyway, so you can send out a thousand invites per week on your account, and the cool thing about it is that it shows up. So, on your LinkedIn here, you might have to maximize the screen a little bit. Just a side note, we did try and, increase the resolution here. So we’re, let’s supposed to be streaming in, in, 10 80 p today.

So hopefully it’s a little easier to read these things in the. in, in the slides these days. But, if you go to the my Network section, the nice thing about events is that they show up just like LinkedIn connection request and LinkedIn. If you’ve got your notifications or none, those requests will come through your email.

So LinkedIn basically features these ’cause they, they wanna help you grow your network and they want to help you get attendance to, to your events. now it’s possible to turn those off and some people do. but you know, there’s, you know, there was always this kind of assumption that people would fatigue on those pretty quickly.

we haven’t found that to be the case. We found that, yeah. You know, 18 months ago people said yes, a little bit higher, but it’s leveled off pretty good and still stays at a pretty good rate. And we’ll get into some of those metrics here, in just a little 

[00:31:25] bit. but the one thing I wanna point out yet is that.

You may only be able to send a thousand invites from your account, but let’s say you work at a company and you’ve got, you know, five or six people, well, each of those people could send out a thousand invites in a given week. So that’s how we tend to do ours is, we can do two or three or 4,000 invites in a given week, just depending on, you know, the team members and who’s.

You know, who, how many connections they have. So that, that’s how we kind of set ours up is that everybody gets a team effort. So everybody works. So if you really kind of wanna scale these, like I said, you can have your team do it. If you’re interviewing guests, have them do it, have their teams do it. and you can get tons and tons of invites out there.

So those big events that you see are usually being, you know, you’ve got a lot of people doing invites to them to get, you know, especially anytime you’re seeing anything in the thousands. There’s a lot of people getting in on, on doing the invites for that. So if you’re doing your first one and you said, man, you know, I, I worked really hard and we only got 220 people to RSVP to it.

What did I do wrong? I tell you, you know what? There’s, there’s just limits to what one account can do. If you do that from one account, good for you. You did good. So just gonna keep that in mind and, and keep mind. That is a perfectly acceptable number. It’s, you know, you’re still gonna get people to attend, you’ve got people to engage with and you’re gonna have, you can still have a really good event.

So small events are not necessarily a bad thing, to do. alright, next up 

[00:33:01] here. So let’s talk about getting people to actually show up. So now you’ve set it up, now you’re doing it. How do you get people to, to show up for these things? ’cause right, it’s, it was pretty, it’s, the nice thing about LinkedIn events is it’s pretty easy.

They can click accept now they’re attending. The bad thing about that is all they have to do is click accept and now they’re showing as attending. So how do you actually get them to show up on the day and the time of the event? So timing of the event. now I’m, this is for North America. if you are in Europe or Asia or something.

Obviously you gotta make some adjustments to this, but if you want the North American market to show up, we find that doing it in the afternoon Eastern time, usually between Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, those are generally the best times to do it too early and nobody shows up. I know that’s when your typical like networking events, like if you’ve ever been to like A BNI or something like that, they do it in the morning before people start working.

But as far as live streams and events go doing it, you know, especially if your network is professionals and things like that, doing it, during business hours tends to work better. Now if your people are generally, you know, people who’ve got, you know, doing, have side hustles and things like that.

Then, you know, perhaps an e early evening one would be better. feel free to play around with that. But so far what we found is sometime one, two, or 3:00 PM Eastern time, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday are the best. if you have an email list, it is definitely worth promoting to them. and the thing about live streams is I know we’re focusing on LinkedIn.

Keep in mind, live streams can be sent anywhere that that takes ’em. So that could mean Facebook, that could mean YouTube, wherever you want to do it. You, if you really want to get fancy, you can send these off to different, to your own website so you can have it hosted on your website while simultaneously doing, These on LinkedIn. that is definitely beyond the scope of today, but, but some of the tools make that pretty easy for you. Or if you’ve got a web person, you can kind of hook that up. You can certainly experiment with it. But, I wanna focus on LinkedIn just ’cause it’s, it’s so easy because the audience is, is like attached to the, to the event itself.

So you’re not trying to kind of juggle a whole bunch of different 

[00:35:24] things. I do recommend sending out reminders the morning of the event, especially if it’s smaller. So typically when we’re doing this for a client, so you did not get one today because there’s too many, too many people who signed up, but as they’re smaller, you might have a hundred, 200 people.

having somebody go through and just message those people and remind them, Hey, here’s the event, here’s the link, and sending that out. Can be really effective and kind of boost the attendance. and then after the event, sending out the replay link. so if you’re doing it as a live stream, it’s really easy.

You just grab the same link you gave them and do it. And, keep in mind after the event ends, In your, if you go to that page, you can trim it so you can cut off all the time you spent making small talk at the beginning, or if things rambled on at the end, you can certainly cut that off too. So there’s some very, basically editing stuff, but some pretty, some, you know, things that are help make it, make it a little bit smoother for, for replay experience.

So you can go through and message everybody and just thank them for signing up. We know not everybody’s gonna show up. So just send them, sending them the replay. We’ll get you more views to that particular event that you did and you’re putting in the effort to do it. You may as well have somebody kind of go through and, and really kind of help you get the most out of that set of event.

So I see a few questions in here. let’s see here. Rhonda, nice to, nice to have you here today. Do you offer replays for doing it as a LinkedIn Live? So. The great thing about, the doing it as a live stream is the replay will process automatically. LinkedIn is capturing this as I speak, so yes, the software I’m using streamer.

Is recording this and I have that recording. but LinkedIn also just automatically captures it and as soon as I click the end broadcast button, LinkedIn will start processing that video and the replay will show up automatically on the page. So it makes it really, really easy and we find that you get a lot more end up getting a lot more views of, of the event that way.

right. I know it used to be that when we would do these, especially like on Zoom. Most of the views we got came from doing it, live. The people who were on live were the people who generally ended up watching it. Now we get more views after the event is over because the activity and, you know, the reminders and everything push a lot of people back to the page.

And you know, we get now the majority of our views happen post event. So. let’s see here. Alright, so I think that covers all the questions here, but yep. Keep, keep the questions coming. I really appreciate ’em, it makes, it always makes them fun to do when, when I’m seeing people like ask questions and get to engage a little bit.

because I know sometimes, you know, these days, you know, we’re sitting in an office or sitting at home and you kind of feel like, oh, am I, am I just talking to a monitor today? But when I get all these comments, it’s really great to hear from people. So. 

[00:38:21] Thank you. So in terms of what to expect, so here’s kind of the metrics that we see.

And that is that five to 15% of people will R-S-V-P-I-E. They’re gonna click that accept button to your invite and say yes to coming. Now that assumes that you don’t have registration turned on. If you have registration turned on, it’s gonna be significantly. It, it’s quite a bit lower, in terms of people actually clicking, you know?

Oh. Click yes. Oh, I gotta register. No, I gotta, oh, is that email right? No, I gotta fix that. you know, on a computer, that’s fine. But remember, lots of people these days access their stuff from their cell phone, so, that’s the thing I was trying to remember. And then, you know, they may not, they’re just kind of, they’re gonna bounce and and not see it again.

So if you can do it, you make it work without turning on registration. Like I said, do it through your personal one. Do it as a live stream. Make it easy for people to attend. More people will in fact say yes and a 10. So 10 to 15 people, 10 to 15% of those people will then show up live. so that’s typically what we’re seeing, you know, anywhere from.

So on an, on an event like this, typically I’m gonna see about, on average a hundred to 130 people live. So 10 to 15% of people actually showing up live. It is higher if you’re gonna send out those reminder reminders manually the morning of the event. So if you go into your event and you click on the attendees, you can see on this, over here on the right hand side, there’s a message button, and you can let those people know and remind them, since they’re signed up for your thing, for your event, you can just send that reminder out.

And like I was saying in the, in the past slide when answering Rhonda’s question. 50 to 70%. So 50 to 75% of the views will happen during that PO week post event. So right. If you get a hundred people who are showing up live, you’re probably gonna have at least another a hundred, a hundred, 200. Even. I think our last one, we had over 300 people who watched it.

After the event. So, as you’re, as they kind of grow, there’s, they’re a little bit stickier. so again, I’m, I, I know I’m kind of a broken record here, kind of with the live streams, but, highly recommend them in terms of making this, maximizing the impact that you have from 

[00:40:49] these. But how many people will buy, right?

And I think that’s kind of the question is, well, is it, is it gonna be worth my time? Is it gonna be, are people gonna show, you know, are are they gonna buy my offer? And here’s the thing, I don’t know. The salesperson, you know, their, their answer would typically be, well, you know, if I can get 50 people on a, on a webinar live for you, do you think you could sell a few of them?

And you’re probably, you sitting there and you, you obviously, you don’t want to feel like, well, of course, of course I can. I mean, you shake your head. Yeah. Here’s the thing, you might not, especially if it’s your first one or your, your presentation, you’re still kind of working out the kinks of that. It is entirely possible that.

Nobody buys. right. And I know, I know. Nobody’s like, oh, well then why do it? So here’s kind of what we’ve, we’ve found is that you may not get people to just automatically like, oh, click the link. You don’t create a buying frenzy or something like that at the end. And that’s okay, because one of the, the great things about the events is that you’re engaging with your network.

So. If they said yes to your event, they’re more likely to see your content in the, in the newsfeed. You send them a message, they’re more likely to respond to it. So it’s not a one time chance, and that’s the only time you do it. If you’re doing events monthly, you’re gonna invite them again next month probably, and they might show up again there.

So think of it more about as, as a, as a process, we find that is part of, as part of an overall sales strategy. We find it’s great for re-engagement for people who may have ghosted us or we’ve talked in the past and, you know, just all of a sudden it just wasn’t either a right fit at the time. or, or just, you know, they, they weren’t interested then because things have changed and now, now they’ve come back.

Now they saw the event, and now they say, yeah, okay. I, I think it makes sense now for us to, to talk, It’s, it’s great for kind of people who’ve, you know, maybe fence sitters people who are kind of considering your offer. So it doesn’t have to just be people who are brand new to your world. This can be a way to kind of bring them in, educate them a little bit, you know, help them get some of their questions answered in a, in a safe environment, right?

It’s, it’s not high pressure, it’s not one OnOne, it’s not like a sales call or discovery call. The skies is a sales call. It’s, it, it really is. You know, they’re getting to kind of learn and ask questions in a, in an, in an environment like this. So, Yes, you can definitely generate sales from, I was talking to one of my clients last week who’s, or yesterday actually, who was pretty lukewarm on, on doing the events and.

The last one they did. Oh, now they closed, it closed a big deal. You know, it was a ma it was a major, you know, acquisition for them. And now they’re like, okay, we gotta do these at least every month. Let’s really ramp this up. And, and that’s typically how it goes, is it? It’s it, it feels like a lot of work to put in if you don’t get any leads or sales out of it.

And then all of a sudden you get that first one or two or three, and then I say, okay, now we gotta do these all the time. So. Just keep in mind it may not be right away. it’s always hard to say. It depends on so many factors that I wouldn’t even want to speculate on how many people actually purchase your service.

But they’re, they’re good for lots of things and that’s kind of why I wanted to bring that up. ’cause I know, I know people ask that question and it’s, it’s hard to answer ’cause it, it really depends on just tons and tons of factors. But, They, they kind of help build so many different parts of your sales process that they’re probably good.

Even if you don’t get a single lead directly from it, you’re probably, it’s probably helping your, your sales process 

[00:44:25] overall. let’s see, another question here, from John, a week later, does LinkedIn, I’m gonna assume LinkedIn alert you someone attended. So what you do, John, is if you go into an event here.

There’s a manner or there’s gonna be an analytics section. So if you’re logged into your account and you do an event, there’s an analytics tab and that will, you’ll be able to kind of see the stats and where, you know, attendee, you know, attendance and lot. Peak viewership and all kinds of things. So it’s got some good, good information there.

So, yeah, if you just click on, on the event, so click on the name of whatever event you did as long as it was your event. It has, you have to be logged in as whoever did the event. So only the, the host is gonna see this, but yeah, it’s the, the tab that’s called analytics and it’s right, kind of right underneath like the title and everything.

So if you click on that. That’ll get you the information that you’re looking for in terms of, you know, numbers. Now it won’t tell you specifically who attended. LinkedIn does have that information. They know, right? For example, John, they know you’re here, Christine, they also know you’re here. but unless I actually see you in the comments, they’re not telling me exactly the names of the people.

So just kind of keep that in mind. And that’s part, that’s why we try and follow up with, with everybody, whether we know they attended or not. just because we don’t. They don’t give us that visibility. probably for privacy reasons. I can understand that. It’d be great if they, from a, from a, from a salesperson standpoint.

Yeah. I’m thinking, man, that would be great if I could see it. But I’m also thinking, well, somebody who attends these do I do, I really want everybody to know everyone I attended. so, you know, kind of just keep that in mind. So, feel free to keep the questions coming. I think I’ve got just one or two more things here and then we’ll get into the, the q and 

[00:46:20] a. But, wanna talk one more thing here that I think kinda really can really push this kind of into the next level, in terms of getting the most out of your event is, so far everything we talked about is just the event itself, but what about now using that content? Here’s the great thing is you’ve created now a, probably a pretty good piece of content.

Now it’s a little bit long, right? It could be 30 minutes. I mean, we’re 44 minutes in right now, so most people aren’t gonna sit down and just. You know, on a, you know, on a spur of the moment, just sit down and watch it. But they might watch, you know, a 32nd clip, a 62nd clip, three or four minute video clip.

And the great thing is, is now that’s something you can do, is you can take that piece of content you created and repurpose it and turn it into short video clips that you can now share either on LinkedIn or different types of social media places. I know it’s something that. I’ve probably been having conversations with people about, Hey, this is a good idea.

We should do this for probably for the better part of two years now. and we’re finally starting to do it. So, I know for us, this is kind of an, an exciting way to kind of really take these to the next level is now we can take these videos. Now we’re getting ’em caught up and clipped up so we can continue to share ’em.

So now we’ve got content and if you were on the last session we did, I talked about this a little bit where LinkedIn is, is, Always a little bit inconsistent from the organic standpoint. Right. You know, people wanna post and you know, try and get that traction. But it can be a little bit unpredictable in terms of getting engagement on the newsfeed ’cause people don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn.

But so it, it, it’s always kind of hard to justify that investment in content. And then do you wanna hire a ghost writer? And that’s its own issue because was the ghost writer gonna write good content? It’s gonna be super generic. It’s usually generic. It’s usually not that good. So then do I really wanna post it?

Well, I should post content, right? You end up in this kind of vicious cycle of, well, everything is bad, so I don’t wanna post anything, but I should post something. This solves the problem of. Now what’s in your voice now? It’s quality content. ’cause you’ve spent time creating it now. Now the investment that you’re making in doing these events, because you wanna do a good job.

So you probably spent, you know, probably an hour or two or you know, maybe a few, several hours or maybe even a day prepping for something like this. Now you’re getting a lot of mileage and kind of effectively using that by repurposing it. Now you’ve got content to share all next month, uh uh, for something like this.

So that’s what I’ve got. So just kinda wanted to share those ideas, with you. Like these, like I said, these are things that we’ve been starting to do, the events we’ve been doing for the past 18 months. you know, the, the repurposing we’re just starting with, but, you know, very excited about that.

But. Just to kind of recap, we talked about proactively building your network, adding new connections, kind of setting things up, some of those tips to kind of maximize attendance in terms of, you know, what to expect from attendees and how many people are actually gonna show up. So you can kind of do the math and figure out, is it worth me doing?

How many people can I invite if I, if you only have 200 people you can invite, might not be worth doing yet. If you’ve got a thousand people you can invite, you say, okay, I can get some people to show up and it, it’s probably worthwhile. And then we talked about, you know, repurposing your event for maximum impact.

So that’s what I’ve got to you for you 

[00:49:53] today. If you do need any help with this, I just wanna let you know that, we have finally decided to break out events into its own service offering. Up until this point, we’ve only ever done this for kind of our full service clients who want, kind of the full treatment of, they want outreach, they want connections, and you know, they want to.

podcast interviews. We’re breaking this out so that we can offer it at a, at a lower investment, where essentially we’re still gonna do all the heavy lifting for you, right? Some of this is still a manual process ’cause that’s just the way it works best. we, you know, but where we continue to build your network with relevant content, what relevant contacts?

So you get 300, 4 50 new connections each month. And where we’re setting up those events, we’re doing the invites. We’re gonna send out those reminders. We’re sending out replays. And you know, we can even repurpose your event, create 10 to 25 pieces of content. From each event, and now you’ve got content to share all next month.

So if you’re looking for someone like that, someone to kind of help you manage this and, and take care of it and take that off your hands. ’cause I know for, for, for us, it’s kind of the same. I I’ve had the same issues you probably did. I don’t have time to do all that stuff. you know, I’ve got, you know, clients to work with and things.

So just doing the event is usually about the, the maximum, my, my, schedule handle. so if you are looking for help with that, we, have started offering that, pricing. You know, it, it varies, just kind of depending on what we’re working with, what you’re looking to do. but I can tell you that the, the base package starts just under a thousand a month average.

Probably being a little bit closer to two once we’ve kind of figured out the, the right, features and, and, services for that, for that account. But, If you are interested in talking, you can schedule a call with me directly@theappointmentlab.com. That links directly to my calendar. So would love to chat with you if it’s something you’re interested in.

Kinda learn more about what your business offers and see if this would be a good fit, for, for what you guys are looking to do and help you accomplish these events. 

[00:51:55] So. with that, I’m gonna open it up for some q and a and, let’s see here. Christine, can these, let’s see here. Christine asks, can these events be rerecorded?

I’m gonna guess prerecorded. so our prospects can view it any time. So if you’re using live streaming software, kind of like the stuff that I’m using, you can set that up. So that it would send out a prerecorded webinar, at the scheduled time. I will tell you that LinkedIn discourages that, but they don’t disallow that.

So, you could certainly do it. Keep in mind you don’t get like the same level of engagement and things like that. But, if all you wanted to do was kind of have one set up. You could prerecord it and load it into the system and have it scheduled to go out and go live at that particular time. That is something that is, is possible if you wanted to kind of have it all recorded and ready to go so that you didn’t have to try and, and do it live.

Plenty of advantages to doing it actually live. But I will leave that to you to decide what is gonna be the best fit for, for your context. All right. Next question here from Elena. Which platforms does your company support to host events in addition to LinkedIn? we can do, anything that, we’ll take live streaming.

so, what, whatever you guys want to live stream on, we can push it out too. So, the reason that we kind of focus everything in on LinkedIn is, is ’cause getting the attendees, is. It tends to be the most valuable. But if you’ve got, say you’ve got a big following on, on Facebook, this can easily, we just add it to the, to the live stream and then boom.

Now when you go live here and you’re, you’re on this one, your Facebook over there is, is live as well. so whichever, whichever platforms you guys have that support live streaming can, can be supported there too. So whether it’s YouTube or or anything like that. So, All right. Evan, did I miss any other questions?

I, I’m trying to catch ’em as they went through today. but did I miss anybody? Oh, no, actually it looks like you got everybody. Okay, great. Well, are there any other questions here before we wrap things up today? If not, I just wanna thank everybody for attending. It was great having you on the event. I’m, I’m.

Glad we could do this one. Like I said, this is one I’ve been excited to try and actually get, get pushed out for a while and we finally had enough information and kind of best practices to share. So was, was good. good seeing everybody. We will be doing another one of these events next month. I don’t think we’ve picked the topic just yet, but Hopefully, in the next week you should start seeing that, up on my account. probably start seeing a lot more content from me as we start to do the kind of things that we recommend in terms of repurposing content. but yeah, with that I’ll let everybody go, let you get back to your day.

Thanks so much for attending and hopefully I’ll see you next month. Take care.