Episode 414: Use LinkedIn Events to Attract Prospects

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library.  Enjoy the show!

00:00:48:11 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Making Sale Social Live. Coming to you from the social sales link, virtual studio and brought to you by Ask SSL dot a I I’m Bob woods. I’m joined by Stan Robinson Jr. and Brynne Tillman. How y’all doing today?

00:01:07:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Doing excellent. Thanks, Bob. 

00:01:10:11 – (Bob Woods): Excellent, excellent. Good stuff. So today we’re going to talk about Linked in Events. We love them. We use LinkedIn events all the time here at Social Sales Link. And in fact if you’re with us live on LinkedIn right now making sales social live is a LinkedIn event. So you’re already with us. So and all that stuff. So great. And I’m also betting you you’ve seen at least or maybe have even been invited to a LinkedIn event.

00:01:40:22 – (Bob Woods): Now, as I said before, we love them here. SSL because they’re really powerful for prospecting and networking, right, guys? 

00:01:50:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Absolutely. And I’m really excited to dive into the many ways we can use events to start those conversations. The trust based ones, of course. 

00:02:00:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Exactly. And one of the beauties of events is that even if people can’t hop on with you live, they can come back to your profile and have a look at the replay.

00:02:10:22 – (Bob Woods): Yes. 

00:02:11:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So that’s a wonderful feature of events. 

00:02:14:22 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s a really important point there. So first of all, just not going to mention everything involved with creating a LinkedIn event just because there is a little bit of a process to it. But creating a LinkedIn event is really easy to do. All you need to do is go to your home page, scroll down to events in the left rail, which is I think it’s the very bottom one at the left rail. Click on that. Then on the next page you’ll see create an event. Click on that, fill out the form, boom! You’re ready to go. 

00:02:50:22 – (Brynne Tillman): So just to clarify, that’s every event except for LinkedIn Live’s LinkedIn live has to be created in a third party tool. Here’s the challenge. We had a client that set one up last week and it was a disaster, unfortunately, where he set it up the way you exactly said and he’s like, okay, now how do I connect it to my StreamYard?

00:03:11:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s true. 

00:03:13:22 – (Brynne Tillman): And he can’t. So he had almost 100 people that said they were going to attend. And he had it become this whole Michigan, which means. And so it just became a mess. And I, you know, I feel really bad because he had 70 plus people interested in attending. But when they clicked through it said the event will start soon and it can’t, but not that way anyway. So there are lots of different kinds of events. I guess we’ll probably talk about the different kinds of events you can set up with the LinkedIn live. You do need a third party tool. 

00:03:48:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah yeah that’s an important point and a little side challenge for you today. Work the word Michigan into a conversation that at the end of the day everyone who is with us right now so that it’s a great word. I love that word 

00:04:06:22 – (Brynne Tillman): comes from northern Europe.

00:04:08:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And I guess what it means is just like it sounds. 

00:04:12:22 – (Brynne Tillman): So. Yeah. 

00:04:13:18 – (Bob Woods): Exactly, exactly. So first of all, let’s talk a little bit about marketing your event. So obviously LinkedIn isn’t going to do it for you. It’ll help out a little bit. But you really should take the reins on your event and market it yourself so, you know, promote it on your feed to get traction. One of the really nice things about events is that you can invite up to a thousand people a week and, and encourage them to invite others as well. Therefore you get that multiple multiplicative. Yeah, I did say that was the right event. And then obviously you can send emails and do all of the more traditional types of things as well.

00:04:59:15 – (Bob Woods): But marketing your event on LinkedIn, I have to admit, does make things a little easier for you to do.

00:05:06:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Can I share really quickly before we even jump deeper into marketing that essentially there are two types of events when you create a link that when you create an event, there’s the LinkedIn live, which it’s misleading because it looks like you can set it up from right there your profile and there’s an external event link. If you have a registration somewhere, you can also have a third which is in person.

00:05:38:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So and in person often you can either have an external link for registration, but you can also just have the address. If it’s just an open house, just show up. Right. So just kind of keep that in mind when you’re setting up the events, especially online, you either need to have that third party for LinkedIn live or an external event link where they can either join, personally, if you are doing an external digital link, and you don’t have the ability to have full on landing pages, if you have a paid zoom, you can actually create

00:06:15:15 – (Brynne Tillman): a registration link that takes in contact information and gives everyone their own, zoom, link URL. But you can capture people that way. Now you’re going to get lots of people that say, attend these events and they never actually register. So a side note on that and then we’ll go back to marketing. I just wanted to kind of clarify some of this.

00:06:42:20 – (Brynne Tillman): The side note on that is if you really need them to register, you can send each of them a note. Thanks for your interest. Here’s the last, last step. And resend that external link. The other thing, which is why I really like the idea of having a zoom registration link, is even if they don’t sign up or register when they are alerted that the event is live and they click through, they have to register.

00:07:12:16 – (Brynne Tillman): But then if it’s within three minutes, I believe for five minutes of the event, you’re going to be redirected to that live so that if you don’t have a full on marketing team or support team, you can do it all inside of zoom and get those folks that register now marketing. I’ll let you guys start and I’ll finish marketing.

00:07:37:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): I was just going to mention, Brynne, you already mentioned the offline because since it’s on LinkedIn, don’t think you’re limited to online events. You do have that choice and you can drop, I guess, an Eventbrite link there. If you’re having people come to your meeting or whatever the case may be. quick note on the marketing. We already talked about being able to invite up to a thousand people a week. If you are co-hosting the event with somebody else, make sure they also invite their thousand people a week so you can get, you know, more bang for your buck, so to speak.

00:08:09:23 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that tip. And make sure you’ve added them as hosts. They do have to accept, 

00:08:15:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): yes, 

00:08:16:23 – (Brynne Tillman): but even if you know, it puts up their picture and a connection to their LinkedIn page, absolutely. Great tips. My last tip on this is every single one of these events has its own URL. It has its own link. So you can actually promote this outside of LinkedIn. You can promote it in Facebook or threads or X or TikTok or Substack. Right. You can actually bring people back to that LinkedIn event email. We’ve put it in our newsletter all the time. So, the marketing side of things, if you can expand your reach outside of LinkedIn, sure. You’re bringing them back into that event inside of LinkedIn. But you can,

00:08:59:10 – (Brynne Tillman): just bring in a different group of folks that might not typically see your LinkedIn post.

00:09:05:21 – (Bob Woods): Exactly. And then the other nice thing is that URL that Brynne mentioned, if you are doing a LinkedIn live, like we are as your LinkedIn event, that is where the replay lives as well. And one of the really nice things about it is that the, the, the replay generally gets generated. Yeah, that sounds right. Pretty quickly. So, so there’s usually not that, you know, huge lag that if you’re used to waiting for like a zoom,

00:09:37:18 – (Bob Woods): just a regular meeting to get converted because you’ve recorded it sometimes, you know, it may take an hour or even two hours just depending on, I think, zoom and how things are going with that server. With LinkedIn, it happens almost immediately. So if you ever have someone go, oh man, I missed that event. If you did a LinkedIn live with the event, you could say, well, here, just go here. And then it’s all there, ready and waiting for them to view it as a replay. 

00:10:05:10 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s a really smart way to look at this. Right. Because if they see it too late it’s not too late.

00:10:11:04 – (Bob Woods): So it’s never too late. 

00:10:14:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah that’s great advice. Awesome awesome.

00:10:17:01 – (Bob Woods): Awesome. So next is going to be handling invitations. So Brynne’s already done this one. But you know, as Bernard said, some invitees may not register, and may not be able to register directly on the event page. Or there’s another step process that Brynne mentioned as well. So that’s where reaching out to them directly is. And providing the registration link is going to be really important to do, because just the way things are set up with LinkedIn, it’s a little bit cumbersome. One of the nice things about this, though, is that it actually provides another touchpoint for you with the people who you’re inviting.

00:10:58:24 – (Bob Woods): So, you know, so your name just gets reinforced a little bit more when you’re taking that extra step. Plus, you know, you’re actually helping them out at the same time. So you’re also seeing it as an asset to them hopefully.

00:11:12:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. That’s awesome. And is it maybe Nika or Nika I’m not sure is excited about the replay. And I see here we have I love these name revenue. 

00:11:25:24 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Some very cool things about this too.

00:11:30:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. 

00:11:31:24 – (Bob Woods): And one more from. Sorry. I apologize if I massacred that. Really amazing. So thank you very much. I really appreciate all of the comments coming in. So with that, let’s move on to number three. And this one’s kind of a brand original. It’s leveraging other events. So you can actually use LinkedIn’s event. Certainly within LinkedIn search you can search for events. Now it’s not a great search. You don’t have all of the filters that some of the other ones do, but you could still use it to find events that your targeted buyers might attend. So what you can do with that is you can attend those other events and then connect with other people through messaging.

00:12:18:18 – (Bob Woods): But, you know, obviously you don’t want to spam or be obnoxious or whatever about it, but done the right way and done with a really soft touch. You can leverage other events to get people to your event, especially if they’re really closely tied together. 

00:12:35:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Do you want to say anything? Stan before I jump into my round? 

00:12:39:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. You know, go for it.

00:12:41:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, so I cannot say how much I love this anymore. There’s no words to express how valuable this tip is. So what does this mean? I go into LinkedIn, I click on the search bar and I put in for me. I might put an AI prompt rating or LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, and I then find all the events I hit enter. And then there might be, you know, lots of choices. I click on events. So if I do right now, Sales Navigator three will come up. One is ours, but I look at the other two and one has 28 attendees and one has seven attendees. And these are people in the other events that might also get value from our event.

00:13:30:18 – (Brynne Tillman): So I just make sure that we’re not competing right. So often it’s LinkedIn that’s running these. Or I prompt writing. It might be for, I like cap cut does like other tools that we don’t compete with, but we’ve got a similar audience. So I will look through. So first, when you hit attend, you now can access all the people that are also saying they’ll attend. You can network with them, you can bring them value. Do not throw an event in here. But you can say I’m really excited for this event. And if you’re open, let’s connect. I’ve got some prompt writing content. If you’re interested, let me know. Right. And we just have a very nice conversation permission based. But you’re using these events that are attracting your targeted,

00:14:25:19 – (Brynne Tillman): buyers. It is like going to a very targeted conference or networking meeting and you are attending and so are all those other people. And virtually we start natural conversations that can really convert into opportunities. So, networking through other people’s events is fabulous. Just make sure you’re not poaching competitors, groups of folks and that the people are parallel to what you’re doing.

00:14:57:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Side note if you are doing lots of events and that’s someone that’s attracting the right people, you may want to interview them on a live stream. You may want to start to co-create content. So that’s how I look at it. Is this someone that I want to co-create something with? And it’s not that you’re not falling into that competing realm. And I feel comfortable with you networking with their people. 

00:15:25:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, it’s a great mindset to have. I like that a lot. Perfect. 

00:15:29:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Hey, I like it too. 

00:15:31:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, exactly. So, before we move on to the following, you know, like, after you’ve had the event and follow up and things like that, because that’s definitely coming up next. I do want to touch on personal profiles versus company pages really quickly, and I want to touch on it quickly just because a lot of people out there don’t have company pages, so they don’t need to worry about it. But if you are one of those people who has a personal profile and a company page as well, you do need to make a little bit of a decision there on which vehicle, which channel, whatever you want to call it, to actually use for the event.

00:16:12:10 – (Bob Woods): because there are a couple of minor differences. So with the personal profile, that’s just going to give you a more personal touch. Because any message that you send out will be coming from you rather than from the company. One of the things about the company page, though, is that you get enhanced registration options for the company page.

00:16:35:24 – (Bob Woods): So that’s kind of the balance that you need to strike there. So, you know, choose based on your goals, your target audience, and especially the level of personalization that you want for prospecting. I think that most people would probably go with a personal profile if they do have both. But, you know, everybody’s situation is unique. You may actually want to use the company page for something, especially if you want the enhanced registration options there.

00:17:05:18 – (Brynne Tillman): which, by the way, are phenomenal. 

00:17:08:24 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, 

00:17:09:18 – (Brynne Tillman): The enhanced registration is pulling it from their LinkedIn profile. So they don’t even have to fill anything out. They just have to agree to it. And you get a ton of information about that as well. So if so we did it one time. Just so we can say we did it. And the negative is it you don’t attract the same people. There’s no saying you have to really actively invite people as individuals in order to bring people in. If you people don’t typically see this where I recommend company over, individual, or if you are a large financial institution or, you know, you’re a huge cut, your IBM and you’re going to be running a series of things.

00:17:58:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. And then and you don’t necessarily it’s not really based on an individual. There’s a great opportunity there because not only, people can still invite this individual. So if I go into a company page and I invite a thousand people, it shows that Brynn Tillman was invited to the social sales link event. So you don’t necessarily lose that.

00:18:22:12 – (Brynne Tillman): But what happens is marketing now is able to leverage all of that content. The interesting thing is there, and I think it’s still there is there’s a checkbox that says you are allowed to contact them or you’re not, or you’re not allowed to contact them. And what we found is there were a ton of people that opted out of being contacted, and that did not help.

00:18:45:21 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So there are, you know, there are positives and negatives that you really need to, to think pretty deeply about, depending on, you know, your, your goals and everything else. And I think that the way that Brynne presented, you know, a potential path for you is, is a really good way to look at it.

00:19:07:20 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah, yeah. And it occurred to me since you mentioned the IBM example, if you’re with a company that does have a large team and the team members promote the event to their networks, then you take advantage. I would think of the page registration, the ability to grab the information. And it’s the people that your team already has relationships with. 

00:19:34:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Is that yeah, that is a wonderful example you’re not promoting, especially if you’re in a sales position, you’re not promoting another salesperson or you’re not. You’re promoting the company’s event. And I think that’s amazing. I love that. 

00:19:48:21 – (Bob Woods): Yep. Yeah. So let’s pretend that the event is done. Now. It was a smashing success. Everybody was happy with it. Now what do you do to follow up and network? So after the event you know, be sure to follow up with your attendees because you want to continue building rapport. And you definitely want to continue establishing yourself as a valuable resource, because hopefully you’ve already started that process during the event, whether it was a LinkedIn live, whether it was in person or whatever, whatever route you decided to take there, you’ve already got that whole ball started.

00:20:30:10 – (Bob Woods): Keep it rolling with follow up with networking, because as we all know, networking and especially relationship building are essential for your success in sales. Because if you’re not viewed as an expert, it’s that much more difficult to really deal with, with, with people and make sure that any prospects that you have view you as someone who is not only, knowledgeable, but also trustworthy when it comes to whatever, whatever product or service that you’re providing for them.

00:21:03:12 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. And just kind of piggyback on that slightly so it does not connect in pitch. Do not invite and pitch. Do not if you want to call to action at the end. I love that. But yeah, this event should be, standalone value. Even if they never buy from you 

00:21:23:10 – (Bob Woods): like 90%. I would say something like that. I mean, a really, really, really high percentage of it has to be valuable, valued content that, you know, that they will walk away with thinking, wow, I really learned something there. And this is something that I can already put into my business. And but, you know, I may not know how to do everything. That’s what I want to reach out to Stan, to really figure out how he can help me do this. Even, you know, take it, take things even further. 

00:21:55:12 – (Brynne Tillman): So the other thing is, if they did opt in, you can drip campaign on them, on content, continue to bring value, to continue to offer a conversation, and invite them to other events. There’s so much that you can do that just continues to nurture that relationship. 

00:22:17:20 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So don’t forget to engage with the comments on the event.

00:22:20:18 – (Bob Woods): Yes. 

00:22:21:20 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Occasionally people will watch the replay and comment. Now, not a lot, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. 

00:22:27:18 – (Bob Woods): Yes. 

00:22:28:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Good good good point. That is so important. And I’m here like on my phone right now while we’re live. Just liking the comments that are coming in. But it’s, it’s good to go back and, and leave other comments when I’m on. Mark and Meredith’s, Saturday Morning Live podcast. About two hours later, Mark is going back, so he likes things, but Mark is going back and I get like, thanks for sharing that, friend. Thanks for engaging. And he, every single time, makes sure he responds to every single one of those. Wow. So neat. 

00:23:07:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Very cool. 

00:23:08:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. 

00:23:09:18 – (Bob Woods): Which actually gets into our final point today could not lead any better. And that’s being proactive and being personal. Now that obviously goes beyond what we were talking about in terms of interacting with comments and things like that, because that obviously is very important. And I think the example that Brynne brought up is brilliant. And I think that we all should be following that model there. But when it comes to,

00:23:37:09 – (Bob Woods): you know, just linked events in general, don’t expect things to work on autopilot. I think if there’s one thing that we’ve learned about LinkedIn through the years is that, you know, especially when it comes to the algorithm and everything else LinkedIn has, it has control. If you want to really promote yourself or promote or promote not the right word, but get the word out about what it is that you do and what you’re doing, you really need to take the reins yourself.

00:24:09:14 – (Bob Woods): That’s especially true with LinkedIn events. This stuff is not going to work on autopilot. You need to be proactive. You need to engage personally with attendees. 

00:24:19:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Know automation? 

00:24:20:14 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, customize your approach based on the event and the audience. And I do think that the audience is important too, because you want to attract the right kind of people. You just don’t want numbers filing in the virtual door. Basically. 

00:24:39:20 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. 

00:24:40:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. 

00:24:42:14 – (Bob Woods): Okay. So that’s going to bring this event to a close. So, when you’ve been with us live or recorded via our podcast, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live, sponsored by Ask SSL AI to do these live shows every week.

00:25:04:10 – (Bob Woods): These live sessions, these live events every week. So join us if you’re listening to us on our podcast though, and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button to access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop. And you know, just like here, we like, likes and comments out there in the atmosphere or whatever you want to call it as well.

00:25:27:07 – (Bob Woods): So besides these LinkedIn lives, we also interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas. So catch those as well. Social sales link.com/podcast is where you’re going to want to go if you want more information about us and everything else. And so when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales social. Excellent work peeps. Thanks everybody. Bye bye.

Outro:

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