On March 9, 2022 at 1:00 pm, the co-founder of Sales Robots hosted a Webinar with as many as 543 attendees. In this article, we conduct a detailed analysis of the promotional activities preceding the Webinar using LinkedIn "events" and Sales Robots tools. What do you need to effectively generate leads and gain hundreds or even thousands of valuable contacts? You can start on LinkedIn on your own, and when you want to save time and multiply your results check out the possibilities of Sales Robots tools.
Promoting an event step by step
We scheduled a free event (webinar course) about 5 weeks in advance. The event was added to the schedule on our website with the option to sign up via a simple form (name+e-mail).
We created a "LinkedIn event" to promote our training by selecting the option "use the LinkedIn registration form" so that participants who signed up would give their marketing consent.
Careful planning of the event name (75 characters max) proved most important at this stage. The name is the primary, most prominent piece of information appearing in event invitations. We planned the name before we set up the event because the event url is created based on the first name and editing it later does not change the url.
We prepared a background image for the event, a description, and a link and added a speaker and published the event.
We then selected a dozen LinkedIn accounts of employees (in this case Avatars) whose job was to reach out to their 1st-degree contacts with an invitation to attend the webinar. 1 LinkedIn account receives a pool of 1,000 invitations to the event from the portal to use per week (Sunday through Saturday). Each week the pool renews, so in 5 weeks each account can send as many as 5000 invitations, and with 10 accounts the number reaches 50 000 invitations.
The LinkedIn accounts that took part in the event promotion had already worked with Sales Robots before, they attained a pool of over 5000 contacts in about 3 months.
How do you promote an event on LinkedIn manually?
Visit the event page and sign up for the event. Then click "invite" and a list of up to 1000 of your friends will be displayed. Next to the people you want to invite check the checkbox, and finally send the invitation to all of them using the "invite" button. We recommend sending no more than approx. 300 invitations a day. After sending 1000 invitations in one week, you may send the next invitations only in the next week (starting Sunday).
During the manual invitations process in the following weeks, you will encounter an issue with the way the list of people to invite will be displayed: there will be repeated invitations of already invited people, which makes it difficult to send invitations to others - the list has maximally 1000 entries, even if the number of your contacts is much bigger. The solution to this problem is to use filters visible above the list - we recommend division by province or city to increase the range of the promotion.
The above actions require attention and time and should be implemented systematically. Using multiple LinkedIn accounts, e.g. colleagues, will multiply the number of invitations sent and the final effect.
Our experience shows that 7-11% of people accept the invitation they receive, and about 25-30% of them give their consent to processing their data (name, surname, position, company, e-mail) for marketing communication purposes.
Inviting about 50 000 people in 5 weeks, we obtained over 3300 participants of the event on LinkedIn, out of which almost 900 people gave us their marketing consent.
How to effectively promote an event on LinkedIn using Sales Robots tools?
To save LinkedIn users time and make promoting events more effective, we built a very easy-to-use tool. All you have to do is indicate your LinkedIn event link and promotion date range in 30 seconds, and the rest of the tasks will be completed automatically and much more efficiently than with manual actions.
How does the event promotion automation tool work?
Once you set up the task that automates the process, the rest happens on its own. First, all contacts from all connected LinkedIn accounts will be downloaded, and the resulting list will be deduplicated so that each person receives only 1 invitation.
Next, Sales Robots will begin sending out the invitations by dividing them into smaller, irregular "packets" to mimic manual action, while still getting the full potential of the event promotion. The process will repeat until the set date is reached.
Using Sales Robots minimises the commitment of employee attention and time to just a few minutes instead of several hours, while significantly increasing the effectiveness of the event promotion.
How much lead generation capability does LinkedIn provide?
Almost everyone knows that building a formidable network of contacts on LinkedIn, full of decision makers, is fairly simple. It requires little knowledge and systematic action. Senior employees readily accept invitations (30-40% when acting manually), and the pool of about 200 invitations made available by the Portal to each user each week allows you to meet 300-400 new contacts per month. Such a number is impressive and cannot be achieved through other channels.
But is it possible to acquire contacts even more efficiently and save a lot of time at the same time?
The LinkedIn portal is a huge opportunity for communication in the B2B sector and premium services and products. At the same time, the functionality of the portal does not make many processes easy, such as sending multiple invitations to make contact and to attend an event or send a series of messages.
During more than 3 years of joint implementation of communication campaigns with our clients, we have created powerful tools, significantly improving the work with LinkedIn: multiplying the effects and saving a lot of time.
Until recently, Sales Robots tools supported communication campaign processes based on intelligent message automation in the LinkedIn messenger. At the same time, to run messaging-based communication campaigns, it was necessary to build a tool that sent invitations to connect with the right people. We enhanced what LinkedIn offers and gave our users the functionality of "smart invitations", increasing the acceptance rate up to 90%, i.e. tripling the number of decision-making contacts acquired per week. The system collects millions of user-based data, which allowed us to build another tool that sends not only 200, but even more than 500 invitations to make contact per week. As a result, a Sales Robot connected to a LinkedIn account allows them to increase efficiency up to 700% and save up to several hours of work per day.
A new feature introduced for users in March 2022 is the automation of event promotions, thanks to which the number of acquired contacts with marketing consents (leads) has doubled, and the final cost per lead is only about £3 - not achievable through traditional channels such as Google and Facebook Ads, cold calling, cold mailing or other
How many more leads can you acquire using "events" on LinkedIn?
Events on LinkedIn are new and still lack a lot of functionality known at least from Facebook. Perhaps that is why many marketers underestimate them and only a handful of them have decided to use them for communication activities. this creates an opportunity, as the method, although effective, is still not very popular, and consequently, not many competitors use it. For now.
A valuable functionality is the option to add a registration form marking marketing consent. The consent is optional, but still, it is given by about 25-30% of people signing up for the event.
The event administrator can easily and at any time download a CSV file (excel, numbers) with a complete and detailed list of participants along with e-mails and indications of consent.
We recommend that you set up the event from the position of your company page on LinkedIn. An individual account also has this option, but the functionality is then poorer. When creating an event, we recommend enabling the "use the LinkedIn registration form" option. A LinkedIn user signing up for an event will see an automatically filled out form and the only action for them to perform will be to optionally check the consent box and click the "submit" button - as shown below:
Automate event promotions with Sales Robots
Launching the Sales Robots tool to automate event promotion is very easy and will take you less than a minute. All you need to do is prepare your event link and go to the panel. The whole process closes in a simple form:
The system prevents duplicate invitations to the same recipient and randomly distributes actions over time.
Events on LinkedIn provide tremendous communication potential for marketing, sales, recruiting, attracting sponsors and investors, and other communication activities on LinkedIn. The Sales Robots tool, on the other hand, saves many hours of work and maximises the efficiency of these activities, and when combined with automated, intelligent invitations and personalised messages, creates a solid foundation for effectively acquiring valuable leads.
So it's worth thinking about an interesting event that could attract customers. It doesn't have to be strictly about the products or services you're selling, it just needs to be within the theme. For example, a company selling mattresses can organise a webinar on healthy sleep and only partially "smuggle" information about mattresses into it. The possibilities are truly enormous.
