LinkedIn has become an invaluable tool for professionals across all industries to network, build their personal brand, and generate new business opportunities. For event planners and coordinators, LinkedIn can be especially useful for making connections, finding clients, promoting services, and staying up-to-date on industry trends. In this article, we’ll explore how and why event planners use LinkedIn to grow their careers and event planning businesses.
Networking with Other Event Professionals
With over 722+ million users worldwide, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform. For event planners, it presents a huge opportunity to connect with others in the industry. There are numerous LinkedIn Groups focused on specific event planning niches like weddings, conferences, fundraisers, and more. Joining these groups allows planners to meet and interact with potential partners, vendors, and colleagues around the globe. Some key benefits of networking on LinkedIn include:
- Finding and vetting vendors: Read reviews and recommendations of venues, caterers, entertainment, etc. to build your vendor list.
- Partnerships: Connect with planners in your locale or who serve a similar clientele to collaborate on events or trade vendor referrals.
- Advice and ideas: Get feedback on your event plans and concepts from experienced planners in the groups.
- Job opportunities: Network with planners and brands who are hiring for in-house event roles.
- Staying on industry pulse: Follow trending topics, tools, and tips from thought leaders.
With the ability to search for specific skills, interests, and professional backgrounds, LinkedIn makes it easy to find and connect with the right event pros for your business needs.
Showcasing Your Personal Brand
As an event planning professional, it’s important that you have a strong personal brand and presence in the industry. LinkedIn provides the perfect platform to highlight your skills, experience, services, and unique value as a planner. Some key ways event pros can build their brand on LinkedIn include:
- Crafting an informative profile headline: Summarize your offering and specialties.
- Displaying a professional profile photo: Show your personality while maintaining a polished look.
- Listing your services and specialties: Share the types of events you plan in the experience and skills section.
- Collecting recommendations: Ask past clients to endorse your work and leave recommendations.
- Sharing event portfolio: Post photos of successfully executed events in your portfolio.
- Interacting regularly: Like, comment, and share content to stay active and connected.
By dedicating time to building your LinkedIn presence, you can establish credibility and give potential clients the confidence to hire you for their events.
Attracting Clients and New Business
In addition to networking and personal branding, many planners leverage LinkedIn to attract new clients and generate business leads. With advanced targeting and advertising options, LinkedIn makes it possible to get your services in front of exactly the right audience. Some of the ways event pros can use LinkedIn for lead generation include:
- LinkedIn ads: Run customized ad campaigns to target decision-makers, geographic areas, industries, job titles, and interests.
- Sponsored posts: Get your content in front of a wider audience by boosting your posts.
- Company pages: Create an event planning business page to attract local followers and showcase your capabilities.
- Lead generation forms: Use forms to capture contact info from site visitors to build your pipeline.
- Targeted outreach: Identify and connect with prospective individual or corporate clients.
The combination of accurate targeting, company and contact data, and professional networking gives event planners a leg up in converting leads. According to LinkedIn, 80% of B2B leads generated through their ad platform are uniques, demonstrating a major opportunity to expand your reach and clientele.
Promoting Your Events and Services
In addition to directly networking and engaging clients, planners can also utilize LinkedIn as a promotional tool. By sharing event details, vendor partnerships, and company news, you can build meaningful buzz for your business. Promotional tactics may include:
- Posting event announcements and invites
- Running contests and promotions
- Cross-promoting with partner organizations
- Giving exclusive discounts and offers just for your network
- Sharing event recap photos and details
- Leveraging hashtags to connect with wider audiences
- Advertising upcoming events or launches
This regular stream of updates keeps you front-of-mind with contacts and helps convert them to future event attendees and clients. You can monitor engagement, comments, shares, and clicks to see what content resonates best with your audience.
Conducting Event Research
In the planning process for any event, conducting thorough research is a must. You need to understand your target attendees, benchmark against competitors, source vendors, and keep up with the latest trends. LinkedIn’s advanced search capabilities, news feed, Showcase Pages, and data insights make event research quick and simple. Some examples of ways to leverage LinkedIn for event research include:
- Analyzing target demographics and preferences
- Researching similar or competing events for comparison
- Gathering vendor and speaker options
- Accessing reports on industry and content trends
- Following influencers and thought leaders in your event niche
- Evaluating technological needs and solutions
By using LinkedIn as an event research toolbox, planners gain the knowledge needed to craft targeted, relevant experiences that meet client goals and resonate with attendees.
Choosing the Right LinkedIn Account and Settings
To truly maximize the power of LinkedIn for event planning, it’s important to have the right type of account and optimize your settings. Here are a few best practices:
- LinkedIn Business Plus or Sales Navigator account: Unlocks more search filters, Lead Gen forms, InMail messages, and analytics.
- All-star profile strength: Aims for 100% completion with a professional photo, company info, skills, recommendations, etc.
- Notifications on: Stay on top of messages, comments, mentions, and group activity.
- Partner with sales: Collaborate with sales team members to generate leads and close deals.
- Share media uploads: Post videos and images to bring your profile to life.
- Showcase Pages: Create project or event specific pages to provide more details.
Optimizing these profile settings gives event planners the visibility, resources and features to fully leverage LinkedIn for networking, branding, client acquisition, and event promotion.
Best Practices for Event Planners on LinkedIn
To maximize your chances of LinkedIn success as an event pro, keep these best practices in mind:
- Choose a specific niche or area of expertise to focus your personal brand and network building.
- Interact regularly with your connections by liking, commenting, and sharing content.
- Prioritize quality over quantity connections by selectively connecting only with relevant contacts.
- Provide regular status updates on event planning projects to give followers a behind-the-scenes look.
- Use Showcase Pages to create robust event websites, capture leads, and promote registration.
- Partner with vendors and sponsor organizations by tagging, cross-promoting, and co-marketing.
- Monitor notifications and respond quickly to messages, comments, and other engagement.
By being deliberate about how you engage on LinkedIn, event planners can build a stand-out personal brand in the industry, converting connections into loyal networking contacts, partners, and clients.
Advice for Getting Started on LinkedIn as an Event Planner
If you’re just getting started on LinkedIn as an event planning professional, here are some tips to jumpstart your presence:
- Choose a professional profile photo that captures your personality and conveys your personal brand.
- Include important details in your professional headline like your focus area, certifications, specialties, and company name.
- In your summary, share your professional background, passion for event planning, and what makes you unique.
- Populate the experience section with key events executed, including photos, videos, and testimonials if possible.
- Join several niche-specific groups aligned with the events and clients you serve.
- Follow leading event pros, brands, and publications to gain industry knowledge.
- Start growing your network by connecting with existing clients, vendors, venues, and industry colleagues.
- Engage regularly by liking, commenting, posting, and sharing to build credibility.
By investing time upfront to create a robust, dynamic profile and actively participate in your LinkedIn network, it won’t take long for you to realize concrete benefits – like making valuable connections, showcasing expertise, generating leads, and winning new business.
Common LinkedIn Mistakes for Event Planners
While LinkedIn can work wonders for expanding your professional network and attracting clients, there are also some common mistakes for event planners to avoid on the platform:
- Including too little detail about your niche, skills, and past event experience.
- Connecting with anyone and everyone rather than curating quality contacts.
- Neglecting to regularly post interesting updates, news, offers, and recaps.
- Failing to respond and engage when you receive messages or comments.
- Not utilizing all the sections like featured media, recommendations, groups, etc.
- Forgetting to optimize profile settings for notifications and partner access.
- Using basic search filters rather than leveraging advanced targeting capabilities.
- Skipping personalized messages in favor of copy-paste outreach.
Avoiding these missteps and putting thought into how you intentionally use LinkedIn as an event pro is key to getting results. Consistency and quality connections are more impactful than spamming and vanity metrics.
Key Takeaways
Here are the key reasons why LinkedIn should be part of every professional event planner’s marketing strategy:
- Networking opportunities help you vet vendors, find partners, get advice, and build your industry presence.
- Showcase your personal brand and areas of expertise to establish credibility.
- Targeted advertising and lead gen capabilities help attract new corporate and individual event clients.
- Promote your events, launch new services, and maintain buzz.
- Conduct important industry and event research all in one place.
- Optimize profile settings and account type to access more robust tools and analytics.
- Implement best practices like consistent engagement and niche focus for maximum results.
- Avoid common mistakes like ignoring messages and making generic connections.
For savvy event planning professionals, dedicating time to build a standout LinkedIn presence is a smart investment that can pay dividends for years to come through new business opportunities. The power of connecting with the right networking contacts, prospects, and partners makes LinkedIn a go-to platform in an event planner’s digital toolkit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some common FAQs around event planners utilizing LinkedIn:
What types of LinkedIn accounts should event planners use?
Most planners find a premium Business Plus account, or Sales Navigator account provide the best features and analytics at a reasonable price point. This unlocks more search filters, InMail messages, Lead Gen forms, and profile views to get the most from the platform.
What are some popular LinkedIn Groups for event planners?
Some of the largest and most active include:
- Event and Meeting Professionals Network
- Event Planners Worldwide
- Meetings, Events & Wedding Planning Professionals
- Experiential Event Planners
- Virtual and Hybrid Event Professionals
- B2B Technology Events
- Luxury Event Planners and Designers
How often should event planners post or engage on LinkedIn?
1-2 times per week is ideal for a mix of original posts, content shares, responding to others, liking, and commenting. You want potential clients and network contacts to see you actively contributing insights and value.
What types of content do event planners typically share on LinkedIn?
Industry news, tips, and trends; brand and company updates; event promotion and recaps; related articles and resources; relevant photos and videos. Mixing these different formats keeps your profile dynamic.
Can LinkedIn be used to research event ideas, vendors, and themes?
Absolutely! LinkedIn is a goldmine for exploring popular events, sourcing potential speakers, discovering new venues and suppliers, identifying sponsor partners, and generally benchmarking your event against competitors.
Conclusion
For professional event coordinators and planners, dedicating time to cultivate an optimized LinkedIn presence provides immense networking, branding, and lead generation benefits. It enables discovering new business opportunities through strategic connections and partnerships. When used to its full advantage with a niche professional focus, high-quality engagement, and compelling profile, LinkedIn gives any event pro or agency a leg up in promoting their expertise, attracting ideal clients, and ultimately driving growth. Other social media platforms have a role to play, but none offer the same power for professional networking and showcasing credibility like LinkedIn. Any event marketer not yet capitalizing on these unique advantages is missing out on connections and leads that could significantly expand their business reach and success.
