16 LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Event Planners

You won’t find cat videos. You won’t find vacation updates. And you won’t find memes, at least not the inappropriate ones your weird cousin shares at 3 am.

What you will find on LinkedIn is a digital utopia for business-to-business networking. In this article, we’ll explain how event planners can use LinkedIn marketing strategies to promote their events and themselves.

How LinkedIn Marketing Can Help Your Event Planning Business

Event planners can use LinkedIn marketing to grow their network, increase brand awareness, and promote their events.

According to Hootsuite, LinkedIn is the top choice of B2B marketers. Whether you’re trying to reach new corporate clients or get the word out about an industry-related conference you’re promoting, LinkedIn should be your go-to social media platform for marketing.

However, LinkedIn marketing is still a big deal, even if your event planning business centers around bar mitzvahs, weddings, and birthday parties. Simply put, LinkedIn is where you’ll find the demographic most likely to pay an event planner to throw the most epic birthday party in Dwight School’s third-grade class.

Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Event Planning Network

The number of connections you have powers your marketing effectiveness on LinkedIn. LinkedIn groups your connections as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree or outright “out of network.” 1st-degree connections are those people to whom you are connected. 2nd-degree are the people connected to your 1st-degree connections. And 3rd-degree are connected to the 2nd-degree peeps.

Here’s a rundown of how that works in relation to your event-planning marketing efforts. 1st-degree connections will see your posts on their homepage. If your 1st-degree connections engage with your posts, the corresponding 2nd-degree connections will then see your post on their homepage, and so on until, potentially, people twice removed from your primary connections have the opportunity to see and interact with your posts.

As you can see, having a lot of connections exponentially increases your exposure when you’re marketing your event planning business. Follow these tips to increase your connections.

1. Send an invite to everyone you know in real life, including previous coworkers and people you’ve met in the event planning industry.
2. Make your invite personal. Include a relevant greeting in which you introduce yourself as a NYC event planner, a common memory or connection, and a compelling reason to connect.
3. Promote your LinkedIn profile. Print it on your event planning business cards, include it in your official email signature, and post it on your event planning website.
4. Create a post, along with a link, on other social media platforms inviting your followers to connect.
5. Join groups and participate. Search for “event planner groups” within the platform. Send invites to group members with whom you’ve substantially interacted.
6. Search for people who are open to connect. Use the following search terms to find people who are open to connecting (or use these terms in your own profile to encourage invites):

• • • “open to connect”
    • “open networker”
    • “LION” (which stands for LinkedIn Open Networker”

Increase Brand Awareness for Your Event Planning Business

As we’ve already discussed, your target audience for your event planning business is on LinkedIn. And the social media platform for professionals is a surprise power-hitter when it comes to marketing. For example, according to DemandSage, more than half of social media users who arrive at B2B sites get there from LinkedIn. In other words, LinkedIn marketing is a fantastic way for NYE event planners to increase their brand awareness. Try these following tips to make your event planning service top of mind for your audience.

7. Post regularly, using these tips to increase engagement.

• • • Post Tuesdays between 9 and 10 am or 12 and 1 pm.
    • Or post on Wednesdays between 8 and 10 am, according to DemandSage.
    • Don’t post on Mondays or weekends.
    • Photos are good, but videos are better.

8. Make sure your personal event planning profile is filled out completely. And don’t forget to use keywords.
9. List your event planning clients in your experience history. You can showcase your client list by using the experience history section of your profile. Rather than simply “New York Event Planner” accompanied with a time frame, list each client as a new position. You can choose “Freelance” or “Contract” in the drop-down labeled employment type. Listing your clients as part of your work history also allows you to showcase media associated with your event planning services, such as videos or websites created for specific events.
10. Create or update your company page. If you own or work for a New York event planning business, then make sure it has a complete and updated business page.
11. Post a variety of content related to event planning to LinkedIn, including long-form articles, polls, and infographics.

Promote Your Event on LinkedIn

Promoting your event on LinkedIn does double duty because it also increases your brand awareness. Of course, keep your LinkedIn marketing effort to events that are professional in nature and open to registration. Use the following LinkedIn marketing strategies to promote events.

12. First, the obvious: create posts with links using your personal profile and your business page.
13. Change your headline on your personal page to promote your event.
14. Create a LinkedIn group for the event. You can do this by clicking “Create Group” from your Groups Homepage. Invite likely attendees.
15. Invite speakers to create a post about their upcoming talks and engage with the audience by asking questions, taking questions, or creating a poll.
16. Use paid advertising on LinkedIn to promote your event.

LinkedIn Is a Top Marketing Strategy for NYC Event Planners

New York event planners can’t afford to overlook LinkedIn in their social media marketing strategies. This social media platform for professionals is the go-to place for businesses and those most likely to use event planning services. When you use these 16 LinkedIn marketing strategies for event planners, you’ll grow your network, increase brand awareness, and make your events even more successful. 

If you really want to boost your connection power in a B2B environment, reserve your booth for The Event Planner Expo 2024! It’s the event industry’s premier conference where thousands of event planners and corporate decision makers go to find partners and form strategic partnerships. Reserve your booth while there’s still availability!