Challenge:

• The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a nonprofit organization focused on leadership development, was experiencing terrific engagement from its overall LinkedIn strategy, especially its LinkedIn Live series. They were already reaping the benefits of live video, seeing an average of 11,000 views (almost 5x that of pre-recorded videos).
• But the sales team was unsure of the best way to leverage those successful live presentations. “They were struggling with how to promote the Live conversations we were having from our company page, and wanted to ensure that our target audience was aware that they were happening” says Emily Viviani, CCL’s Social and Brand Communications Manager.
• The organization also wanted to better understand its existing followers, as well as identify which industries were most interested in learning about their leadership strategies and methods. “We basically wanted a clearer snapshot of the organizations and people that were benefiting from what we were already doing on LinkedIn,” Emily explains. “Unless someone shared the video or commented, we didn’t have a real sense of who was attending, except for the high-level demographic information.”

Solution:

• CCL decided to try LinkedIn Events to better understand their audience, enhance brand awareness, offer relevant resources, and grow recognition for their solutions. For their premiere event, the CCL team created a one-day conference with seven sequential sessions focused on developing leadership skills to successfully navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s always been part of our brand and our mission to be a helpful, charitable resource for people,” says Emily. LinkedIn’s free events product helped the team deliver on their mission at minimal cost.

Results:

• CCL saw 4,000 registrations for it’s one-day conference, and each session averaged over 3,150 views. “We were really excited to see that the number of live viewers we had was significantly higher than the number of live viewers we have when we stream anything to our LinkedIn Page,” Emily shares. “For the first two sessions, we had over 1,000 people viewing live, which was really exciting for us because typically we have just about 200 viewing live if we are streaming from our LinkedIn Page.”
• Even for the sessions at the end of the day, the number of live viewers was twice as high as the average number of CCL’s LinkedIn Live viewers.

Pre-event nurturing pays off:

• In advance of the event, CCL created a landing page on their own website to share more details and offer downloadable conference materials, and linked to it from their LinkedIn Event page. The downloads, which were gated behind a lead form, enabled them to capture email addresses — 2,500 more, in fact, than the number of attendees for their LinkedIn Event! Paired together, this proved to be an effective strategy.
• Prior to the event, the organizers posted videos to the feed, introducing themselves and chatting casually with one another and about the event. “We were trying to develop a sense of community and camaraderie before the event even happened, which was really cool to do,” says Emily.

Interactive sessions perform better:

• Surprisingly, the session with the highest attendance was the longest, which included an interactive assessment that participants completed over a short break, followed by a discussion. “It was definitely the most conversational of all of them and got the most lifetime views,” says Emily.
• The CCL team is now identifying leadership topics that lend themselves well to interactive activities for future LinkedIn Live streams and LinkedIn Events.

Reaching highly- targeted audiences:

• CCL finds LinkedIn Live streams resonate more with a large audience, so it will continue to use the format for high-level leadership subjects or issues where they want to position themselves as thought leaders. They’ll use LinkedIn Events to reach specific audiences interested in narrower topics, leveraging the sales team to drum up interest and drive attendance.
• “Now every time I do a LinkedIn Live, I’m asked to email the data that we can access immediately to a long list of people, because everyone is really hungry to see where our content is resonating,” says Emily.

About Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®)

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) is a top-ranked global provider of executive education. They use research to develop people into better leaders — transforming individuals, teams, organizations, and societies. They have nearly 5 decades of experience working with tens of thousands of diverse organizations in more than 160 countries across 6 continents, helping more than a million leaders at all levels.