About Expandi

Expandi is the safest LinkedIn automation SaaS tool. Through omnichannel outreach (LinkedIn as well as email), image & Gif personalization, smart sequences, and more, we make it easy for you to reach your customers.

With smart outreach “if-this-then-that” sequences, lead generation has never been easier.

The Challenge

One of the best ways to generate business leads is through tradeshows and networking events, where you can build relationships in person. However, with the impact of COVID-19, there has been a digital transformation with physical events being replaced by online ones.

Like everyone, we were losing a lot of sales and leads.

The very first online webinar we organized got 12 attendees. 

Since then, we’ve managed to develop replicable marketing strategies that get us 1,000+ attendees like clockwork. From experience, we’ve developed proven organic and content marketing tactics that you can also use to reach more people.

Results

The actual webinar got well over 1,000+ attendees.

The marketing strategy part we divided into three parts:

1. What to do before your LinkedIn event. 
2. What to do during your LinkedIn after. 
3. What to do after your LinkedIn event.

With a mix of organic and content marketing strategies, the idea was to grow our reach, build relationships, and then re-engage the leads after the webinar.

Using the latest content repurposing tactics and strategies, we managed to skyrocket our reach when getting the word out:

Then, we scraped those posts and did direct LinkedIn outreach to interested leads.

We also promoted the event in Facebook groups.

And finally, though our newsletter isn’t our most active channel, we still got over 100+ clicks from there.

One very important part of our outreach was that we were focusing heavily on humanizing it.

Instead of doing spammy outreach advertising our event. We focused on building relationships and used custom, dynamic GIFs with our employees in front of the camera.

As we found out, people resonated with a face and personal outreach.

The best part is these strategies work for everyone – you don’t even need to have a huge audience to start marketing yourself.

Here’s how:

STEP-BY-STEP STRATEGY

As mentioned above, to get 1,000+ attendees, we split our strategy into three parts:

1. What to do before your LinkedIn event. 
2. What to do during your LinkedIn after. 
3. What to do after your LinkedIn event.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the exact steps we followed in each period:

1. BEFORE your LinkedIn webinar

The ‘Before’ part itself consists of:

• Preparing your event.

1. 1. Coming up and validating what your LinkedIn webinar will be about.
   2. Creating a LinkedIn event and optimizing it for higher clicks with custom design, clever LinkedIn copywriting, and more.
   3. Setting up a paid Zoom account and how to get the most out of it.

• Marketing your event.

To market the event, we used a mix of organic content marketing and repurposing strategies.

We used:

• Video posts.
• Poll posts.
• Storytelling content.
• Announcement content.

We then:

1. Used LinkedIn engagement pods to increase our reach.
2. Scraped our viral LinkedIn posts to reach out to people who voted on the polls or commented on our posts.
3. Invited people to our LinkedIn event automatically with Expandi.
4. Scraped other, related LinkedIn events in our industry to reach out to people we knew would be interested in the topic.
5. Created a connector campaign to scrape our own event as soon as we launched it, in order to engage with people who clicked ‘attend’.
6. Joined other, related LinkedIn groups to invite people we knew would be interested in the topic.
7. We promoted the event on our social media and our channels to increase excitement last week before the event.
8. Invited our external network from our CRM, personal brand or channels, social media, Facebook group, and more.

• Delivering your event.

For the actual presentation, we used a “hero’s journey” storytelling tactic to present our story, focusing on:

• Situation – What is the current situation? / What was it like?

• Complication – What was the challenge / what happened?
• Resolution – What did you notice to resolve this?

2. DURING your LinkedIn webinar

This step consisted of:

1. Going through our speaker checklist (test run, quality microphone, webcam, settings, quiet place, etc.)
2. Keeping an eye on live event moderation with our community manager (making sure everything works, managing participants, permissions, noting questions, etc.)
3. Making sure everything is recording, all the technical settings are correct, and everything is tuned so the participants can enjoy the webinar.

3. AFTER your LinkedIn webinar

Last but not least, here’s what we did after wrapping up our webinar and a quick celebration:

1. Ran an event participant campaign to interact with our attendees and gain feedback or build further relationships.

2. Focused on more content marketing and repurposing. Mainly we:

• Edited the webinar into smaller clips for video promotion.
• Posted 30 second snippets of the webinar for months after across our marketing channels.
• Tagged people who attended.
• Created polls, asked questions, and engaged with our audience on all channels.
• Engaged with our audiences on our newsletter and external channels.

Finally, we reviewed our LinkedIn analytics: Looking at the top demographics to zoom in on our ideal customer profile.