How GitHub Used LinkedIn Event Ads to Get Nearly 1,000 Event Registrations

In late 2021, GitHub launched a new enterprise flagship event called InFocus, which featured a three-week-long virtual series. Each week was dedicated to a unique theme: Developer Experience, DevOps, and Security. The goal? Boost revenue and funnel the enterprise developer audience through a global and regionalized white-glove approach.

But how do you best drive attendance and promote engagement while also increasing sales through direct lead contact? 

GitHub's marketing team had previously relied on Twitter and Twitch for event-related outreach. This time, they wanted a more innovative approach. And they knew LinkedIn would be a great way to reach out to their desired enterprise audience and spread the word about InFocus.

How GitHub used LinkedIn to get developers excited

In addition to Sponsored Content and Message Ad campaigns, GitHub took advantage of LinkedIn Event Ads. At the time, Event Ads were still in beta, allowing users to promote LinkedIn Events from their Page to a defined audience.

GitHub's marketing team set up individual event pages on LinkedIn for each keynote and breakout session at InFocus, as well as an all-up event page, which was utilized for the paid event ads. From there, audiences auto-filled their registration information within each LinkedIn event page. From there, audiences auto-filled their registration information within each LinkedIn event page.GitHub was also able to boost organic LinkedIn posts around the event — which not only helped them reach a wider audience, but enthusiasm for the event also became much more relatable and genuine.

Fletcher Helle, GitHub's Senior Manager of Social Media, expressed his appreciation for LinkedIn Events: "From a promotional perspective, I love being able to add the event speakers as hosts, so they can promote it from their own profiles and feed. When they tell people, 'You should attend this event, it's going to be really interesting,' it carries a lot more weight than Github saying the same thing." 

Helle and the Github marketing team were satisfied with both the agility and flexibility of LinkedIn Event Ads. While exploring all their options for the InFocus events, they chose to use LinkedIn Live's streaming services to maximize viewership for their signature session. They also followed up with Inmail campaigns to re-engage event attendees who did not sign up for meetings after the event.

"We were able to put this together without having to engage our web team or marketing operations," Helle said. "We had this hammered out largely over the course of an hour-long meeting because we could customize the event landing pages directly." 

Helle also expressed how both LinkedIn Event Ads and LinkedIn Live helped boost GitHub's social media strategies, noting that the event "represented a transformative moment in the global social media at GitHub."

"We really started to look at LinkedIn more holistically, and we realized: 1. Our LinkedIn audience is growing very fast. 2. 25% of our Linkedin audience are in the specific markets we're targeting. Other platforms don't allow us to generate leads and carry them to the business in the way LinkedIn does." -- Fletcher Helle, senior social media manager, GitHub

Unprecedented success with LinkedIn

Working with LinkedIn Event Ads, LinkedIn Live, and Inmail made a world of difference for GitHub’s Infocus campaigns. 

In fact, LinkedIn tools were the second-largest driver of event registrations (the first being email invitations). Through Event Ads, GitHub achieved a 22% registration rate, which accounted for 840 registrations, or 15% of all InFocus registrations. (For reference, typical conversion rates for sponsored content and lead-driving ads is 4%, or 5.5 times lower than GitHub’s results.) 

LinkedIn's Message Ad campaigns also saw tremendous results. During the three-week event series inviting current customers to more exclusive events, the campaign saw 75% open rates for active Sponsored Messages.

Kate Pate, GitHub's Director of Digital Marketing, attributed the successful campaigns to users' positive experiences with the platform.

"The maintained platform experience is a huge component of the success we've seen. The fact that the form is pre-populated from your profile has a significant impact. I also believe user expectations of the value they'll get from LinkedIn events is higher than other platforms, since they associate it with business content and consumption." --Kate Pate, Director of Digital Marketing, GitHub

Tapping into a unique and valuable audience 

When GitHub first decided to use LinkedIn to promote InFocus over other social media channels, they assumed there might be some overlap between their social audiences. However, while promoting InFocus, they quickly discovered that their LinkedIn followers were a separate and distinct demographic. 

As former GitHub Product Manager AJ Jimenez put it, "Each platform has its own culture and uniqueness. And it turns out there isn't a huge overlap in the audience that consumes our content on LinkedIn versus other platforms." 

This experience gave GitHub a deeper understanding of their enterprise developer audience, which in turn made it easier to reach out to and provide them with more tailored, highly relevant content.

According to Jimenez, "Once we found our enterprise audience [on LinkedIn], we've really enjoyed the consistency and engagement we're seeing." 

Easy, effortless signups

Event Ads also allowed GitHub to easily notify LinkedIn followers of live virtual events, in real time, based on their interests. And timeliness matters.

The team found that the real-time alert feature was incredibly helpful and, most importantly, unobtrusive. Users had the ability to drop in to any events without worrying about registering or having to jump through hoops to participate. 

"From a user experience standpoint, the most ideal scenario is to be able to drop in and to not have to worry about registering—to have no gateway whatsoever, to just be able to jump in and start consuming media," Helle said. 

“With LinkedIn, the level of engagement with an individual on the platform is changing. Members can immediately share, experience, and interact with what's going on. Catching people on the platform is so valuable. You're not trying to pull someone's attention away from somewhere else." -- AJ Jimenez, Product Manager, GitHub

Creating a lasting, meaningful community

Since their positive experience using LinkedIn for InFocus promotion, GitHub has continued to explore new ways of connecting with their audience and fostering community among developers. This includes jumpstarting dialogue among event attendees on their Event Pages to provide a more personalized experience, rather than having GitHub directly lead the conversation each time.

"That's one of the best ways to drive awareness of different sessions," Helle said. "People share with each other which keynotes they're excited about or speakers they've heard before." 

They've also continued to expand their LinkedIn Live and Events usage, run live streamed Demo Days every Friday, and launch breakout events on the platform. GitHub's success with LinkedIn's myriad of social tools, from Event and Message Ads to LinkedIn Live, helped make InFocus the success that it was—and it made GitHub reevaluate its assumptions about connecting to prospects via social. 

Thanks to LinkedIn Events, GitHub now has a new primary channel for capturing leads and driving revenue like never before.

Want to learn how you can use LinkedIn to grow your business? See how LinkedIn Events can help your business reach new audiences like never before. Read the full GitHub case study.