LinkedIn's ads chief on what event marketing really takes

Jae Oh, LinkedIn's head of ads, has published guidance on event marketing that most B2B brands will find quietly damning. Social Media Today reports that Oh's central finding is simple: brands that build outreach strategies before an event and follow-up plans after it see materially greater engagement and reach than those that treat the event itself as the deliverable.

That framing inverts how most organisations actually behave. The budget goes on the booth, the keynote, the sponsored dinner. The LinkedIn activity is an afterthought: a post on the day, a photo recap a week later, then silence. Oh's guidance suggests this sequencing is precisely the wrong way round.

The event is the middle, not the peak

Think of a major industry conference as a three-act structure. Act one is the pre-event window, where a brand establishes what it stands for before the crowd assembles. Act two is the event, where it reinforces that position with people who are already paying attention. Act three is the follow-up, where it converts fleeting attention into durable relationships.

Most B2B LinkedIn strategies fund act two and skip the other two entirely. The result is a spike in impressions around the event dates and a rapid return to baseline, with no lasting lift in profile visits, no DMs from qualified buyers, and no pipeline that can be traced to the investment.

Oh's point is that LinkedIn's feed rewards sustained, contextually relevant activity. A brand that posts consistently in the two weeks before a major event, during it, and in the fortnight after registers as authoritative on that topic to both the algorithm and the audience. A brand that posts once on the day does not.

For executives at multilaterals, industrial groups, or financial institutions, where events like Davos, COP, or major trade conferences generate enormous short-term visibility, this matters considerably. The organisations that come out of those gatherings with measurable authority gains on LinkedIn are rarely the ones with the biggest presence on the ground. They are the ones whose leaders have been building a position on the platform for weeks beforehand and who continue the conversation long after the last panel wraps.

What a real follow-up strategy looks like

Oh's guidance points to follow-up as the most neglected lever. This is credible. The post-event window is when intent is highest: attendees are processing what they heard, buyers are evaluating vendors they met, and the topic is still live in the feed. A comment thread started under a substantive recap post, a document summarising a session's key arguments, or a direct message to a contact made in person — these actions, taken within 48 to 72 hours of an event, convert attention into something measurable.

The alternative, the generic "great to be at X, see you next year" post, generates likes from colleagues and nothing else. It does not produce saves, which signal genuine interest. It does not produce the kind of extended comment thread that distributes a post further into the feeds of second-degree connections. It does not prompt profile visits from buyers who want to know more.

The implicit recommendation in Oh's framing is that event marketing on LinkedIn should be treated as a campaign with a defined arc, not a content moment. That means allocating production time before the event, not just during it; identifying the two or three arguments a brand or executive wants to own coming out of the event; and scheduling the follow-up before the event begins, so it actually happens rather than getting deprioritised when the team returns to the office exhausted.

For brands whose calendar is structured around a handful of high-stakes annual events, this approach does not require more content. It requires better sequencing of the content that was always going to be produced. The speech, the panel contribution, the research launch, the customer dinner: each of those generates material. The question is whether that material reaches LinkedIn before the audience's attention has moved on.

Oh's guidance does not claim this is complex. The brands losing the event marketing game on LinkedIn are not losing because the strategy is hard to execute. They are losing because they have not decided to execute it at all.