Building brand awareness is not just something consumer brands should do. When done well, brand awareness campaigns can help fill the top of your sales funnel by ensuring the right B2B decision-makers are familiar with your brand. When individuals are aware of your brand and what you have to offer, they are more likely to click on your ads or search for you when they have a challenge that they think you can help solve. Brand awareness campaigns can help break down barriers and increase your ability to influence their decision-making. In essence, brand awareness is the foundation to acquiring new customers for all types of brands.
Why use LinkedIn for brand awareness?
LinkedIn is not just a place to apply for jobs. It is the largest professional network on the internet with 310,000,000+ active monthly users, who use the platform to develop their careers, network, share ideas and research. Inside LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager there is a ‘Brand Awareness’ campaign objective; these campaigns are impression/reach based and help drive interest, and increase the reach of your activity.
Partner this objective with LinkedIn’s powerful targeting, ad formats, demographic reports and performance metrics and you have an excellent tool to help reach your brand awareness goals.
To maximise impressions for your brand awareness campaigns, the best practice is to test a variety of ad formats. The best ad formats for brand awareness campaigns are:
- Video Ads
- Single Image Ads
- Conversation Ads
- Spotlight Ads (Dynamic Ads)
What about creative?
A 2020 Edelman-LinkedIn Study found that B2B decision makers are spending large amounts of time-consuming ‘thought leadership content’. The study also found that:
- 89% of decision makers say thought leadership has enhanced their perceptions of an organisation.
- 49% of decision makers say thought leadership is influencing their purchasing decisions.
- But only 15% of decision makers rate the quality of thought leadership they see as excellent, so there’s huge potential to provide quality thought leadership content in all industries.
So, what defines great quality thought leadership content?
It’s crucial that content you create is educational and insightful. The main goal of thought leadership content is to become a go-to resource in your industry. As people use LinkedIn to gain unique insights into their industry, good content will allow your business to stand out from the crowd and add value to your audience’s journey.
Edelman’s research also found that consumers are more concerned with relevance than they are with originality. Therefore, it is a good idea to repurpose existing content from previous campaigns, blogs, webinars, and other media channels for brand awareness campaigns – not everyone will have seen it first time around.
Creating unique insights will help you stand out. Running industry surveys on perceptions, pain points and customer needs will not only provide you with great insights into the needs of your customers but will also provide you unique data to share in your content.
How to measure brand awareness
Organic metrics to measure brand awareness:
- Views
- Comments
- Likes
- Shares
- Followers
Paid media metrics to measure brand awareness:
- Engagement rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Uplift in people searching for your brand
- Traffic to your website and number of unique visitors
In summary, LinkedIn has a unique member base of professionals and decision makers who use the platform to further develop their careers and knowledge of their field. This offers B2B brands an excellent opportunity to increase their brand awareness through informative and value-based content distributed either organically or through the LinkedIn paid advertising platform.
Please feel free to get in touch if you would like our help adding LinkedIn advertising to your digital marketing plan!
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| Author | Ed Parker |