You’ve got great products and services. You know that potential customers can benefit from what you’ve got to sell them. There’s just one problem: They don’t know who you are or what you have to offer.
One of the biggest challenges for any company is getting the word out and gaining mindshare of customers in its target audience. So, how do you build brand awareness? A new course from LinkedIn Marketing Labs will show you how to use both organic and paid options to build your brand on LinkedIn. From the basics to adopting a full-funnel marketing strategy—here are five skills from the course to kickstart your campaigns:
1. Learn more about your target audience. One of the most powerful capabilities available in LinkedIn Campaign Manager is its demographic reporting, which lets you see the professional traits of your audience. You can also use the LinkedIn Insight Tag to learn about your audiences and measure your results on LinkedIn and beyond (i.e.: your website), and use this information to inform your marketing strategy.
2. Repurpose existing content from owned channels. Edelman research indicates that customers are more concerned with relevance than originality, so it’s wise to repurpose existing content for brand awareness campaigns. Rather than going back to the drawing board for every ad campaign, take a look at which content and creatives are performing well organically on other channels like email or blogs, and repurpose them in LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging.
3. Leverage a variety of organic content distribution options. LinkedIn offers a number of free options for distributing content to grow your audience organically. Creating a LinkedIn Page is key to establishing your brand’s professional presence while engaging with your audience directly. Another great way to stay connected with your community is to host a LinkedIn Event.
4. Build trust through thought leadership. Since brand-building is a long-term strategy, it’s important to offer high-quality thought leadership content to earn the trust of key stakeholders and executives. According to Edelman, 49% of decision makers say thought leadership is effective in influencing their purchasing decisions. Examples of this include elevating executive voices on blogs and social channels, or conducting and distributing original research.
5. Measure brand awareness. When measuring the impact of your brand awareness campaigns, it’s important to know that linking them to the bottom line may take time. We recommend focusing on primary metrics like cost per thousand impressions (CPM), engagement rate and click-through rate, as well as secondary metrics like lift in brand recall and awareness, traffic to website or even number of linkbacks to your content. Our course dives deeper on ways to measure performance of both organic and paid campaigns.
These are just some of the insights that you can glean from the course. It offers further detail on the items above, and much more, including the following:
• Filling your funnel. Building brand awareness fills up the top of your funnel by making sure that relevant people know about your brand. One of the best ways to do so is by creating and distributing valuable thought leadership content to the right audiences.
• All-weather marketing. Because competition among brands is fiercer than ever, advertising is a solid investment, and the effects of brand advertising are long-term. So, no matter how or where the winds may blow, it’s a smart idea to invest wisely in brand awareness.
• Balancing brand and demand. Finding the right mix between long-term branding and short-term sales activation is key. In the course, you’ll learn about the recommended ratio and how to achieve an appropriate balance between the two.
With the videos, interactive tools and lessons in “Using LinkedIn for Brand Awareness,” you can learn how to build highly successful brand campaigns and get the word out about your products and services. You’ll be able to move through the course at your own pace and take quizzes to ensure that the key points stick.
We’ll see you in the Lab!
