Brand awareness is the key founding block to any successful and sustainable business development strategy. Without awareness, there are no business decisions and purchases to be made. On LinkedIn alone data shows that 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content, not to mention that LinkedIn has proven to drive more traffic to B2B blogs and sites compared to any other social networks.

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In this article, we want to focus on 6 main stages of the B2B brand awareness strategy on LinkedIn in order to plan, execute and measure brand awareness campaigns effectively and successfully.

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1. Define your brand awareness objectives

 

The golden rule of any marketing campaign is to clearly define and know your main objectives. To have more structured planning think about the following 3 focus areas:

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Objective A: Increase brand exposure

New exposure to your brand, product, and services could be one of the key objectives defining your campaign, in this case, you would want to focus on the reach.

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Objective B: Grow brand followers

Growing your brand followers is yet another effective objective to consider. Your direct brand followers can become your strongest brand ambassadors.

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Objective C: Drive content engagement

Increasing activity and engagement on your company page and across your LinkedIn posts is a strong objective helping your brand voice to be heard, noticed, and shared further.

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2. Identify your target audience

 

Nevertheless, it is very important to know who is your key audience as your content will be created for them, not for you. Keep in mind that 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions and have 2x the buying power compared to the average web audience. So, to start with, think about the following characteristics:

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A: The location - What role does the geographical location play? In which countries do you want to drive the awareness of your brand? For example, would you want to expose your brand to Europeans or perhaps Americans?

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B: The person - What importance is to the person’s role, their seniority level, perhaps their gender? When it comes to your product and services who would be keen to learn more about it?

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C: The industry - What about the market segments or specific industries, does that impact your strategy? Think in particular for who your product is made for.

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3. Create brand awareness content within the LinkedIn platform

 

LinkedIn drives 15x more content impressions than job postings. It’s time to utilize LinkedIn for your marketing content exposure and brand awareness. LinkedIn itself offers a handful of content creation tools on the platform. Of course, think about how to utilize those content formats to increase organic reach as well as content fit to the platform itself.

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A: Publish Article - Consider publishing your blog articles right on the LinkedIn platform. It’s a perfect format to share thought leadership pieces, best practice advice, share industry experience and professional expertise in your business field.

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B: Record Video - Video can create a new perspective of your brand and allow you to communicate with your audience in a completely different format compared to text. A study by LinkedIn showed that videos that are shorter than 30 seconds in length delivered a 200% lift in completion rates.

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C: Share Social Media Content - Leverage the posting feature on LinkedIn by sharing relevant and targeted content to your audience. The possibilities are endless, consider sharing the latest news and business announcements, event landing pages, presentations, interview articles, website content pieces and webpages, infographics, latest even photos, etc.

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D: Run a Poll - Perhaps it’s interesting and also insightful to run a survey with your audience. Try testing LinkedIn’s poll feature to connect with your audience in a new format.

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E: Create Stories - In some countries, we have already seen the new launch of LinkedIn stories, a new feature for short videos or photos of everyday professional moments. Another fantastic content format to consider for your brand awareness initiatives.

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4. Plan the frequency of your content

 

As LinkedIn reports show 69% of B2B decision-makers research business products during their workday, 73% during evening hours, and 51% spend time on research also on the weekends. Without a doubt, your brand awareness content needs to be there when your audience is looking for it. In other words, consistency is the key.

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A: Daily Content - Perfect content for daily posts is for example company news, industry news, latest research pieces, key statistics, industry or product infographics, links to brand articles or blog posts, presentation decks of your solution, product, video ads, etc.

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B: Weekly Content - Consider on a weekly basis to publish an article reviewing industry trends, sharing your professional experience, or lessons learned. Present key insights in your focus market, give a detailed overview of your product and challenges it helps to solve.

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C: Monthly Content - Plan monthly webinars and promote it by creating a LinkedIn events page. Think of your partners to invite and collaborate, attract a wider audience by addressing trending topics.

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5. Expose your brand content to your target audience

 

With over 690M professionals using LinkedIn, it is important that you get your content noticed by your target audience. Thankfully, it is easier than ever before as it can be done in no time, from anywhere. Effective brand awareness exposure methods can be:

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A: B2B influencers - According to BrandRefer 1 out of 10 professionals would love to promote other B2B brand content to their network. The recent B2B influencer marketing campaigns show 2-3x higher brand awareness campaign engagement compared to automated ads. A perfect way to give a boost to your brand visibility, social proof, and engagement.

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B: Team Power - Typically 30% of the company post engagements come from your employees. Fantastic opportunity to expose your brand to your team’s network professionals and gain new brand followers, recognition and content engagement.

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C: LinkedIn Ads - LinkedIn offers a handful of advertising solutions to help promote your brand services. It’s worth testing and running multiple ad campaigns to keep your brand visible and drive interest across new audiences

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6. Measure the effectiveness of brand awareness

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In order to draw a meaningful summary and improve your brand awareness campaigns, you must think ahead about how to track, measure and compare gained results. The more granular you can analyze the better improvements you can then apply for the next campaigns. Consider trying these methods:

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A: Benchmark results - Gather previous brand awareness statistics you collected in the past. Research industry average statistics to use as a benchmark if you do not have enough your own data to support your analysis.

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B: Set KPIs - Set clear KPIs for your campaign to know what exactly needs to be tracked, setup and measured. Do you need a UTM link, can you set up dedicated landing pages, customized signup forms, distribute coupon codes? All elements have to be thought through in advance.

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C: Run A/B test - If your campaign is running at scale or perhaps over a long period of time it is worth considering and running an A/B test experimenting with content format, delivery method, audience segmentation, frequency, etc.

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To sum up, start with knowing your end goal. Know who is your audience and what would they find valuable and interesting about your product. Leverage LinkedIn’s tools to publish and post content. Create relevant content on a regular basis for brand visibility. Advertise and promote your brand awareness campaign within your team’s network, collaborate with B2B influencers on LinkedIn as well as leverage LinkedIn’s own ad solutions. And don’t forget to measure your results to continuously improve your brand awareness results.

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Continue reading: Ways to promote B2B business with LinkedIn influencers

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This article was prepared by BrandRefer, your trusted full service influencer marketing agency for LinkedIn.