If you’re a B2B marketer scouring your brain for LinkedIn ad campaign objectives and you’ve landed on a brand awareness campaign – but have no idea where to begin – we’ve got you!
Building brand awareness is a crucial part of marketing your company – but unfortunately, it’s not always as easy-peazy as we’d like it to be!
It’s impossible to convert leads without generating them first, and in order to do that, you need a dazzling brand awareness campaign – and LinkedIn is a great place to start.
Our LinkedIn advertising agency love LinkedIn because it’s ideal for reaching like-minded B2B audiences, as well as being able to accurately and specifically track and monitor engagements and conversions.
When creating a brand awareness campaign, you will likely understand that the success lies within reaching past the people who are already familiar with your brand and what it does. You need to venture into uncharted territory. And here’s how to do just that by using the powerful platform of LinkedIn.
1 – Targeting Strategies for Brand Awareness Campaigns
There are two key targeting strategies a LinkedIn marketer can harness for brand awareness campaign success.
ABM vs General Awareness: Investigating the 2 Key LinkedIn Targeting Strategies
1.1 – Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM involves figuring out and then targeting high-value perspectives on LinkedIn and homing your brand awareness campaign on them.
AMB is a popular strategy amongst B2B marketers because it is ideal for this area of business advertising, and also it focuses on building a deeper level of understanding and awareness than more “surface-level” marketing. It will also unite marketing and sales forces that have a joint focus.
With account-based marketing, it is highly likely you will need to liaise with the sales team of the organisation you’re building the campaign for (be it for your own company, or a third-party organisation). This is because sales teams are experienced in gaining knowledge, speaking the (metaphorical) language of, and building rapports with potential buyers, which of course, results in conversions.
Building an Accounts List
A key part of ABM is compiling a list of high-value accounts. And again – liaising with the sales team is vital in order to connect with the right profiles (AKA, the decision-makers within organisations) and can identify where the perspectives are within their buying journey. You can then either aim your campaign at these targets specifically, or you can build a “replica” account list of similar prospects.
Once you’ve put together your accounts list, you can then upload it to LinkedIn via the Campaign Manager and the Account Targeting feature.
Influencing the Decision-Makers
This is where it’s important to have established a deeper connection and understanding with the prospects on your accounts list. Once you’ve done this, you can then discern their core values and needs, and then tailor your campaign’s content in accordance with these values and needs.
Account-based marketing can be challenging because it puts the marketer in the position of needing to approach the message within their campaign on a deeper level than any other campaign type in order to gain the brand awareness you desire.
1.2 – General Brand Awareness
Moving on to the other option: general awareness. Even if you decide to bypass the ABM approach, you’ll still need to strategise a way of garnering the awareness you desire for your brand.
The key to success within any brand awareness marketing approach is putting your content in front of the right audiences – AKA, hot leads (leads who are ready and willing to convert). And using the tools within LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager can help you do this.
LinkedIn’s Targeting Filters & Parameters (Via Company Data):
- Company name.
- Company industry.
- Company size.
- Job title.
- Job function.
- Job seniority.
- Member schools.
- Fields of study.
- Degree.
- Member skills.
- Member groups.
- Member gender.
- Member age.
- Location.
Depending on what scale you would like to build brand awareness, you can refine these filters accordingly to build to the most specific, targeted audience possible.
When building a brand awareness audience, it’s wise to aim for an audience of minimum 300,000 LinkedIn members. This should at least guarantee a return-on-investment of your budget costs. Remember: the less parameters you use, the more broader your audience will be.
Your metrics will help you discern how warm these audience members are by whether or not they engage with your campaign the way you’d like. This can then provide the insights you need to tweak your campaign, if need be.
LinkedIn Retargeting Campaigns
LinkedIn is also an ideal resource for B2B remarketing ad campaigns. And it even comes with its own website retargeting feature. You can even use an insight tag to track conversions on your website via your retargeting campaign. LinkedIn themselves have also documented the success gathered from these types of campaigns, which can be up to ten times higher than a standard targeting ad campaign.
As the old saying goes – familiarity breeds understanding!
LinkedIn Layered Targeting
In order to optimise the potential of your LinkedIn brand awareness campaign, it can be wise to deploy layered targeting tactics. You can do this by focusing on both audiences and buyer personas for different campaign types, which will help you with personalisation of ads, which is a lucrative approach to marketing on LinkedIn.
Also, it is important to find the “sweet spot” when narrowing down the different audience filters to use – using too many can limit the amount of audience members you gather, and using too many will result in an audience that is too broad and vague. Neither of these approaches will generate success. Choosing the right amount predominantly depends on your industry.
2 – How to Build Effective Awareness Campaigns on LinkedIn Ads
Now you’re familiar with the types of targeting campaign options there are on LinkedIn, let’s look at optimising your brand awareness campaign to maximise its success:
2.1 – Set Goals
Outlining your campaign objective is the most important aspect of ad strategising. Without this, you cannot take advantage of all of the useful tools LinkedIn has to offer to help you build a successful campaign.
When building a brand awareness campaign on LinkedIn, these are your options – and you will need to select one (and only one!):
- Website visitors.
- Brand awareness.
- Video views.
- Engagement.
2.2 – Organic Presence-Building
You can do this naturally just by posting and having a presence on LinkedIn, as well as using paid marketing strategies. That way you can test both options and see which is generating the most awareness for your brand.
Going for the organic approach involves posting/sharing content that is relevant to your audience’s needs. Keeping an eye on relevant trending topics is a good place to start, as well as engaging with them.
Taking advantage of features such as LinkedIn Events can also be useful.
2.3 – Specific Targeting
More often than not, company buying decisions are made by more than one person. This is where finding your filter sweet spot is important. And always take advantage of LinkedIn’s segmentation tools, such as Matched Audiences.
For future campaigns, you can also create a “lookalike” audience for other targeting campaign objectives with similar attributes to this current audience.
2.4 – Select the Right Format
Next job on the to-do list is choosing your ad format. If you don’t want to settle on just one, you can combine a couple instead. Merging more than one depends on what your campaign objective is.
2.5 – Analysis & Optimisation
This is where LinkedIn’s metrics come in handy. These are the metrics you’ll need to keep an eye on:
- Conversion (rate, cost per lead, and cost per conversion)
- Awareness (click-through rate, impressions, and clicks)
- Consideration (click-through-rate, clicks, and website visits)
It is important not to check your metrics until at least seven days into your campaign. Any sooner will not provide an accurate representation of the impact it is making. Be patient!
Also, consider a/b testing your campaigns to ensure optimal success.
3 – Creating Powerful Brand Awareness on LinkedIn: Top Tips
Implement the following tips as the icing on the cake for campaign success:
Use Blog Content
Blogging is far from dead, contrary to popular belief, so why not pull some of your best blog content out of a post and turn it into a killer LinkedIn Sponsored Content post?
Social Media
Same goes for your social media posts. If you’ve noticed a particular post on one of your social media channels doing exceptionally well in terms of engagements, why not use it to create an optimised LinkedIn post?
Videos
Video advertising is vastly becoming one of the most popular and successful marketing tactics. If you have a YouTube channel, you can share your company’s videos on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to optimise it with four relevant hashtags.
Run Multiple Content
It’s wise to run more than one piece of LinkedIn content at any given time. This will allow you to compare and contrast the results of each.
A/B Testing
Test content formats and options to see which has the best results.
Use Your Logo – Every Time
Get into the habit of including your logo in amongst your visuals – this is ideal psychology for brand awareness and recognition.
Use Good-Quality Images
Low-resolution stock images are not okay!
Always go for optimum quality when it comes to your campaign’s visuals. Anything less just looks cheap and amateur – which doesn’t set off the right impression!
Don’t Forget Your CTA
Your call-to-action is the most important aspect of your campaign, so make sure it’s clear, concise, and it works properly (nothing is more off-putting than a broken URL!)
3 – Bringing Value to Your Brand Awareness Campaign
Building brand awareness can be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing. However, when executed properly, you can see much tangible success.
Once your campaign has gone live, it is imperative you then wait for seven days to pass to allow your campaign to circulate and then regularly check your metrics. Once you can see how it is performing, you can make any necessary amendments to optimise it, if need be.
If your campaign’s call-to-action (CTA) leads to your website, don’t forget to add an Insight Tag to monitor your audience’s behaviour once they leave LinkedIn and click on your URL.
Tracking your campaign’s success on LinkedIn can be measured by the following metrics:
- Click-through-rate (CTR)
- Your campaign’s current reach
- Cost-per-1000-impressions (CPM)
- Engagement rate
Brand awareness is a crucial stage of online marketing, and often it needs to be implemented prior to creating a campaign that focuses exclusively on lead conversion (making sales, etc.). It will help you build your audience, stay ahead of your competitors, and will help you with campaigns down the line that are aimed at users at a different level of their buying journey.
Conclusion
Taking the time to create a brand awareness campaign on LinkedIn, and following the above steps to ensure it is performing at its optimum level, will not only provide you with the recognition you desire, but it will aid you in future campaigns.
If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.
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