Brand Awareness

Stage 1: Brand discovery

At this stage, customers go from having no awareness of a brand to discovering its products or services via an initial touchpoint, such as:

This hypothetical in-feed ad shows the company value proposition and speaks to the target audience.

Stage 2: Brand recognition and recall

After discovering a brand and its core offerings, marketers can retarget prospects who interacted with the first touchpoint to guarantee exposure to additional materials.

For example, customers may receive targeted emails if they opted into downloading an ebook or whitepaper, after clicking the ad above. Here is an example of a Lead Gen Form where a prospect can enter their information after clicking or tapping on the ad.

Over time, the target market becomes more familiar with the brand and seeks further information about its products or services. At this stage, prospects are looking to decide why a product or service might be the right solution.

Sticking with the example from earlier, a prospect may then start following the brand on LinkedIn and watch a helpful video or other organic updates.

Stage 3: Brand purchase consideration and favorability

Once potential customers can recall a brand name and its key benefits, it’s time to build their confidence that the products and services they consider are the best fit.

Studies have shown that information quality increases the likelihood of winning a high-quality, low-regret deals, so it’s crucial for B2B brands to create highly informative websites, blogs, ebooks, and other marketing materials to boost consumer trust and brand favorability.

Mckinsey reports that, “two thirds of the touchpoints during the evaluation phase include consumer-driven activities such as reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations.” That’s why B2B brands must also cultivate positive business ratings, reviews, referrals and positive customer testimonials that increase brand awareness and favorability.

Stage 4: Intent to purchase a brand

After prospects have finished their research, they reach the purchase intent stage, where they shortlist the brands they’d like to buy from.

Their final stage in the brand awareness journey is often to reach out to a sales representative to compare pricing, services, or features.

To close a sale, brands should make it easy to reach a real person via multiple “contact us” touchpoints, such as phone numbers and email addresses. Providing access to 24/7 customer service and FAQs is equally helpful.

Slow response time, pricing issues, poor technical or product knowledge, lack of face-to-face or phone interaction, lack of online capabilities, and poor comparison capabilities are some of the key factors that might impact a deal at this stage.

Stage 5: Brand loyalty and referrals

Achieving this final stage with a customer means brands now have ambassadors who can help move more prospective customers from the first stages of awareness to the consideration and purchase intent phase.

Building strong relationships with new customers is crucial as it increases the likelihood of them promoting the brand to their peers.

The factors that keep B2B buyer relationships strong include building trust and personal relationships, as well as being responsive when customers have questions.

Understand the target customer

This includes researching their demographics (income, location, job title) and psychographics (lifestyle, personal interests, attitudes and opinions, core values).

To gain further insight into customer needs, interviews or surveys can be used to learn about their pain points and how a business's product/service can help address them.

Learn how to emotionally connect with those customers

It’s crucial to understand what brand messages resonate with B2B buyers before developing product or service offerings.

B2B buyers choose brands that:

B2B brands should incorporate those practices into overall brand identity and communication strategies.

Know where to reach them online

Discovering where a brand's target audience spends their time online during the B2B research process is crucial.

There are multiple tools that will reveal website and social media platform rankings by demographics.

Select appropriate brand awareness objectives

With brand awareness ads, these objectives can include:

Once the brand awareness ad campaign goals have been identified, determine how to track and measure success using key performance indicators (KPIs) like impressions, new followers, shares, likes, and comments.

Choose digital channels and formats

Brands can achieve their awareness ad campaign objectives using both organic and paid content, along with sophisticated targeting.

Many ad and social networks provide back-end user demographic data – ranging from age and geolocation to job title and company size – to help brands build awareness with as many target customers as possible.

Watch the video to learn how LinkedIn website demographics works:

Create content for each brand awareness strategy stage

To grow brand awareness and move customers through the buying process, businesses should focus on providing relevant and informative content at every stage.

Research indicates that customers who receive helpful information are more likely to make a purchase and less likely to regret their decision.

Additionally, providing valuable content after a sale is closed can help to build customer loyalty and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

To effectively distribute content, brands can use paid and organic digital marketing channels, work with social media influencers or brand advocates, and create different types of content such as guest posts, blogs, videos, ebooks, reports, webinars, or whitepapers.

Match stories and tone to the brand’s personality

The tone and narrative of branded content should match its company values and culture. For example, if a company sells CRM solutions to the ecommerce providers, its branded content tone and personality will be significantly more serious than that of a company selling social media software to Gen Z entrepreneurs.

Other content creation best practices include:

Read “A Content Creator’s Guide for LinkedIn” for more ideas on how to get started with B2B content creation.

Leverage online analytics tools and campaign performance data

Brands can use campaign reporting and analytics data to track brand awareness metrics such as:

With the knowledge of target customer's needs and preferences, businesses can develop and distribute tailored content that aligns with each stage of the purchase decision-making process.

Then, increase brand awareness by retargeting the same target audience based on their meaningful behaviors, such as the pages they visit on a branded website, blog, or social network and how they engaged with branded ads.

LinkedIn’s online course helps businesses learn how best to create, track, and measure B2B brand awareness.

Conduct brand lift surveys

Many ad and social networks offer ways for marketers to measure the brand lift (or increased awareness) from an ad campaign by surveying users before, during, and afterwards.

Some key brand lift metrics include:

To learn how to conduct a brand lift study, refer to this post.