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What is branding?

Why It is Important, Plus Strategies to Grow Brand Awareness Online

Brand Build on LinkedIn

A well-planned and executed business branding strategy helps marketing teams create an emotional and memorable connection with target customers.

In this guide, we'll explain branding and provide strategies for building an online brand to elevate marketing results and maximize ROI.

Learn more about Branding:

What is branding?

Why is branding important?

How to build brands with LinkedIn

Comprehensive Guide to Building a B2B Brand Identity

This guide will provide actionable steps and insights to create a compelling brand identity that resonates with your target audience.

Download resource

What is branding?

Strategic branding creates a unique, emotionally-driven identity for a business, product, or service, convincing customers to choose it over competitors. It establishes a solid online and in-person presence, ensuring long-lasting customer recall and preference.

Branding includes tangible assets like logos, colors, slogans, and more. It also encompasses intangible elements such as recognition, brand personality, unique product characteristics, company story, values, and customer interactions.

Once businesses launch a brand, they will work long-term to improve consumer brand favorability and recall and even rebrand (e.g., changing critical elements of a brand’s design, identity, and promise) when necessary to shift public perceptions, differentiate from competitors, and grow market share.

Image of two professionals collaborating

Branding vs. marketing

Strategic branding is a distinct function within marketing. It helps consumers understand a company's uniqueness, why they should care or trust it, and why it's a better choice than competitors.

Marketing involves the strategic planning, development, execution, and monitoring of campaigns, product placement, pricing, and other tactics created to reach, connect with, and entice people to consider buying or consuming a brand — eventually becoming loyal customers and advocates.

Illustration representing branding vs marketing

Why is branding important?

Developing an effective brand meaning and presence offers several benefits:

It establishes trust and credibility with customers. A brand's credible reputation fosters customer confidence in purchase decisions. Consistent presence across channels with targeted messages signals professionalism, reliability, and commitment to delivering quality goods and services.

It helps businesses achieve competitive advantages and pricing power. Strong brands gain a competitive advantage, protecting long-term revenue and market share. They exhibit reduced pricing sensitivity, improved margins, and can achieve more flexibility in product/service expansion or adaptation.

It helps businesses attract the best talent. A strong, favorable, and recognizable brand attracts top talent, contributing to awareness and sales revenue growth over time.

It influences buyers’ long-term purchase decisions. Consumers are more likely to buy from a recognizable and favored brand associated with positive emotions. Brands with a strong presence impact future buyers who are out-of-market. This impact extends the B2B sales cycle to convert eventual in-market customers.

It strengthens customer relationships and loyalty. Favorable and recognizable brands create lasting connections with loyal customers, transcending price differences. Strong brand loyalty cultivates repeat purchases and fosters long-term customer relationships.

The key elements of branding

Below are different aspects of strategic branding development and management that marketers should know to get started.

Brand positioning

Brand positioning develops a product or service's unique offering and market position. This strategy resonates with customers and elicits positive responses online or offline. It differentiates a brand, highlighting its value, selling points, and why it's the best choice for the target audience.

Brand voice

Target customers will also connect emotionally with a brand’s voice. It is the style and tone (e.g., friendly versus formal or playful versus authoritative) of a company’s written and verbal communications across all platforms. Voice plays a significant role in shaping a brand’s identity, which we’ll cover next.

Brand identity

Branding design should reflect a business's personality and characteristics, making a strong first impression on new customers. Identity consists of tangible, visual assets like color, design, and imagery, working alongside the unique voice to engage customers' senses. The brand's identity should be easily distinguishable from competitors, solidifying its visual recall.

Brand values

Values guide a brand's identity, personality, employee behavior, customer relationships, and messaging. They should align with a company's core beliefs and mission, resonating with both employees and customers. B2B sales organizational brand values may encompass honesty, integrity, trust, and product innovation.

Brand promise

A brand promise is a clear, compelling, and memorable commitment to target customers, communicated through consistent brand messaging and marketing strategies. It conveys the value customers can expect when using a product or service (e.g., fast, easy to use, improves team collaboration). The brand promise builds trust and credibility, but failure to deliver can harm the bottom line.

Brand association

Positive brand association occurs when target customers strongly associate specific aspects of a brand's positioning, identity, value, and promise with people, places, or things they encounter daily. For instance, mentioning "social media," “professional networking,” and "business contacts" may instantly bring LinkedIn to mind. Businesses must establish a solid, memorable brand and create awareness through differentiated symbols, images, and messaging to foster this emotional association.

The sample LinkedIn campaign below demonstrates how a brand can position itself as playful but also helpful to target customers by showcasing its unique voice and identity – all in one awareness ad:

How to create and launch a brand

Branding your business requires a long-term approach. Here are foundational steps to develop a successful and sustainable brand:

Step 1: Identify target customers and create buyer personas

Marketers should identify and understand target customers, including their needs, pain points, and interests. Begin by creating a buyer persona (or ideal customer profile) to research and outline their demographics (e.g., age, gender, location), psychographics (e.g., interests, hobbies, lifestyle), and online behaviors (e.g., purchase cycle length, preferred media and social media channels for research, etc.).

Insights from customer surveys, focus groups, third-party research reports, and web analytics data will inform the development of a brand's positioning, tone, identity, values, and promise, which serve as guides for future branding strategies.

Other helpful buyer persona research tools

Some B2B marketers utilize real-time, first-party LinkedIn Sales Navigator data of over 850 million user profiles worldwide to learn more about their target customers.

They can gain Insights into their target customers. This data provides information about buyer persona profiles, roles, responsibilities, content interactions on LinkedIn, questions they ask peers, comments on competitors, and specific interests or hobbies. Sales and marketing teams can then develop branding strategies based on the target buyers' key needs and pain points.

Step 2: Grow awareness and reach through digital branding campaigns

A brand awareness campaign aims to expose as many customers as possible to branded ads that quickly convey the brand’s positioning, values, identity, and promise.

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute research reveals that a digital brand awareness campaign strategy that reaches everyone in a buyer category is stronger and drives higher customer acquisition and conversion than one that only targets specific customer segments.

Remember that buying committees and the buying cycle involve multiple organizational stakeholders. That's why reaching people who might influence an organization’s purchase decisions is vital to convert more leads into buying customers.

Likewise, loyalty and retention programs will spur some profit and are a predictable function of brand market share. However, a loyalty program’s percentage of total revenue, compared to growing the overall customer base, is smaller than the impact of a reach campaign and won’t sustainably grow brand loyalty alone.

Reach campaigns help marketers raise brand awareness for new prospects while reassuring existing customers of the company’s values and promise. This awareness strategy instills and reinforces positive brand association and sentiment over time.

Review our guide to learn how to develop, launch, and track a digital branding campaign.

Step 3: Invest in share of voice

When preparing to launch brand awareness campaigns, B2B marketers should consider growing their share of voice (SOV) in the marketplace. SOV is the ad spend that brands capture in their business category, divided by the total industry ad spend in that category. Share of market (SOM) is the percentage of total market share by revenue.

When SOV is greater than SOM, businesses are likely to grow faster.

Marketers can increase SOV by capturing greater reach, frequency (the number of times one customer sees an ad), and impressions (the total number of times ads are served on a browser throughout the campaign) from their target audiences.

Step 4: Improve a target buyer’s “mental availability” and brand association

Mental availability is the likelihood that a customer will think of a brand in a buying scenario. If a branding design achieves positive sentiment after customers are exposed through awareness and reach campaigns, it is more likely to be recalled quickly.

This concept comes from what is called the “availability heuristic,” which is a customer’s tendency to recall information quickly and favorably to make a purchase decision. Those decisions are based on familiar facts, emotions, and images that leave an easily recalled or associated impression in their mind.

Improving mental availability through awareness and reach also helps to amplify a brand’s share of voice by creating associations between the brand, the buying opportunity, and a relevant set of emotions and feelings. These associations influence buyer preferences to choose one brand over another when buyers are in-market.

Some of the top drivers of mental availability include the following:

1. Maximizing brand reach and frequency to grow awareness and SOV, using a variety of ad creative executions (we recommended four to five different ads to start) and high-attention ad formats (e.g., banners, videos, and stories)

2. Using effective, emotional branding that resonates through clear messaging and creative assets (e.g., logos, colors, fonts, images, and sounds)

3. Expanding targeting to reach influencers, as well as “future buyer” target segments across ad networks, as well as traditional and social media ad placements

4. Driving engagement with targeted social media communities through organic, educational branded content (e.g., videos, blogs, research report downloads, and live events) – then promoting content that resonates (e.g., through likes and comments), or when it goes viral via shares, to expand the brand reach further.

Step 5: Track short- and long-term brand performance and adjust over time

To establish a strong brand meaning, presence, and SOV, businesses must take both a short- and long-term approach to nurturing performance and staying relevant and competitive. When launching a brand awareness campaign, businesses should plan to track and measure results properly.

Use the below strategies to track ad campaign performance metrics and demonstrate brand lift.

1. Use the right analytics tools and campaign performance data

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

Impressions: The number of times the branded ad was seen

Click-through rate (CTR): The number of people who clicked on the branded ad unit(s)

Average CPM: Total budget spent on ads divided by 1,000 impressions

Engagement: Shares, likes, and comments on branded ads and content

Pageviews: How many people visited a brand content page, company page, or website

Site visits: To the branded content page, company page, or website

Time spent: On a branded content page, company page, or watching a video ad

Bounce rate: How fast people leave a branded content page or website after landing on it

Referrals: To the branded content page or website from other links and sources (e.g., influencer social media posts, shares, and emails)

Leads generated: From branded content downloads and event signups

Marketers can use early campaign performance data to 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 engage with the first round of branded ads.

LinkedIn’s online course goes deeper into helping businesses create, track, and measure B2B brand awareness.

2. Conduct brand lift surveys

Some ad and social media networks offer solutions to measure the brand lift (or increased awareness) from an ad campaign by surveying users before, during, and after a campaign launches.

Important brand lift survey metrics:

Ad recall: How many test group members recalled seeing an ad in the past seven days

Aided awareness: How aware members are of a brand or product

Product consideration: How likely members will consider a brand or product for purchase

Recommendation: How likely members are to recommend a brand for their next purchase

Brand familiarity: How familiar members are with a brand or product

Brand favorability: How favorably members view a brand or product

To learn how to conduct a brand lift study, refer to LinkedIn’s testing guide.

When marketing teams have captured enough data to understand their audience’s brand awareness and perceptions, they can make campaign adjustments or tweak their positioning, identity, values, and promise to build a stronger connection with target customers over time.

How to build brands with LinkedIn

Ultimately, branding is at the core of all business functions and is a powerful tool that helps marketers set their businesses apart from competitors. It grows consumers’ awareness, association, and recall of a product or service’s values and promises to boost market share and customer loyalty and foster sustainable business growth.

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions and the LinkedIn Audience Network help B2B brands grow awareness and extend their advertising reach and frequency online through campaign optimization and reporting tools. Business brands can also launch organic and paid content and ads to build engagement and brand awareness with over 850 million users worldwide, then track paid and viral engagement metrics via the Campaign Manager tool.

Additionally, LinkedIn offers Brand Lift Studies that allow marketers to track and measure the impact of awareness ads on a target customer’s brand recall, favorability, and purchase consideration.

Remember that branding your business is a long-term commitment and an essential investment in a B2B business’s future. To learn more about building brand awareness with LinkedIn, download our “Factsheet” and “Brand Playbook.”

Watch our five-step video on how to make branding campaigns to build a presence online.

Step 1

Define your objectives

Watch time: 1:01

Step 2

Build a compelling organic presence

Watch time: 1:40

Step 3

Target with Precision

Watch time: 1:44

Step 4

Choose your format mix

Watch time: 4:03

Step 5

Monitor KPIs and measure ROI

Watch time: 2:18

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Step 3
Step 4
Step 5

Watch Full Playlist.

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