Read Me if You Want to Build Your Brand on LinkedIn
Editor's Note: This post, co-written by LinkedIn's Mandy Bowman, is the first of a three-part series inspired by ‘Read Me’, a trilogy of essential marketer’s guides to LinkedIn, by LinkedIn. The guides are categorised by marketing objectives — to build a stronger brand, advertise better, and drive more leads on LinkedIn — and are loaded with insider insights, tips and best practices that only LinkedIn can offer.
In a matter of months, the world as a whole has accelerated the shift onto the online space. There’s never been a more interesting time to be a B2B marketer, but it’s no less challenging. With limited resources on one hand, and the pressure to deliver results on the other, long-term brand marketing may be the furthest thing from your mind now. But it shouldn’t. It is precisely in times like these that businesses need a strong brand.
Your brand has the potential to become a powerful asset, one that is able to cushion the impact of economic fluctuations on the business, and contribute to greater market share and enviable pricing power when recovery comes. So unless survival is at immediate risk, brand marketing should never be placed on the backburner.
Even if you’re walking on a budget tightrope, there are plenty of ways to ramp up your brand presence organically by leveraging products like LinkedIn Pages, LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events.
This can help you save the time and effort of figuring out how to build an optimal brand marketing campaign by using this 5 step formula from us at LinkedIn.
We go into detail about this formula (and more) in the ‘Read Me’ series, but here’s a quick look:
Step 1. Define your objectives
Objectives are essential to any marketing campaign, but more so on LinkedIn because your choice of objectives will determine how your campaigns are optimised towards members most likely to take your desired action. We use past and predicted platform data to make that call.
Step 2. Build a compelling organic presence
The greater your organic reach, the more it can amplify your brand marketing efforts on LinkedIn. Start by creating a solid community on your LinkedIn Page and continue to engage your audience regularly by sharing great content. This drives followers, which gives you a great base to test and optimise different types of organic content. You can also choose to repurpose the best-performing pieces for targeted paid campaigns.
The ‘Read Me’ guide to building your brand also includes a handy checklist to optimise your LinkedIn Page and recommended use cases for LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events.
Step 3. Target with precision
LinkedIn targeting is unique because members are incentivised to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date. After defining your audience based on their professional attributes or uploading your contact, account or website visitor list, you can use Matched Audiences, Audience Expansion and Lookalike Audiences to quickly scale your reach before, during and after your campaign.
Step 4: Choose your ad format mix
LinkedIn ad formats are designed to work in harmony to help you achieve your objectives. In ‘Read Me’, we take a comprehensive look at all available ad formats on LinkedIn, then recommend tried-and-tested combinations that you can use to grow brand awareness efficiently and effectively.
Step 5: Monitor KPIs and measure ROI
The #1 barrier to brand building is the inability to see short-term results. It’s important to protect your brand investments from premature ROI, so in ‘Read Me’, we clarify the difference between KPIs and ROI and explain why a long-term measurement mindset is necessary. This is information that you can share with your stakeholders as well.
Finally, to wrap up, the guide ends with an overview that summarises what you need to build a stronger brand presence on LinkedIn.
Download the ‘Read Me’ series of essential marketer’s guides to LinkedIn, by LinkedIn now.
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