Bringing digital marketing to the forefront
CBRE is a commercial real estate services and investment firm that helps investors, owners, and occupants solve their most demanding real estate challenges. Employing more than 75,000 people, and serving customers in more than 100 countries, CBRE is the largest professional services company of its kind. In the past, CBRE primarily relied on traditional communication channels, like print and out-of-home advertising, to reach audiences. But over the past four years, the marketing team has undergone a massive transformation. “Digital marketing has become our core strategy,” says Paul Suchman, Global Chief Marketing Officer. “Today, up to 75% of our marketing investment is in digital and social media.” Although CBRE is primarily a B2B service provider, their passion for the cities where they do business led them to create the annual Urban Photographer of the Year (UPOTY) competition, which challenges professional and amateur photographers to capture the essence of the urban environment. While the CBRE team had previously used digital marketing channels to promote the UPOTY program, they felt they could be doing more to reach and engage creative audiences, and sought to augment their strategy with a more targeted and measurable digital channel.
A new channel for a new audience
The LinkedIn platform was already a key ingredient in CBRE’s go-to-market strategy, as they had successfully used Sponsored Content to promote branded material, research, and thought-leadership pieces to their core B2B business audience. But this would be their first time using LinkedIn as a platform to promote UPOTY and target a more consumer oriented audience. “We knew that LinkedIn could play an interesting role in helping us connect with photographers around the world, but we didn’t know which of their solutions would necessarily work best,” says Teresa Bosso, Global Team Marketing Manager. “After discussions with LinkedIn about Sponsored InMail and its capabilities for hypertargeting and one-to-one communications, however, it became the smart choice.”
Precisely targeting a highly active audience
With a primary goal of increasing contest entries overall, CBRE’s marketing team knew they needed to target not only professional photographers but hobbyists as well. The combination of LinkedIn’s wide-reaching network and Sponsored InMail’s demographic and interest-based targeting filters gave them direct access to both audiences. Sponsored InMail also gave CBRE the confidence that their messages would be received by active and engaged audiences that would be more likely to enter the contest. “Because Sponsored InMail is only delivered to recipients who are online and active on LinkedIn, we knew that our messages weren’t getting missed,” says Bosso. “There was a receptive audience on the other end, reading and responding to our communications.”
A human-to-human marketing platform
To best leverage the platform, CBRE partnered with media agency m/SIX to create content that would speak directly to their photographer audience, using captivating imagery from previous UPOTY contests to create a visually rich and arresting campaign. Samantha Grossman, Manager of Media Strategy and Planning at m/SIX, says, “When it comes to social channels like LinkedIn, we’ve discovered that there’s a lot of value in tailoring your message to the specific interests and job titles of the various audience segments you’re targeting.” Using this strategy, the resulting communications from CBRE felt like one-to-one conversations, not mass email blasts, with CBRE taking a personal interest in the work of individual photographers. Suchman believes that Sponsored InMail’s hypertargeting capability was particularly instrumental in building strong connections with their audience. “LinkedIn connects us very specifically to the people we want to have a conversation with,” says Suchman. “We no longer see the platform as B2B or B2C. It’s more like human-to-human.”
Exceeding expectations and benchmarks
CBRE’s 2016 Urban Photographer of the Year competition was a record-breaking year, receiving more than 29,000 entries (a 41% increase from 2015). This far exceeded previous efforts, a result that CBRE believes was due in large part to the effectiveness of their LinkedIn campaign. “Sponsored InMail produced a significant amount of qualified web traffic compared to other paid media channels,” says Bosso. “When people visited our site by way of Sponsored InMail, they had a very high probability of entering the competition from there.” CBRE also surpassed LinkedIn benchmarks, with an open rate of 54% and a click-through rate (CTR) of 28%. “At the end of the day, it’s all about engaging content plus hypertargeting,” says Suchman. “Getting the right content to the right audience in an engaging way is what drove our great open and response rates. It’s easy to ask for, and hard to deliver, but LinkedIn made it happen.”
