Brand awareness is an intangible aspect of marketing whose importance is often underestimated. Yet, it can influence trust in your offerings, the ability to make sales or repeat purchases, the ability to maintain pricing strategies and generate healthier profit margins. LinkedIn is fast becoming an innovative channel to build and grow brand awareness for the smarter marketer.
What is Brand Awareness?
What is brand awareness and how can we raise it in today’s fragmented media landscape? Brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize and recall it afterwards. Think of it as being how recognizable you are in a crowded room and then remembered later.
Brand awareness can increase or decrease in line with how much you invest in advertising and marketing. Brands with high awareness are often said to be ‘trending,’ particularly if mentions on social media are the yardstick.
Establishing and then maintaining awareness of a brand is highly valuable when marketing your products or services, particularly in the early stages of a business. However, marketing activity that aims to increase brand awareness is equally suitable for established brands too.
However, effective branding goes beyond likes and logos. It includes what people associate with your company, such as values, personality and reputation. Companies such as Amazon and Apple are widely regarded as having strong brands. And strong brands can even have their value placed on the balance sheet.
The Importance of Brand Awareness
How well-developed your brand is can have a big impact on your business. The top five aspects are:
1. The first step in the customer journey: Customers need to know you exist otherwise they will never consider buying from you. Good brand awareness can put you at the ‘front of mind’ when customers are evaluating purchase options.
2. Builds trust and credibility: For years, people have placed their trust in companies that they know and like. There is a direct link between someone buying from you when they recognize your brand, as they’re more likely to perceive you as established, reliable and therefore lower risk.
3. Influences purchase decisions: In a crowded market, it can be hard to find points of differentiation. When features or price points are fairly even, customers lean towards brands they know and have had positive interactions with. That’s why delivering amazing customer service pays off in the long run.
4. Fosters loyalty: Apple is perhaps the best example of a brand that has fiercely loyal customers who purchase again and again and are willing to pay higher prices for their products.
5. Gives you a competitive edge: Standing out in a crowded market is hard. Brand awareness can help position and differentiate you from the competition.
Building Sustainable Brand Awareness in the Digital Age
Many companies choose to work with an external agency on brand building programs. This may include social channels, blogging and podcast content, influencer and partnership marketing, email campaigns, events and numerous other strategies to reach and engage with new customers.
And these agencies need to keep up with the trends. For example, where the market is seeing a decline in email open rates due to advancements in spam filters, it’s also seeing an increase in outreach via social channels; most noticeably LinkedIn.
There’s an undeniable trend towards email platforms adding LinkedIn outreach in their email workflows. And whilst there are many types of specialist agencies, there are relatively few that focus on the dynamic world of LinkedIn marketing.
Agencies that specialize in LinkedIn deliver services that span multiple specialisms from content and SEO to lead generation.
In addition to using LinkedIn for brand awareness, it can also play a crucial role in lead generation, and many companies are successfully using similar techniques to drive new business growth.
An innovative, cutting-edge technique using LinkedIn is fuelling the rise of hyper-targeted brand awareness campaigns, that can scale. Whilst it sounds like a contradiction in terms, LinkedIn offers unique advantages over other marketing channels. This has seen LinkedIn and the possibilities it offers start to move out of the niche and into mainstream marketing strategies.
Amplify your brand on LinkedIn
Let’s look at the top 6 reasons why LinkedIn has become established as a tool for achieving brand awareness:
- LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network.
- LinkedIn is self-selecting which means the audience has chosen to be on the platform.
- 1 billion members, many of which have either purchasing power or decision-making authority.
- They are located in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
- 48% of the members are active on the platform on a weekly basis, translating into nearly 500 million engaged people.
- LinkedIn offers detailed filtering and targeting tools, enabling campaigns to be tailored precisely according to a number of demographic criteria.
LinkedIn provides access to a large audience of business professionals, who are active on the platform. It offers unique characteristics compared to other marketing channels such as email marketing.
Using LinkedIn for brand awareness should be integrated into the marketing mix. It works best when amplifying and complementing existing efforts such as outbound email, Pay Per Click Advertising, SEO and more.
Want to leverage LinkedIn for powerful and effective brand awareness?
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Advantages of LinkedIn for Branding
Using LinkedIn to drive brand awareness employs familiar techniques that underpin successful traditional outreach campaigns. This includes features that combine to offer a superior channel for outreach:
- Precise targeting allows you to zero in on exactly the audience you are looking to reach. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has 35 Lead filters, 16 Account filters, and a Keywords filter for example.
- Many LinkedIn automation tools offer ‘mail merge’ style personalization tags that allow you to tailor the messaging according to a wide number of variables, leading to higher open and response rates.
- LinkedIn as a network is all about engagement and providing value rather than selling per se. This means people are naturally open to relevant communications.
- LinkedIn outreach tools feature automated or drip campaigns which ensure you can set up regular touchpoints with your audience, using minimal effort. This can extend to sophisticated multi-step communications for ongoing campaigns.
- You can test different approaches and see which works best for you, your product or service and your audience.
- Social proof works well, as recommendations and testimonials are readily obtained, and have high credibility on LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn automation tools allow you to measure what matters, track campaigns using detailed marketing analytics, and continually fine-tune campaigns to ensure optimum performance.
- LinkedIn offers an unmatched ability to scale your marketing campaigns at a relatively low cost. This leads to potentially higher ROI rates.
- Rapid results are possible, with the campaigns starting to deliver the desired brand awareness outcomes within the first week.
There is one more advantage of using LinkedIn for driving brand awareness. Unlike email marketing, LinkedIn outreach has almost 100% deliverability. This means you can be certain that your message has arrived in the inbox of your target audience.
However, it is not just companies that might want to build a strong brand. Individuals such as sole traders or entrepreneurs also benefit from increased levels of brand awareness. That makes LinkedIn with its cost-effective, quick result formula, an ideal marketing tool.
Practical Steps to Turn Connections into Greater Brand Awareness
Individuals on LinkedIn have a personal profile and like most social media platforms, you have connections, who are said to be ‘in your network’. If you want to add someone to your network, you can simply search for them by name and send them a connection request, which optionally includes a short note that you can personalize. If the person receiving the invite accepts, then you then become a ‘first-degree’ connection.
LinkedIn automation tools enable you to do all of these activities at scale and on autopilot. Irrespective of which LinkedIn automation tool you are using, the following approach applies:
1. Engage with a network
The goal is to increase the number of first connections in your network. You can use automated features to ‘warm up’ the audience by setting your LinkedIn automation tool to visit a profile. You can also automate actions such as following a profile.
2. Build the network
You can increase the number of connections you have by sending targeting connection requests. Beware, with limited characters in which to compose your message, you need to be creative in explaining why you want to connect with someone. Generally accepted best practice, is to avoid a sales pitch – the sole objective is to gain acceptance of the request.
3. Outreach with personalized messaging
Once you have a network of connections, you can automate the process of sending personalized messages. This is best achieved by providing information of value, highlighting new industry insights, or providing your own via information assets such as reports and relevant blogs.
4. Nurture for the long-term
By regularly communicating with your audience, over time the awareness of your brand and offerings increases. Again, there is no sales pitch. Instead, we are looking to build trust and engagement.
In many ways, LinkedIn represents just another communication channel, albeit with some specific advantages. And with the advent of AI for LinkedIn automation, aspects like messaging and campaign messaging are becoming even easier and quicker to adopt by everyone, not just the marketers among us.
Master the art of driving brand awareness on LinkedIn with our expert strategies!
Use Case: Building Brand Awareness in the Travel Industry
The problem: the client was a travel company who needed exposure with the goal to have their solution published on websites, magazines and newspapers.
The use of a LinkedIn automation tool helped them raise brand awareness in an original and highly effective way. This blended a number of tactics from content marketing and Public Relations to SEO and achieved impressive results on a small budget. To achieve this, a simple plan was followed:
- It created an information asset that was useful to journalists.
- Using LinkedIn filters, it identified relevant travel journalists in London and Barcelona and sent them a connection request. Note: there was no mention of selling, or asking for anything, it was simply about connecting to their network.
- Once connected, journalists were sent a message with a link to the information asset. Because it was designed to be informative, it was well received by the audience.
- This led to publications using the information to write articles and create other pieces of online content. The coverage generated backlinks to the client’s website, which had an SEO benefit.
- The resulting increase in website traffic directly raised awareness and additionally led to growth in sales.
Final thoughts: How LinkedIn has become a powerful branding tool
Whilst LinkedIn automation tools have been around for over a decade, it is increasingly being deployed within a wider marketing program by individuals and companies to successfully raise brand awareness and drive greater loyalty.
The beauty of the technology that underpins it, is that it be deployed at a relatively low cost and enables effective brand building on autopilot.
GrowthHackers is a seasoned LinkedIn marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners boost their brand’s visibility on LinkedIn, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
