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LinkedIn hosts an ever-expanding member base of more than 590 million professionals who use the platform to network, research, and grow their careers. This mindset and intent makes LinkedIn a uniquely powerful social media channel for B2B marketers.

Offering a full suite of products to help companies gain relevant visibility and recognition with their most valuable audiences, LinkedIn has proven a sound branding investment, which is why 97% of B2B marketers utilize it for their content marketing efforts.

Consider these thought leadership statistics:

Oftentimes, marketers rely on guesswork and assumptions when analyzing audience traits. At least, they used to. Today you can become more sophisticated and purposeful in this process.

At LinkedIn, we offer a tool called Website Demographics, which enables you to learn about the people who visit your site, helpfully informing future campaigns. By adding an Insight Tag to your website, you can collect aggregate data around professional attributes of your visitors — job title, seniority, function, company, industry, location, etc. You can then use this information to set targeting parameters for future campaigns.

The most crucial step in launching an ABM approach is putting together the right list of target accounts. This is where a partnership with sales becomes extremely valuable. Reps know who the buyers are and how their functions connect to the decision process. With this information, you can build lookalikes and start developing a collection of accounts that profile similarly and offer serious potential.

Once you’ve created your contact list, you can upload it into Campaign Manager using the Account Targeting feature, which cross-references against 8 million Company Pages on LinkedIn and automatically generates a targeted segment.

As mentioned earlier, one of the key benefits of account-based marketing is the way it’s designed to establish deeper influence in buying committees. By studying target accounts and the content they share, you can learn what resonates with them and tailor your own marketing content accordingly. Take advantage of mutual connections to create new links to expand your brand’s presence within the organization.

ABM challenges marketers to think differently about their messaging because it must reach both far and wide within a single account. You’ll want to first create broader awareness across the company, because you probably don’t initially know exactly who will influence a deal. Then, as you gain more visibility and insight, you can put more resources behind tactics to specifically zero in on key people with later-stage messaging.

When one member of a committee reaches out to another and says, “Hey, should we take a look at this solution from Company X?” and the other responds, “Oh yeah, I know them, they share a lot of great content on LinkedIn,” that’s a sign you’re getting it right with brand awareness.

If your aim is to raise brand awareness at scale, then define your relevant audience in the broadest terms possible. LinkedIn targeting parameters like industry, job function or broad-ranging skills are ideal for this. When you use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to set the targeting parameters for your campaign, you’ll be given an estimate of your likely audience size. For building brand awareness, you should define an audience of at least 300,000 LinkedIn members, to enable you to reach your objectives cost-effectively. This will usually involve using a maximum of two targeting parameters, and the broad scope will often lead to lower competing bids.

As a marketer, these engagement rates and a low CPM provide you with valuable metrics to feed back to the business to show how your brand awareness campaign is performing. They may not track the impact of your activity all the way through to leads and conversions – but they give a useful indication of how efficiently you are filling the top of the demand generation funnel.

One powerful and easy way to qualify your audience for brand awareness campaigns is by taking advantage of LinkedIn’s Website Retargeting function. With the same Insight Tag used to set up Website Demographics, you can track visitors to your site and then later serve them ads on LinkedIn. Statistics show that the average click-through rate on retargeted ads is 10 times higher than a standard display ad.[5] This intuitively makes sense; familiarity matters, and past engagements with your company’s site signal some level of interest or intent.

Keep your targeted audience size within the suggested parameters for each product

Your LinkedIn Page (and related Showcase Pages) are your most important destinations for branding on LinkedIn. When someone is struck by an ad or piece of content you share on the platform, they’re likely to click on your business name and take a closer look. Additionally, LinkedIn Pages are easily discovered through search.

Your LinkedIn Page is basically your brand hub on LinkedIn. This will include a wealth of information about your core business. Showcase Pages are distinct offshoots that can be used to highlight key sub-brands or business initiatives. You can share company updates and Sponsored Content directly from these pages.

You can best leverage LinkedIn Pages and Showcase Pages for branding by maintaining an active posting cadence, delivering useful content for your audience, activating employee advocates, and mixing in the right amount of paid amplification. With this approach you can seek to drive engagement metrics such as clicks and comments, and even more importantly, you can increase the follower counts for these pages, building up your future audience.

Campaigns are time-bound marketing programs with limited durations. These are core staples of the discipline. But these days, an always-on approach is becoming more prevalent. This is a customer-centric mindset that involves making your brand discoverable and reachable at all times, throughout a buyer’s journey.

Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing frames the value of always-on: “We don’t control when we have access to the buyer; we don’t get to control when they have access to us. We need to be ready when they are ready, and ideally it’s not just when they want to learn about your product.”

B2B Decision Makers Are "Always On" For Business

Your budgeting approach will depend to some extent on your distribution approach. For campaigns, we recommend using a total budget to be spent within a defined time period. (You might also consider front-loading the campaign budget to gather insights and make adjustments.)

For always-on marketing, a consistent daily allotment might be best. Make a small proportion of your budget available for brand-building each month. You can spread this budget over a range of different brand assets, picking your top-performing organic posts to use as Sponsored Content, for example. Bidding on a cost per impressions (CPM) basis, where your competing bids will be lower, will help extend the reach of your budget as well.

Always keep a close eye on analytics. If the results aren’t where you want them, you may want to recalibrate your bidding, targeting or content.