4 Keys to Building B2B Brand Awareness Online Get started creating content and brand messaging that resonates with customers and ultimately exceeds your marketing goals.

For many growing B2B companies, getting noticed and being recognized is a major hurdle to success. Standing out from the competition is no easy feat. Your branding and messaging need to be in front of customers wherever they spend time.

Smart business owners and their marketing managers either know or quickly discover that what's popular among consumer marketing tactics doesn't always apply to B2B. For example, if you're selling pet food, having your message next to videos of dancing cats might be just the context you need! But if you're selling payroll software, it's probably not going to resonate. B2B companies need to reach their key audience when they're ready to do business.

That's where LinkedIn Marketing Solutions comes in. With more than 756 million members across more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is a powerful business network with three professionals signing up every second to network, research, and grow their careers. Yes, every second.

Whether your goal is to grow brand awareness, increase your reach, gain more followers, or increase engagement and conversions, LinkedIn can help. Here are four ways B2B companies can leverage LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to grow their brands online.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn Page for organic growth.

Before you get started spreading the word about your brand, make sure your business's LinkedIn Page is ready for success. Companies with completed and active Pages see a 5x lift in Page views and a 7x lift in average impressions per follower.

In addition to making sure your Page includes your logo and is completely filled out with the appropriate profile information, it's important to have an active Page where you regularly post helpful content. One of the most effective types of content is thought leadership—pieces that provide valuable consultation, education, and tools. Demonstrating subject matter expertise and positioning your brand as a go-to resource for valuable information can go a long way in creating trust with potential B2B customers.

Companies that post weekly on LinkedIn see a 2x lift in engagement with their content. For inspiration, try tapping the Content Suggestions feature to discover trending topics and articles you can reshare or leverage for your own content strategy.

2. Reach your audience.

B2B business owners want to ensure that they are delivering relevant content to the right audiences (influencers, decision makers, and executives) at the right time. That's where audience targeting comes in.

Whether you're promoting your business with Sponsored Messaging, Text Ads, Dynamic Ads, etc., brands can target those messages to a specific audience using a host of profile-based attributes. These include job experience (title, function, etc.), company (industry, size, followers, etc.), demographics (age, gender), and more.

When it comes to engaging those professionals, Sponsored Messaging on LinkedIn drives double the open rates and double the engagement compared to traditional email marketing efforts. As a result, brands have seen a 33 percent increase in purchase intent resulting from ad exposure on LinkedIn, the company says.

The trick is to avoid targeting an audience that's too narrow. Today's buying committees are larger and more distributed than ever. LinkedIn recommends limiting promotions to two or three of the most relevant targeting options. LinkedIn enables you to reach millions of professionals across multiple touchpoints on its network of publishers.

3. Go deeper when you're ready.

Casting a wide net is effective for generating brand awareness. But at some point you'll want to drill even deeper into LinkedIn's targeting features to start converting. With LinkedIn's account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, the aim is to identify and engage accounts with a high degree of buying intention. In other words, the people your sales team are most interested in.

These days, purchasing decisions aren't made by one person, but rather a group of people with varying titles. That's why LinkedIn's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy targets multiple departments with personalized content for each. Overall, it's about marketing to accounts at the bottom of your marketing funnel rather than to individual contacts. Your content should provide a unique value proposition for each department within the company/account that influences a buying decision.

LinkedIn provides a useful guide for starting and running a successful ABM strategy here.

4. Measure performance and adjust your content mix for best results.

As with any successful marketing campaign, monitor short-term performance indicators like impressions, reach, engagement, and website visitors. You'll also want to measure the long-term return on your efforts, including total revenue (vs. costs) and customer satisfaction.

LinkedIn's Campaign Manager platform reports a wide range of metrics for every campaign. LinkedIn recommends letting your campaigns run for at least seven days before checking your campaign performance. After that, Campaign Manager can help you determine which audiences respond best to your content and ads and create new target audiences or direct ad spend to better-performing areas.

Understanding how your content—organic and paid-for—resonates with individuals and accounts will help you optimize and prove the long-term value of your brand marketing efforts.

Click here to learn more about how LinkedIn can help get the word out about your B2B brand today.