A common mistake from beginner marketers is confusing their businesses brand image with their brand identity. I get it. They sound similar and are connected concepts.
But they are not… Our brand identity is what we think our brand is and the brand image is what customers think our brand is. However, our brand identity does influence how our brand image is perceived.
This article explores what a brand identity, its importance and strategies a business can use to create their own brand identity.
Business owner at BYB Marketing.
I like to add value to businesses with their marketing. To help them be better.
Every since my introduction to marketing class during my degree, I had a keen interest in marketing. The psychology behind it.
I ended up doing master's degree in marketing.
I am now an experienced marketer, and I have become well-known locally as a Linkedin content creator, and as the organiser of the Linkedin Local Hamilton networking events.
https://brandyourselfbetter.com/
The power of branding in the twentieth century is obvious. Brands such as Google, Apple, Nike and McDonalds are globally recognisable and powerful, the only thing that sets them apart from their competitors is the unique connection and loyalty that consumers hold with them.
Interest in the theory of brand equity increased in the late 1980s with a concern that a shifting trend from businesses towards a short-term focus on finances could have a harmful long-term effect on their brand and marketing tactics. There was a realisation that brands are assets to a business, driving business performance over time.
Brand equity is the added or subtracted value given to a current or potential product or service, influenced by the brand. It is “the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand” (Keller, 1993). Consumers have a perception and desire that a brand will meet their promise of benefits. The higher the perception of value, the higher the premium customers are willing to pay.
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| Most people don’t think twice before purchasing Coca Cola |
An elevated level of positive brand equity requires cooperation between the tangible and intangible aspects of a product or service. The intangible aspects come from a customer’s subjective experiences with a brand, the brand’s uniqueness and personality and ability to stay relevant and build a relationship with loyal customers.
“Brands, in their ability to create choice, build trust and loyalty and drive a premium price.” (Interbrand, 2010)
Consumers gravitate toward products with great reputations. Brands with strong positive brand equity can generate a premium when compared to a generic equivalent. Customers are more willing to pay a higher price — even if they can get a comparable product or service from a competitor for less.
This is how Apple can charge so much for an iPhone when a comparable alternative can cost less than half the price, yet Apple’s legions of loyal fans will queue outside the store to buy the latest phone on release. If a customer attaches elevated levels of quality or status to a brand, they perceive it as being worth more than alternatives.
This price premium is not limited to consumer products; a study on industrial products (See Bendixena, Bukasaa, & Abratt, 2003) found that the leading industrial brand name could command a price premium of 6.8% over the average industrial brand and 14% over a new and unknown brand. Technical specialists were willing to pay a price premium of up to 26%.
Besides the benefits of being able to charge a premium price, there are numerous other benefits to having a brand with strong positive equity. Some of the benefits are as follows:
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| Brands are everywhere you look in big cities |
Over the years, there has been confusion and disagreement on how to best define measure brand equity. There have been multiple definitions, but they predominantly fit into two distinct categories: customer-based and financial.
“Customer-based brand equity is defined as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand.” (Keller, 1993)
Customer-based brand equity is the most popular conceptualisation of brand equity, introduced by prominent marketing academic Kevin Keller. He defined brand equity as attracting (or repulsing) consumers to (from) a product, generated by the ‘non-objective’ part of the product. It is the added value of a product in a customer’s mind. It is the influence brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of the brand.
Keller’s brand knowledge construct drives brand equity and is made up of three dimensions — brand awareness, brand image, and brand associations. Brand image is a customer’s perception of a product, service or brand. Brand awareness is a consumer’s ability to recognise a brand and recall how they have that knowledge. As you can see above, an individual’s brand knowledge is the combination of their subjective brand awareness and brand image. Brand image should not be confused with brand identity, which is controlled by the firm. Brand image is the customer’s perception of this identity.
See Keller’s brand awareness framework below.
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| Kevin Keller’s brand awareness model |
David Aaker is another notable marketing academic who modelled brand equity from the point of view of the customer. He believes recognition is the important driver of brand equity and identified four contributors to brand equity: perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand awareness and brand associations.
Variations of the dimensions the drivers of customer-based brand equity discussed in the literature include reputation, identity, personality, attitude, familiarity, commitment, trustworthiness, loyalty, and performance.
A common characteristic of both Keller’s and Aaker’s model of brand equity is brand associations. Brand associations are anything that creates a positive or negative feeling toward a brand. Marketing aims to create strong, favourable, and unique brand perceptions and associations with a brand that customers remember. It can be based on functional benefits of the product, but often focuses on connecting on an emotional level through a unique brand personality that reflects positive organisational values and social benefits. An individual’s usage experience also influences their brand associations, which is why tangible and intangible aspects of a brand’s products or services must align.
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| David Aaker’s brand equity model |
“High brand equity implies that customers have a lot of positive and strong associations related to the brand, perceive the brand is of high quality, and are loyal to the brand.” (Yoo, Donthu, & Lee, 2000)
One of the underlying functions of marketing in the 21st century is to form a relationship with customers. Creating a successful relationship contributes to the positive equity existing in a brand, as these customers like and trust you. Brand trust and loyalty strengthen consumers’ investment into the brand by reducing their uncertainty and vulnerability.
A strong brand “increases customers’ trust of invisible products, while helping them to better understand and visualise what they are buying.” (Berry, 2000)
Brand trust is the willingness of a customer to rely on a brand to meet their expectations of function utility. This requires time and experience between the two parties, but trust plays an important mediating role in the creation of equity and value in a brand.
Brand loyalty is a commitment from a customer to consume a preferred product or service consistently and repeatedly into the future, despite situational influences and the marketing efforts of competitors having the potential to cause switching behaviour. Customers that believe in the value of a brand often will not spend time appraising cheaper options with lower prices.
Companies can create brand equity by making products and services memorable, easily recognisable, and superior in quality and reliability. Marketing is a major driver of brand equity through differentiating products from competing brands. Marketing builds strong brand equity through influencing the brand associations held in a consumer’s mind. Enhance the strength of your brand by investing in advertising and resist often discounting products; as this has been shown to create negative brand equity for businesses, as customers are less willing to pay a premium price if they know it is often sold much cheaper.
“Brand equity is developed through enhanced perceived quality, brand loyalty, and brand awareness/associations; which cannot be either built or destroyed in the short run but can be created only in the long run through carefully designed marketing investments.” (Yoo, Donthu & Lee, 2000)
Create a personality for your brand expressed through your marketing mix. The connection a consumer feels with your brand’s personality can define your relationship with customers. Creativity helps develop a unique brand differentiated from competitors. Marketing communications should also be consistent in the long-term, from messages to the visual identity. The marketing mix should also always be relevant to the target customer and your brand image. Stay true to the brand.
The brand equity model below from Yoo, Donthu & Lee (2000) is a good illustration of how marketing contributes to the brand equity process.
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The second popular definition of brand equity is based on measuring the financial value of a brand. The value added to a product or service by its brand name compared to an unbranded alternative.
Marketers in the 1980s started to realise that certain brands offered considerable added value to products. They saw brand equity as a durable and sustainable asset to a business and wanted a way to estimate the unique value of each brand. One of the formulas introduced to estimate a brands value is by taking the value of the firm and subtracting the tangible assets and “measurable” intangible assets. The remaining value is the firm’s financial brand equity. This measure used at the macro (market) level, to put a monetary value on a brand for resale purposes. There are also measures for brand equity at a micro or product level, which allowed firms to observe the value of individual brands by isolating changes in brand equity by measuring its response after major marketing decisions.
As the financial method offered limited use to helping set marketing strategies to grow strong brands, researchers preferred the customer-based approach. The brand value was starting to be explored as a concept at around the same time, and researchers began to realise that taking a financial viewpoint to brand equity was confused the topic with brand value, and the two should be kept separate.
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| Brand equity can be measured as the financial value of a brand |
An uncomplicated way to separate the two is that brand equity what a brand does for a customer, while the brand value is what it does for the business. Brand value is the financial worth of the brand. Many marketing academics consider Interbrand to be the world’s most reputable brand valuator (see Chu & Keh, 2006), and each year they publish a list of the world’s most valuable brands.
There are three key components to Interbrand’s methodology for brand valuations:
· Analysing the financial performance of the products or services — the economic profit measured as “the after-tax operating profit of the brand, minus a charge for the capital used to generate the brand’s revenue and margins.”
· The role the brand plays in purchase decisions — the portion of the purchase decision attributable to the brand as opposed to other factors.
· The brand’s competitive strength — the ability of the brand to create loyalty and, therefore, sustainable demand and profit into the future
That is it for this week's blog. I hope you enjoyed this week’s content about brand equity. Make sure you keep creating quality marketing content around your brand to increase your brand equity!
See you next week,
Dan
Business owner at BYB Marketing.
I like to add value to businesses with their marketing. To help them be better.
Every since my introduction to marketing class during my degree, I had a keen interest in marketing. The psychology behind it.
I ended up doing master's degree in marketing.
I am now an experienced marketer, and I have become well-known locally as a Linkedin content creator, and as the organiser of the Linkedin Local Hamilton networking events.
https://brandyourselfbetter.com/
If you want to grow
your personal brand and increase awareness of what you do, you need to be
posting content on LinkedIn. I do not believe there is a better platform for
growing a professional personal brand. Sure, you may not have the reach of
high-level influencers on YouTube or Instagram; but for the average person, you
are far more likely to be able to grow an audience on LinkedIn.
If you are not
already, Start posting original content. Focus on what comes easy to you, do
not just do something because some ‘LinkedIn video guru’ is telling you that
you “MUST be doing videos!”. If you are good at writing and not comfortable on
camera, just focus on writing interesting content. If you are a natural on camera
and not that good at writing, post video content. Just start posting content
that aligns with your personal brand and what you are trying to achieve.
Different forms of
content have their advantages and disadvantages, and people generally have a
preferred type of content - so you will never cater to everybody. I do not
watch a lot of videos myself, but I like to read interesting articles. Create
content that you think your target audiences is going to be interested in.
Think from their point of view — what would they like to learn or what would
entertain them?
Articles do not get
much of a push on LinkedIn anymore. It can feel like a lot of effort for little
reward. But if you are already blogging and producing long-form content, there
is no reason you should not repurpose it as LinkedIn articles. You are unlikely
to get too many views (Mine usually get less than 100 views compared to
2500–5000 views on my average post), but if people are checking your profile
out it can increase your credibility to have a few well-written and informative
articles on there that position you as an expert in your industry.
It is also
important to post any content directly to LinkedIn instead of posting any
links. The algorithm does not like it if you send people away, and that piece
of content will be penalised. Hail the almighty LinkedIn algorithm! If you must
post a link to external content, do it in the comments instead of the main
post.
One of the biggest
unwritten rules of LinkedIn is to engage in the content of other people as well
as your own. Comment on content relevant to your brand, whether it is your
personal brand or business brand.
The LinkedIn
algorithm favours those who engage. If you like or comment on somebody else’s
post, they are then more likely to see your content. The algorithm is more
likely to send your content into their feed. LinkedIn will assume that you know
each other and that your content is also relevant to them. If you do not engage
in anybody else’ content, they are unlikely to see yours. You could have
high-quality content, but this does not matter if nobody sees it.
I have come to
realise the importance of this over the last few years of using LinkedIn. If I
am busy with work, and do not spend much time on the platform browsing content
and engaging for a few weeks, I notice that there is a reduction in my reach.
Fewer people see my posts. If I spend a couple of weeks of commenting and
liking a lot more content, it will bounce back to previous levels.
As well as putting your content out to more people, writing well-articulated comments helps builds your reputation as a thought-leader, and more people will connect with you and find you credible to do business with. This will help you to start building a community around your personal brand. LinkedIn is full of people like you who want to connect and use LinkedIn for mutual benefit, but most of all to have conversations. It is social media. Also, it might seem obvious, but reply to comments on your post — do not just leave them hanging! They may never comment again.
Connect with people
and form professional relationships. The more people you connect with means the
bigger your network becomes, so theoretically the more potential opportunities
of somebody seeing your content who might find it valuable. As well as being a
content marketing platform, I believe people should think of LinkedIn as a
relationship-building platform.
LinkedIn allows you
to connect your email address book with your LinkedIn account. So first, send
an invitation to connect with past clients, friends, and colleagues.
I suggest
connecting with many people locally and with relevance to your industry. Even
if their competitors or people in similar roles, this means they will have an
interest in your content and may engage with you. If you are going to try and
create a community around your brand you need to be visible. It is extremely
hard to get your message out there if your network is only a few hundred
people. I recommend trying and connect with at least 1000 people.
I have over 6000 connections, and when I first started using LinkedIn for my business, I was aggressive with building my network. I would connect with anybody in my area with more than 50 mutual connections. I assumed that if we have that many mutual connections then they likely to accept my request to connect. LinkedIn is not like Facebook where most people only have a few hundred friends; many people on LinkedIn have an open mind toward connecting with anyone, regardless of whether you have or will ever meet.
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| Connect! |
You can send a
little connection notes to increase your chance of them connecting. To be
honest, sending notes to people that is not something I did a lot of when I
first started building my connections up. It was about volume, and LinkedIn
makes it easy to quickly send requests on mass to people they think are
relevant. I know a lot of LinkedIn ’gurus’ would tell me off for this. But I
figured that if people took offence me sending a request to connect without a
personal note, and refused to connect for this reason, then they are probably
unlikely to engage in any content anyway. It seems a bit dramatic.
If people send a
note to me with a request to connect, I will try and respond to most and say
thanks for connecting. I highly recommend not selling to people when you first connect, without first
establishing a relationship and credibility. If the first thing a person does
when they connect tries to sell me something, then I typically will not respond
to that kind of message. That's not the LinkedIn way.
Try and connect
with “influencers” too. If they have a large audience, chances are it is
because they have a large network. They must have an open mind towards
connecting with people. They realise the importance. Do not assume they will
not accept if you do not have a big audience. If they then engage in your
content, it helps push it out to a bigger audience and increases your
credibility.
Before you start
creating random content with no purpose, it is important to define exactly
what you are trying to achieve and who your targeting with your content. Then
create content centred around this strategy. There are a lot of people who use
LinkedIn to have random conversations or talk about their families as they
would on Facebook. You wonder what they are trying to achieve, and whether they
care about attracting new clients, or if what they do on LinkedIn has an
influence on their career. If your main reason for using LinkedIn is to build
your professional reputation for your career, then you need a direction and a
focus.
Create content that
is of interest to your target audience. Follow and connect with people who
already have a large following, with a similar target audience to your own. You
can get ideas for what kind of content to produce and share yourself, but also
to start engaging in their content to increase your brand awareness with more
of your target audience through having conversations.
It is also important to connect with people in your target audience. Some people with more of a sales mindset will tell you to send messages to these people etc but I’m from the perspective that if you start providing value in your content they will start engaging with it and learn who you are and what you do anyway.
Do not let the
“likes” and engagement of other users discourage you to focus too much on
metrics. A lot of the time they are
meaningless. Somebody who spends 6 hours
a day on LinkedIn will have far higher engagement than somebody who spends 5
minutes a day on LinkedIn. That is just
the way the algorithm is wired.
Sure, you can use
likes a benchmark for your content. But
benchmark it against your own content, not other peoples’. If one of your posts
got ten likes, and you usually get 2 or 3, then try another similar post. If a certain style of post never gets any
likes, comments or any views, maybe ditch it and try something else. It is all a bit of trial and error.
Views is another way to benchmark, but again, is not absolute. Video views and article views are counted differently from post views, so do not let the low view counts discourage you. Typically, all my posts receive at least 1000 views, but video views can only be a few hundred, and articles less than 50.
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| LinkedIn video post |
Consistency is the key. Just keep posting content, regardless of whether you have people engaging. If it aligns with your purpose, then people will start to notice. Once you break over that barrier and start gaining engagement then it should consistently happen, if your content is interesting and valuable. You will slowly keep growing an audience as more people see it, and want to connect with you to see more of your content.
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| LinkedIn post about local city |
Make a point to
spend an hour or so daily if possible, to spend scrolling through your feed
liking and commenting on relevant content. Whether it is ‘leveraging’ (I do
hate this word, but you can do this in a way you are still providing value) the
networks of influencers and commenting on their content, or engaging in the
content of local connections, or content relevant to your industry (do this by
clicking on a hashtag to view content on that topic).
All of this will
start to get the LinkedIn algorithm working in your favour.
You cannot just put
random content out there and assume people are going to see it and engage in it.
There are a few different tactics you can use to maximise the chance of people
seeing your content.
As just discussed,
there is a mutual benefit of engaging in the content of other people. The
LinkedIn algorithm favours those who engage. You often see it when people start
posting content for the first time. If they have been regularly engaging in
other peoples' content over some time before posting themselves, then their
content often they get a huge push from the algorithm. They have already earned a
lot of LinkedIn algorithm brownie points.
Use relevant
hashtags in your content, but not too many. LinkedIn recommends using three. If a post does well,
it might start trending in a certain hashtag and go out to more people. As well
as this, people can find your content if they are looking through posts with
that hashtag. Aim for one broad hashtag such as #Marketing, use one
more niche hashtag such as #contentmarketing and
you can also use a unique personalised hashtag to help people find other posts
from you. I have one called #50weeksofmarketing.
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| Trending posts on LinkedIn |
In a post,
the maximum number of characters is 1200. Try and use as many of
them as possible. The algorithm gives more of a push to content that uses up
more characters, as its easier to identify as quality content. Try to add an
image to your written content, as more people are likely to notice your post
and stop and read it.
The LinkedIn
algorithm push posts out to a bigger audience if the initial
engagement is high. A post might initially only go out to 1–5% of your
connections and if nobody likes it or comments, it dies. However, if five or
ten people for example like it within the first 30 minutes, the algorithm
identifies it as a good piece of content that people want to engage in and
sends it out to a higher proportion of your connections.
The time of
the day you post can also influence how well a post does. If you
post between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., or 4 p.m. at 5 p.m. during
the week, this is usually when the highest number of people are browsing the
platform. Therefore, you have more chance of people seeing the content when you
first post it. In saying this, I posted
some of my popular content between 8 and 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning and
sometimes, 8-9 p.m. can work well.
People often have more time to browse after work hours as LinkedIn has
become more like Facebook. It is not
just a work thing anymore.
Many “influencers”
use engagement pods to make sure that their content gets this
initial push. They try and cheat the algorithm by posting a link to their
latest content in a private group and there is an obligation to like and
comment on one another’s posts. Most of these pods you have to pay for, and
does not guarantee the right people are going to see your content anyway; as
most of the people in these groups are on the other side of the globe, and
their network is the people most likely to see your post. Not your local
network.
It takes a lot of time
and effort to engage in all this random content (I imagine) and it also means
you do not learn what kind of content works best for you. What your sweet spot
is. There is no quality control, they
like everything. But hey, if you want an ego boost and pretend you are famous,
go for it.
7. Do not have
a sell first mindset
The biggest issue
that many people face who get little engagement on their LinkedIn content is
their sales mentality. Think of LinkedIn as a relationship-building platform
rather than a sales platform. I know the term customer relationships is often another way to describe a sales job, however, I believe too much of a sales mindset
harms your ability to build relationships.
People tend to switch
off from the content of people who keep trying to sell — we do it without
thinking. I talked about it in my article about persuasion knowledge. If
we do not have any need for a product or service RIGHT NOW, we are going to
have no interest. But we might have an interest in a “how-to” guide or quirky
story.
I have seen many
people post content about nothing else besides the products they sell or how
successful they are. Nobody engages in their content, and then they just end up
saying “LinkedIn doesn’t work…”
Being a real estate
agent for over four years, it is something I noticed often. The best real
estate agents have no idea what to do on LinkedIn because they have a sell
first mentality, and that does not work well on this platform. Nobody cares
about how many houses you sold, but they do care about what is happening in
their neighbourhood. That is why I stood out as an agent on this platform. If one of my ‘for sale’ or ‘sold’ post got 20
likes, that was a great outcome. Any of
my content about infrastructure or growth would tend to sit in the 50-150 likes
category, and obviously, a lot more people saw this content. And it still had a real estate feel. But I was not selling anything.
8. Provide
Value — Be Selfless
Instead of aiming
to sell something in your content, aim to create value to certain groups of
people on LinkedIn. Your target audience
– the people you are creating content for.
Focus your strategy
around providing value for people who could potentially be a customer one day.
You could do this by creating infographics, or a video showing how to do
something related to your profession. It does not always have to be
business-related. It could be an opinion-piece on local politics or sharing a
piece of news that makes people happy or excited.
Provide this value
to people selflessly and without the intention of doing things “just” to
leverage it. Do it for the sake of genuinely helping people, as if you have
this mindset, people will notice. This will establish trust. People love
authenticity and do business with people they like and trust. People start to
see through those who are consistently self-promoting themselves doing these
good-deeds, just put themselves in the spotlight.
You want to make
people smile, make them laugh, make them think deeper about something, help
them learn something or share a relevant news piece. Create content to educate and entertain
people. Pose thought-provoking questions. This kind of content is interesting
and provides value to people.
Think from the
perspective of your target audience. If
you do not know who your target audience is, create five buyer personas for the
types of people you are trying to reach.
Is it business owners? CEOs? Future members of staff? Once we understand
who our target audience is, it will be easier to think from their perspective
when creating content for them.
If you are
struggling for topics for content, use tools such as local news websites and
Google trends to find topics relevant to your industry to talk about. Use your
expertise to have a constructive conversation about the topic. Read my article about content marketing to get more tips.
9. Be Brave,
Original and Authentic
Do not be afraid to
be yourself. Honesty can polarise some people, but many other people will
respect you for it, even if they do not agree. It builds trust with people.
Speak your mind and be authentic to who you are and your beliefs but do it
constructively. People on LinkedIn have a pretty open mind towards people
expressing their opinion. It is not like Facebook, where trolls who just want
to pick a fight and abuse people, lurking in the comments.
If you are
authentic and speak your mind, this also means you will be original and stand
out amongst the crowd. Many people on LinkedIn will stand in the shadows a bit
and will not do anything too daring.
I would not
recommend trying to replicate the strategies of other people who have a large
following on the platform. Sure, take inspiration, but do not directly copy
everything they do. Chances are that they built their audience based being
unique and original, so that same strategy will not work for you. Stick to your
bread and butter.
Do not post all
kinds of random things that do not align with your personal brand and the image
you want to create. I centre my content strategy around being passionate about
my city, my networking events, marketing (before, real estate), and
fitness/sport as part of my personal brand because I am passionate and find it
easy to talk about. Occasionally I will say something political, but I try not
to too much, as it can be polarising to large groups of people. Save it for
when you want to take a stand and have something to say.
For example, this
recent post where I discussed the possibility of using a place in New Zealand called Queenstown, as a Quarantine town
(Quarantown), had over 25,000 views.
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| LinkedIn post |
Users of LinkedIn
like to connect with the “person”. Posts with selfies in them often do
surprisingly well. You might think, what is this, Instagram? But it is true. I
have never been comfortable taking photos of myself, so it is not something I
do a lot of. Instead, I will post a photo of a coffee meet up I went to.
Consider how you can incorporate your unique human element into your LinkedIn
content.
Grow a community
I think one of the
ultimate aims of using social media is to create a tribe and community around
your personal brand or business. If you can take your community offline, it
will be even stronger. However, do not try and make the community about you.
Instead, make it about a common cause and provide value through the community.
There is a huge ability on LinkedIn to build a local audience.
People are passionate about the city they live in. Just look at your local sports team and the passion their fans have. A way to establish your personal brand in the local market is to create content around relevant news in your local area. When I was a real estate agent, my posts about a house for sale might get 5 likes on average. A piece about the local real estate market might get 10 or 20 likes, where a post celebrating a new piece of local infrastructure often had over 100 likes.
Because I had
established local reach, this allowed me to set up LinkedIn
Local Hamilton, a local networking event that has become popular.
Now ten events in, I host them quarterly and around 1800 people have attended. Might
not sound like a huge amount, but 150–200 odd local businesspeople coming to a
networking event enjoying a drink creates a pretty cool atmosphere and people
love it.
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| Linkedin post - Linkedin local networking event |
When I started the
events, I just wanted to meet some more local people so I could sell their
house one day. I had no idea they would become so popular! Building my personal
brand around sharing content about my local city was probably the perfect
platform to launch the events, as I had a local audience. I had previously
aggressively connected with local LinkedIn users - I could only sell houses in
my city, so local geographic targeting was high up on my strategy list.
I have been doing
the events two and a half years now, but only created a LinkedIn page for the
event around ten months ago. I was quite hesitant because I knew it gave my
personal profile coverage and I did not want to risk losing any reach. Now, I
share a lot of the event content from an event page, and because of it, I think my personal
page has become less saturated with content. This is a good thing, as I have
not lost any reach and I can post more content focused around my business, which is marketing.
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| Linkedin business page metrics |
Organising an event like this also allows you to set a page for the event on your website, as well as a form up to take email details for an events database. This will help with SEO, increasing your brand awareness and gives you the ability to contact these people via email. Do not use it to spam people with email however you will lose credibility quickly. You can see the LinkedIn Local page I set up on my website here.
Read my article about building a brand community.
Business owner at BYB Marketing.
I like to add value to businesses with their marketing. To help them be better.
Every since my introduction to marketing class during my degree, I had a keen interest in marketing. The psychology behind it.
I ended up doing master's degree in marketing.
I am now an experienced marketer, and I have become well-known locally as a Linkedin content creator, and as the organiser of the Linkedin Local Hamilton networking events.
https://brandyourselfbetter.com/
LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for lead generation and increasing your brand awareness with your target market. Especially if you are B2B.
The potential on LinkedIn is huge…
This week’s article explores LinkedIn, and my learnings from the platform over the past ten years. I post a piece of content on LinkedIn most days, and my content averages over 50,000 views a month. I have over a hundred people a day check out my LinkedIn profile.
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| LinkedIn post analytics |
Part one will focus on improving your LinkedIn profile to be more captive to your target audience. You want to encourage them to read on and find out more about you.
LinkedIn is a business-focused social media website and mobile app that launched in 2003. The platform had a reputation of being your “Online CV” and for job seekers, but that has changed over the past few years. LinkedIn has seen consistent growth, and after reaching 10 million users in 2007, now has just under 700 million users in over 200 countries. That number has grown 100 million in the past two years. There must be something to it, right?
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| LinkedIn global users in 2020 |
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 and since then, the platform transformed into more of a Facebook-like platform. The algorithm moved away from pushing the content of high-profile users such as Bill Gates to millions of users, tweaking it to ensure people instead see content from people more relevant to them.
When I first started using LinkedIn around ten years ago, it was vastly different. Long-form content dominated the platform, along with groups. Fast forward to 2020, and long-form articles and groups are far less relevant. Articles no longer get much attention in the feed, and Spam killed the groups, so LinkedIn pushed them to the background.
Short-form written content (1200 characters maximum) and videos now dominate the platform. The introduction of native video on the platform was not until mid-2017. This was a game-changer for the new LinkedIn “influencer”. Before this, people had to post a link to an external video on YouTube.
The interface of the platform is now remarkably like Facebook. It even looks like Facebook. My 15-year-old son thought that LinkedIn was Facebook when I showed him a video a couple of months ago. When LinkedIn morphed into a “Facebook for professional people”, its popularity really took off.
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| History of LinkedIn. Source: officetimeline.com |
Business owner at BYB Marketing.
I like to add value to businesses with their marketing. To help them be better.
Every since my introduction to marketing class during my degree, I had a keen interest in marketing. The psychology behind it.
I ended up doing master's degree in marketing.
I am now an experienced marketer, and I have become well-known locally as a Linkedin content creator, and as the organiser of the Linkedin Local Hamilton networking events.
https://brandyourselfbetter.com/
