LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 850 million members globally. With its massive reach and wealth of professional data, LinkedIn presents a major opportunity for brands looking to understand how their marketing is impacting brand perception and consideration.
One way that brands can measure impact on LinkedIn is through brand lift studies. Brand lift studies aim to determine how much a company’s brand has been “lifted” in the minds of a target audience after being exposed to specific marketing messages or campaigns. By comparing exposed and control groups, brands can quantify uplift in metrics like brand awareness, consideration, favorability, and purchase intent.
What is a brand lift study?
A brand lift study is a type of marketing research that compares a control group who has not seen your marketing content against an exposed group who has seen your content. The goal is to measure the impact of the marketing exposure by comparing brand metrics between the two groups. Typical brand lift studies measure:
- Brand awareness – Has awareness of your brand increased?
- Brand favorability – Has favorability towards your brand improved?
- Message association – Do people associate your key messages with your brand?
- Consideration – Has consideration for purchasing your products or services increased?
By benchmarking these brand health metrics before and after exposure to your marketing materials, you can quantify the degree to which your campaigns are positively influencing brand perception.
Why do a brand lift study?
There are several key reasons companies invest in brand lift studies:
- Measure campaign effectiveness – Quantify how much a campaign impacted brand awareness, consideration, favorability
- Benchmark performance – Baseline metrics to compare future campaign performance against
- Identify winning strategies – Determine which messages/placements are most impactful
- Guide budget allocation – Double down on strategies that lift key brand metrics
- Refine targeting – Identify which audiences are most receptive to messaging
In short, brand lift studies help provide concrete data to optimize marketing strategies and media spend.
Can you conduct a brand lift study on LinkedIn?
Yes, LinkedIn provides powerful built-in capabilities to run brand lift studies directly on their platform. Here are some of the ways you can do brand lift research on LinkedIn:
LinkedIn Brand Lift
LinkedIn’s Brand Lift offering enables advertisers to measure the impact of their LinkedIn ads on brand metrics. Here’s how it works:
- A holdout group who is not exposed to your LinkedIn ads is benchmarked before the campaign starts
- Your LinkedIn campaign runs, reaching your target audience apart from the holdout group
- After the campaign concludes, brand surveys are sent to both the exposed audience and no-exposure holdout group
- Lift in brand metrics is calculated by comparing results between the two groups
This methodology isolates the impact of the LinkedIn advertising itself on brand lift, since the only difference between groups is ad exposure. Brand Lift can be used for both LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail campaigns.
Website Demographics
LinkedIn’s Website Demographics allow you to quantify the percentage of your website visitors coming from LinkedIn. You can retarget website visitors from LinkedIn to serve them branded content and then survey them later. This enables you to measure branding impact of your LinkedIn audience reaching your site.
Matched Audiences
Matched Audiences let you sync your LinkedIn ad exposure data with your own first-party data like emails or phone numbers. You can then survey your first-party data to compare branding lift between LinkedIn exposed vs non-exposed groups.
Website Custom Audiences
If you capture email addresses on your website, you can create a Website Custom Audience that allows you to remarket to site visitors on LinkedIn. You can then measure lift by surveying users who engaged with your site and your LinkedIn ads vs site-only users.
Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms allow visitors to fill out forms right within the LinkedIn interface to capture their contact info and attributes. You could serve Lead Gen Forms to your target audience and ask branding questions in the form. By comparing branding question data between Lead Gen Form completions from LinkedIn vs other channels, you can quantify LinkedIn’s brand lift impact.
Best practices for LinkedIn brand lift studies
Here are some best practices to follow when constructing a LinkedIn brand lift study:
- Use a meaningful holdout group – The holdout group should adequately represent your target audience for accurate lift measurement.
- Ask clear, focused brand lift questions – Limit questions to key brand metrics like awareness, consideration, etc.
- Survey both exposed and control groups – Capture both groups within 2-3 days of campaign end.
- Check for statistical significance – Ensure sample sizes are large enough for significant lift.
- Set appropriate frequency caps – Exposed group should see ads frequently enough to influence branding.
- Retarget your site visitors – Convert high-funnel awareness to lower-funnel branding lift.
- Pair withMatched Audiences – Match your ad exposure data to enriched first-party data.
Tips for successful LinkedIn brand lift campaigns
Here are some tips to drive branding success with your LinkedIn campaigns:
- Target the right personas – Create campaigns tailored to your highest-value buyer profiles.
- Feature key brand elements – Showcase your brand colors, fonts, logo, and defining visuals.
- Communicate core brand messages – Reinforce your primary branding themes and messages.
- Use LinkedIn analytics – Assess performance and optimize based on key LinkedIn metrics.
- Retarget engaged visitors – Remarket to prospects who already engaged with your content.
- Leverage LinkedIn content hubs – Associate your brand with owned Spotlights and Showcase Pages.
- Align with employee advocates – Tap into employees to extend branded reach on LinkedIn.
- Collaborate with influencers – Partner with LinkedIn publishers and influencers to expand branded content.
By tapping into LinkedIn’s unique reach and capabilities, brands can execute segmented campaigns that effectively communicate their branding and drive measurable lift in brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and favorability.
Conclusion
LinkedIn provides a variety of powerful tools to help brands quantify the impact of their marketing. By leveraging offerings like Brand Lift studies, Website Demographics, Matched Audiences, and more, brands can accurately assess how well their LinkedIn campaigns are lifting key brand health metrics.
The ability to target professional audiences in a trusted business context gives LinkedIn significant potential to influence B2B branding. With the right messaging and measurement strategy, brands can definitively determine how much of a difference LinkedIn is making for building brand equity.