CONTEXT: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions (LMS) helps marketers target & reach over 900 million professionals around the world with ads, content and experiences. Going into the summer of 2022, the business had big ambitions. To succeed, we needed to redefine who and what we stand for in a way that transformed the way customers both think about and engage with us.

PROBLEM: We were little more than an afterthought to the marketers we needed to reach. Our unaided awareness of 8%* significantly lagged behind that of our digital advertising competitors, including Google (34%*), Youtube (23%*), Amazon (20%*), Twitter (12%*), and Meta (10%*).

OBJECTIVES:

Increase LMS’ unaided awareness.

Increase LMS’ brand consideration.

Strengthen brand perceptions of LMS’ leadership in B2B.

Drive strong digital engagement and campaign homepage visits.

THE INSIGHT: While B2B marketers help power half the world’s economy, the digital platforms they use most (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter) are designed with B2C in mind.

THE CREATIVE IDEA: Make B2B everything it can be.

The strategy was to make LMS stand out by repositioning LinkedIn as the place for B2B marketers. Prior to this campaign, LMS historically spoke to both B2B and high consideration B2C (finance, travel, auto, etc) audiences with its marketing. The resulting propositions did little to differentiate us from the category competition. By focusing exclusively on B2B, we were able to not only carve out a distinct space in the marketing world, but also build on our audiences existing perceptions of LinkedIn as a professional network. Moreover, the strategy connected directly to how marketers use LinkedIn’s unparalleled professional data to reach otherwise hard to find B2B buyers.

To bring the idea to life we started with a simple, but powerful graphic-driven campaign that helped poke at B2B marketing norms and clarify LinkedIn’s place in it as the platform that’s built for B2B.The global campaign and brand repositioning extended across the US, UK, India, Australia and Singapore.

Our ‘B2Brand building’ idea was designed to reach the right audience at moments that mattered, including:

Industry digital and print:The Drum, AdAge, Adweek, Entrepreneur, & WSJ

Marketer’s office elevators

At Dreamforce

At our industry defining event:B2Believe

Finally, we brought our campaign to the world’s biggest festival of creativity:Cannes. We created advertising, programming and experiences that changed the way the industry sees B2B, including a mainstage keynote presentation from LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky to a full-day B2B Leadership Forum session with 30 CMOs.We also helped make B2B everything it can be by launching the first ever Creative B2B Lion at the event.

Objective 1: Increase LMS’ unaided awareness.

Result: Drove increases in unaided awareness of 3%. During the same period, the majority of the competitive set was either flat or down in both markets.

Objective 2: Increase LMS’ brand consideration.

Result: Increased LMS’ US brand consideration by 2%*. During the same period, Google, YouTube, Amazon and Twitter all saw declines in the US.

Objective 3: Strengthen brand perceptions of LMS’ leadership in B2B.

Result: Increased perceptions of “Is an essential platform for B2B marketing” by 6%* in the US and UK 10%*. Increased perceptions of “Supports my needs as a B2B Marketer” by 7%* in the US and 9%* in the UK.

Objective 4: Drive strong digital engagement and homepage visits.

Result: Drove digital campaign CTR of .34%**, 64% above benchmark, contributing to 6.5 million** visits and 2 million** unique visitors to the campaign landing page.