Building a brand following is like getting the right mix of people to come to a party. You know your targets are out there and are waiting for you to invite them over – and you also know that once they’ve accepted your invitation, you need to keep them entertained and engaged. At HP, we have the same challenge: We need to attract and nurture our potential brand followers in places where they’re already congregating and interacting online.
It’s clear to us that LinkedIn is where our most important potential brand champions – the people who make multimillion-dollar decisions about IT purchases – are actively sharing business ideas with each other. With this knowledge in hand, we partnered with LinkedIn to connect with this audience and bring them together as a community, while we share our innovations in enterprise technology and listen to their ideas as well.
The first steps: Building out our LinkedIn Company Page, thanks to new features that let us highlight our “Make It Matter” brand campaign. We used Targeted Status Updates to send fresh news to specific groups of our followers – for instance, news about SMB products to people at smaller companies.
Once we attracted more followers, we worked on developing the crucial two-way dialogue we need to understand what drives brand loyalty. For instance, we can ask our Company Page followers about their hot-button IT issues for 2013, and we can turn the responses into a blog post. We’re also gaining real-time feedback that we can use in product development and marketing campaigns down the road.
This approach is working: Our followers are highly engaged, not just in sharing and linking to our content, but in offering thoughtful, genuine comments. They’re responding well to the customized messages that LinkedIn lets us deliver to them, and they’re much more likely to recommend HP solutions. It’s been exciting to watch our community grow and engage with each other. To find out how we’ve significantly grown our followers and encourage engagement, download the full story.
