Established in the year 1980, Lenovo is world’s renowned PC company that has over 35,000 employees and customers in more than 160 countries. Often familiarized with the tag line -‘For Those Who Do’, Lenovo is a $34 billion personal technology company.
After creating a stir in the field of PC companies, Lenovo entered the smartphones industry by launching its first Smartphone in the year 2010.
In the year 2013, Lenovo has been accredited with the following coveted titles:
- Lenovo became world’s #1 PC company
- Lenovo became world’s #3 Smartphone company
- Lenovo reached #329 in the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies
- Lenovo acquired CCE, a leading consumer electronic company in Brazil
Lenovo’s Business Objectives
Primarily, Lenovo wanted to expand its social media presence. However, the core business objectives of this world renowned PC company are enumerated below:
- To increase brand and product awareness.
- To strengthen the level of current content to connect to a larger audience base.
- To build a strong follower base on Lenovo’s LinkedIn’s Company Page.
- To serve as a test to define B2B social media initiative in future.
Approach/Strategy Adopted by Lenovo
Content is the focal point of almost all social media business strategies. ‘Content is the king’ –undoubtedly content acted as the king especially in the world of social media. Content is that binding element that strings together the company and the targeted audience. This exactly is what happened in case of Lenovo. LinkedIn acted as a perfect interface for Lenovo to interact especially with the IT professionals and reach out to the masses through its effective and impactful content. Lenovo’s social media strategy comprised of lucratively engaging and interesting content that engrossed consumers as well as business professionals.
Content shared with Lenovo’s targeted always turned out to be less. This was the perception of Rod Strother, Director of Digital and Social Centre of Excellence as he stated that “no matter how much content we generate, it never seems to be enough”. Moreover, to be able to reach out to quality customers as well as business professionals used LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates to expand its reach and evolve its customer engagement marketing strategy.
Lenovo wanted to use the response of those audiences who were reached through its Sponsored Updates on LinkedIn and leverage it in such a way so that its content strategy gets optimized and moves ahead, accordingly.
Results Achieved by Lenovo
Lenovo’s multi-dimensional content strategy gave a boost to its operations in terms of more quality customers and IT professionals’ interactions.
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates were an attempt to further engage Lenovo’s audience across 4 different themes:
- Brand
- Thought Leadership
- Products
- External Trends
The effects that were reflected by leveraging content marketing through LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates are enlisted as follows:
- Lenovo’s brand favourability increased to 17%
- The engagement rates as compared to display ad averages were quadrupled.
“The results have been really encouraging. We’re already looking at how we can extend this into other markets.”- Rod Strother, Director of Digital and Social Center for Excellence
Learnings
Lenovo wanted to expand its social media presence and LinkedIn turned out to be the ideal platform to reach out to the ideal customers and lure them towards its diversified line of products viz. PC’s, tablets and smartphones. Thus, Lenovo’s ultimate aim to count upon content marketing via LinkedIn’s sponsored updates resulted in the increase of brand favourability especially amongst IT buyers.