When doing business in Europe, chances are Germany is one of the countries you’re focusing on. The country is big, the economy is steady and it is home to a lot of manufacturing companies.
Online B2B marketing
When we are building brands and increasing sales for our clients in Europe, we pay close attention to connecting to the right target audiences, online and offline. Depending on our clients’ product or service, we like to use social channels, Google Ads, and country-specific websites and landing pages. Especially in a B2B setting, the natural choice when using social channels is LinkedIn; it’s well known, has a big member database and great targeting option. Did you know, however, that it is not the biggest social network in Germany?
XING - The biggest professional social network in Germany
XING is the German equivalent of LinkedIn and used by over 16 million people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For comparison; according to LinkedIn’s Advertising solutions, their member database in these countries totals 13.9 million people. This makes XING a very interesting channel to promote your brand online. Not only because of the reach, but also because of the target audience and targeting options.
Users
XING:
- ~14 million members in Germany
- ~1 million members in Austria
- ~1 million members in Switzerland
LinkedIn:
- ~9.6 million members in Germany
- ~1.4 million in Austria
- ~2.9 million in Switzerland
Who is on XING?
According to XING, 35% of the users has a University degree, 34% works in a company with 1-50 employees, and the majority of users (57%) is 50 years or older.
How can you use XING to connect to your audience?
If you’ve ever used LinkedIn, you know you can target a very specific audience. XING provides the same options. You can select your audience based on company industry, company size, but also based on job title, job seniority and job industry. Nice feature on XING is that you can also target a radius, which allows for more specific geotargeting then on LinkedIn.
How do you get started?
First of all, you need to set up your own personal profile, with the required information. After that, you can set up a business page or a company profile. These are two different things.
Business page
The purpose of the business page is for you to promote your business and products. You can set up several business pages for different products and services, if you’d like.
Company profile
The company profile is meant to give general information about your company and use it for employer branding purposes. If you want to do Ads and you want your company to be the sender, you need to have a company profile.
What are the advertising options?
After setting up your accounts, there are several options to promote your content:
1.XING Ads. You can promote your website, business page, event, company page, news or job position. This is the go-to option for smaller budgets
2.XING Video Ads. This is basically the same as the normal Ads, but now you can promote video content. Minimum budget: 5,000 euro.
3.Sponsored Articles. This will get your content on the XING News page and in the industry newsletters that are sent to 5 million people every day. Minimum budget: 10,000 euro.
4.Sponsored Mailings. This option allows you to send mailings to your desired target audience. Mailings are sent to XING members directly via the e-mail address linked to XING. That way you boost your reach and opening rate by reaching XING members outside of the platform. Minimum budget: 30,000 euro
When posting your Ads, you can choose to either post it on behalf of yourself, or on behalf of your company. You can select your company profile as the sender (so not the business page!)
Needless to say – make sure your ad content is in German.
For more information on the marketing solutions, check https://advertising.xing.com/
Our advice
The targeting options are robust, and can definitely be used to your advantage. For a successful approach, it is important to think through what people you wish to target, their location and what arguments to use to persuade them. From our experience, we prefer to have multiple advertisem*nts for multiple target audiences, so we can really know which score best.
Last but not least, keep in mind that the advertisem*nt are only the first step in the process of getting a person interested on your brand. It is very important for you to think about the steps that follow immediately after people click on your advertisem*nt. In our case, we like to work with country-specific websites or landing pages.
I hope this is helpful in getting more insight on how to use XING.
Do you need help with German online marketing? Send me an email at lars.ruiterkamp@eurodev.com.
