Outsourcing marketing for IT companies,
based on our 15 years of experience in the field
based on our 15 years of experience in the field
A business-oriented social network, a local analogue of LinkedIn, popular among the German-speaking segment of Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Audience – more than 22 million users.
The first and most important note is that Xing has several gradations of capabilities, and the advertising functionality for personal accounts and businesses differs significantly. In this article, I will review the freelancer account, which is available without additional business verification.
In general, the trend towards separating accounts is logical and is present in all major market players, starting with Adwords (Adwords Express) and Facebook (the "Promote" button is actually nothing more than one of the ways to launch advertising, allowing you to create and access a simplified account). In the RU space, this is Yandex.Business with its hidden Yandex.Direct account. We conducted a marketing audit of Xing, and we invite you to read about the results in our article.
No matter how popular a media platform is in a country, no matter how actively natives use it, most local social network solutions always have drawbacks, and Xing is no exception. When promoting through it in Germany, you can encounter two contradictions:
When opening an account in Xing, it immediately catches the eye that it is very similar to the account in LinkedIn. But in practice, the functionality is ten times less.
At first glance, everything is familiar, there is even the possibility of geotargeting with details. Either a region or a radius:
However, regions are only available for promotion in Germany. And in the radius settings, there is no option to set several radii at the same time. It will not be possible to launch one bundle for all million-plus cities.
Available geotargeting for advertising: Germany, Austria, Switzerland. The number of users in 2023 is 22 million, in the ratio: 18.849 million / 1.779 million / 1.420 million.
I liked that 6% of the audience belongs to the premium segment (owners, directors).
What is also surprising is that the social network, which is popular in Germany and Europe, but practically unknown in Russia and the CIS countries, has a search for companies in the RU segment for targeting:
I was not lazy and checked the hypothesis by selecting ALL RU companies available by letters of the alphabet. And what a disappointment - the function turned out to be inoperative (total target - less than 1k), which indicates poor moderation in local languages, which leads to "garbage" registrations:
I expanded the test to English and German, and it became obvious that in general this function is poorly used in promotion. If you enter all possible names of one of the Austrian companies that operates in 50+ countries of the world, then the audience sufficient for launching advertising is still not collected.
It is beneficial if the target setting is focused on a certain segment of companies by industry type (for example, construction), and at the top of the market in Germany:
However, this functionality complements (increases) the already ready-made targeting by industry.
Subjectively, having sorted through all the subsidiaries of GmbH of large construction companies and manually clicked on the target by industry, I immediately saw a loss of about 15% of the audience. This indicates that not all companies have been assigned industry statuses in the system or have been assigned inaccurately. Of course, it is unlikely that anyone will do manual assembly for advertising tests, but for serious "combat" advertising launches in Germany (and other German-speaking countries), manual selection of companies would not hurt.
Yes. However, the selection algorithm is unclear. The audience is being expanded, but to what size from the selected one - is not said. This, naturally, complicates promotion.
AI comes in two variations:
There are two bid options to choose from: for clicks and ad impressions (CPM). The minimum bid per click is 2 EUR, the minimum budget per day is 2 EUR. The CPM bid is at least 3 EUR, and accordingly, the minimum budget per day is 3 EUR.
Subjectively - expensive. On the other hand, LinkedIn tests will cost more. The minimum per click there is the same, but the minimum daily budget is 10 EUR (~300 EUR per month). That is, launching 10 tests per month in LinkedIn will cost 3k EUR, and in Xing you can cut your testing costs by 5 times. Therefore, in LinkedIn we most often use retargeting capabilities, bringing the main traffic from other systems where potential clients "sit".
The standard "bypass" of the click price is a deep hassle with creatives. That is, you need to break through 1.5-2.5% CTR, then you will buy a good volume of quality traffic for reasonable money. In other words, for more or less effective advertising to Germany in the Xing social network, you will have to test 5-10 creatives per week and re-upload, re-upload, re-upload... And what else can you do without AI? 😊
I was also surprised by the lack of the ability to select the language of the target audience (TA) in targeting, which, in fact, greatly complicates the launch of an advertising campaign in this social network. In order to advertise effectively, it is necessary to have a fully adapted funnel and a product in German (for promotion in Germany and German-speaking countries) or English.
There are bugs - for example, it does not allow all domains into advertising (and for reports by mail). And this is revealed at the last step of payment, although the domain passes the first step (URL check).
Due to the "rawness" of the advertising account, the network is still weakly filled with advertising. This means that there is no banner blindness in such a volume as in other networks. There is a chance to make a result in promotion to Germany with the help of relatively simple links.
The volume of cases in the network and videos on YouTube confirm this hypothesis - there are practically no advertisers there.
Xing can be used for HR functions, that is, for hiring using digital marketing tools. There is even auto-targeting for those who are looking for a job. For example, I see it as advisable to create a message funnel when the task is to find a certain homogeneous group of IT specialists (from 10-15 people), and allocate a budget of 30k for this. When scaling a team in a given location, this can be very relevant.
Based on the experience of working with other social networks, the following schemes will be working links in Xing:
Advertising bundles should be done in the hypersegmentation format. Let's say your product is a cloud CRM that can be adapted to different types of business, and you are going to advertise it in Germany. Here are examples of a set of bundles that I would recommend for testing.
There is retargeting in the social network, and product videos can also be driven through YouTube retargeting, when purchasing traffic from 3,000 visits per segment from Xing.
For ourselves, we uploaded several creatives using the method described above.
Promoting a company/product on the German market with the help of a popular professional community can be successful if you clearly understand the features of the site, use proven links and test hypotheses. And also take into account what advertising laws are in force in the country and how the mentality of local residents differs.
Read the rest of the article here.
