Xing: What is it? Who’s on it? And how can I use it for my B2B marketing?
If you’re doing business or planning to do business in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, you will sooner or later come across Xing.
In a nutshell, Xing is the German equivalent to Linkedin. It’s an online business network platform that helps you connect with like-minded professionals, find new jobs and share knowledge and insights on your feed and in interest groups.
If Linkedin is the international globetrotter making connections around the world, Xing is the locally-oriented professional focusing on building a network in the German-speaking countries. People on Linkedin don’t expect to make international connections there, they expect to communicate in German.
At this point, Xing has a network of roughly 15 Million people in the DACH countries. It’s still the most popular business platform in Germany, however, Linkedin is slowly taking over the lead in Austria and Switzerland.
Why is this relevant for you?
If you’re a B2B company looking for decision-makers in German companies, Xing could be a way to reach these people.
Who is on Xing?
According to Xing, the majority of its users are experienced professionals, executives or people in a manager position. More than a third of have a university degree in the bag. IT, Finance and Trade Service providers seems to be the most common industry for Xing users to be a part of.
How can I use Xing for my B2B marketing in DACH?
As a company, you can set up two different types of profiles:
1 — Business profile
This option is ideal for employer branding, posting job ads and recruiting. You can create a hub for current and future employees by sharing your vision and mission, updates and job openings on this page. Even if you’re not planning on hiring people from Germany, you need a basic company profile in order to open up a business page.
2 — Business page
This page is more suitable for the generation of leads, brand awareness among specific target groups and it serves as a platform to communicate with customers and fans. Xing users can follow your business page and will get news and updates from your business directly in their newsfeed.
Can you simply set up a company profile on XING and run a couple of ads once in a while?
The short answer is, yes. However, you need to keep in mind that Xing is a social platform after all.
Think about Facebook. You can set up a profile there and run ads in minutes, but a lead might get suspicious if she clicks on your company’s page and you don’t have a single post in your feed. Most of the companies have content in their feed, but don’t post regularly. As with everything marketing, it depends which industry you’re in and for what purpose you want to use Xing.
That being said, you can run different kinds of Ads on Xing:
- Xing Ads (basic ads for news, products, content, events, groups, business page etc.) incl. videos
- Sponsored Articles (targeted ads in the Xing newsletter and industry newsletters) minimum budget: 10.000 Euro
- Sponsored Mailings (allows you to send direct emails to target group) minimum budget: 30.000 Euro
- Display Campaigns in different formats, minimum budget: 4000 Euros
As with all marketing channels, success is not guaranteed and if Xing is a suitable platform for you or not simply needs to be tried out.
However, I’ve been running campaigns on both, Xing and Linkedin, for a B2B online software and what I’ve seen is that the campaigns on Xing have been performing much better in terms of engagement and lead generation among Germans.
B2B Marketing in Germany with Xing
If you’re a B2B company doing business in Germany and want to attract new customers online, I suggest you should at least have a company profile and a business profile on Xing.
Whether you’re actively promoting or sharing organic content on this social network is up to your industry and your business objectives. Do you want to use Xing simply as a “business card”, or do you want it to become a marketing channel for active lead generation?
I hope this article shed a light on how you can use Xing for your marketing.
Need help with marketing in Germany? Drop me a line at tanja.elisabeth.lindner@gmail.com.
