Recently, we’ve discussed 5 effective ways of promoting your business through LinkedIn. Today, we’ll dig a bit deeper and learn about other methods that will help you increase your brand awareness on an international level. If you want to know how to create targeted ads and advertise your products in different languages via LinkedIn, then this article is for you.
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Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a social media platform that puts professionals and businesses together. It allows for an easy and open discussion, sharing of knowledge, exchanging of ideas, and promoting own products and services. Unlike other social media networks, LinkedIn has a more formal tone to it, which results in the type of users that it attracts. The majority of LinkedIn users are over 25 years old and have graduated from college.
Moreover, LinkedIn is one of the most frequently visited websites on the Internet. This means that any information you may put about your business on your LinkedIn profile, has a high chance of reaching a high rank in search engine results. Through this, you get a chance to showcase your products and services, and generate valuable traffic on your own website.
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1. Sponsored ads and updates
Thanks to sponsored ads and updates you can easily reach out to wider audiences with your own products and services. This feature allows you to get in touch with people who have not yet had the chance to get to know your brand, and will in turn raise your brand awareness. On top of that, it’s great for maintaining relationships with your current clients, business partners, and people who may generally be interested in what you have to say. Also, through these tools, you can attract new leads regardless of which language they use or what location they are in.
To create a sponsored ad or update you have to log in to your LinkedIn account and go to the following page:
After clicking ‘Get Started’, you’ll get to choose whether you wish to create an entirely new ad (consisting of text, images, or video) or if you want to promote one of your previously posted updates.
Once you get to choose which method of promotion you prefer to use, you’re also able to adjust the following settings:
- Ad format
- Text
- Video or image
- Ad orientation and design
- URL of your landing page
- Language
For each of your sponsored ads you can run an A/B Test and create up to 15 different versions of your ads. Through this you can compare the different formats and content and see what works best for your target audience. With this information, you’ll be get the chance to optimize your future campaigns to achieve even better results.
Once you’ve personalized your ad or update, you can choose to whom it will be presented. Your message will be targeted specifically to the people you choose, based on the following data:
- Country
- Industry
- Company
- School
- Job position
- Skills
- Group
- Gender
- Age
In other words, you have full control over what type of message you will present and exactly who will it be presented to.
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2. Your company profile
Through creating your company profile on LinkedIn you can present your brand, post job offers, or even introduce the team of people who stands behind your business. What you have to do is to simply fill in the necessary fields with text, images, and hyperlinks.
What’s more, every LinkedIn user can select a default language for their profile and add secondary languages that will be presented to people who have it as their first language. Should a visitor of your page use a completely different language to the ones you offer they will be simply presented with the default one.
Thanks to this feature, you can adjust the name and the description of your business based on who and where gets to see it.
In order to create different language versions of your company page, log in to your account, go to page settings, and select to optimize the page for different languages.
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Application
Let’s assume that you are a producer of different kinds of rubber seals and wish to promote your products to companies that manufacture cars and agricultural machinery in Europe.
From your research you’ve found that the target audience you’re after is in Germany, France, and Italy.
What should you do?
Step 1
You know all about how important it is to adapt your offer to your customers and and that you should treat clients individually. In order to do so, you should start off by making sure that both your website, promotional materials, and sales team are ready to take good care of international clients whose first language isn’t English.
Once that is secured, you can go on to the next step, which is to start your promotional campaign using one of the many available channels, e.g. LinkedIn.
Step 2
When starting with LinkedIn you should begin by creating a company page for your brand and preparing different language versions for the countries that you wish to do business in. This way
you’ll make sure that individual customers’ needs are taken into consideration and a language barrier is no obstacle for them or you.
Having filled in the necessary fields in English, German, French, and Italian you can proceed to the most important element of this process i.e. creating ads.
Step 3
By going to this page you can create a sponsored ad or an update. Simply select the appropriate method and fill out the text, images, possibly video ,and select the language your current ad will be running in. This will have an impact on how many people from your chosen audience will get to see your ad.
Step 4
Here you can choose the right target audience for your ad. You can select people e.g. from a particular company, industry or a specific job position. In our example we’ve selected people from Germany who work in agriculture, engineering, and automotive manufacturing, and have specific roles in their companies. Based on the selected conditions, the total number of people who we can presented the ad to is 22,493.
Step 5
The last step that you’ll need to take is to set your budget, advertising model, and how long your campaign will be running for.
The available payment models are:
- CPM – for every 1000 views of your ad
- PPC – for every click on your ad
You can also add an additional feature offered by LinkedIn, which is to place a lead bar on top of your website through which your visitors will be able to send you a request for contact.
Step 6
Once you have gone through all these steps all you’ll have to do is to fill in the billing information and observe how your ad is performing.
You’ll have to repeat Steps 3-6 for every different language that you wish to use in your campaign. Simply change the ad language, use the right copy, URLs, images, and select the right target audience.
LinkedIn sponsored ads and updates will allow you to increase your brand awareness and reach out to audiences regardless of their location or the language that they use. Of course, there are other tactics and methods that you can use aside from adjusting your profile and running sponsored ads. Some of them have already been covered in our previous post. As for others, we will be discussing them shortly on our blog so stay tuned and don’t miss any updates!
