The chances are high that you’re already familiar with LinkedIn and its potential. For those looking to do business abroad, the opportunities are almost endless. But while there are plenty of people on LinkedIn (575 million at the last count), precious few of them know how to unlock the platform’s true potential – as both a marketing and a networking tool.
So if you’re looking to get the best out of this enormous international network, there are a few things you ought to know.
Why LinkedIn?
If you take LinkedIn’s website seriously, then what you’ve got here is the world’s largest professional digital network. And whilst a lot of what you’ll see on the website can be fairly eye-rolling stuff, the capacity for it to be an invaluable networking tool, both locally and internationally, certainly can’t be sniffed at.
If you’re looking to expand your market overseas, then LinkedIn could well be one of your greatest assets.
The strength of LinkedIn is that it’s specifically designed for the kind of professional networking that’s essential in most day to day business practices. On Facebook and Twitter, you compete with everything from news to celebrity gossip with a few cat videos in between. On LinkedIn, everyone’s there for the same reasons and everyone knows what those reasons are: making connections, improving your professional network and ultimately, gaining more business.
For international businesses, it’s an especially valuable asset. As a digital platform, it allows you to connect with people from New York, Singapore or Shanghai with ease.
LinkedIn’s professional network isn’t just confined to the Anglosphere. The big potential markets that we’ve covered before, like France, Germany and India, all have high numbers of LinkedIn users, at 25 million, 12 million (including Austria and Switzerland) and a massive 50 million, respectively.
The potential to make connections in new markets continues to expand and LinkedIn now claims that it gains two new professional members every second.
An integrated LinkedIn strategy
A few months ago we spoke about the phenomenal success of Tesla’s digital marketing strategy. The most important part of that was the personal element of Elon Musk’s brand; time and time again we see people interact with character and personalities much better than they do with businesses and brands.
So if you can combine the benefits of both tactics, by merging brand and personality, then you’re in for a winning digital marketing strategy. LinkedIn provides a fantastic medium for this. While the platform allows you to create a LinkedIn page specifically for your business, we’re not sure that’s strictly the best approach on its own. Or rather, it doesn’t harness the full potential of LinkedIn.
Creating profiles for employees and even the CEO of your company, from which they can act as digital brand ambassadors, is a great way of embedding the benefits of personalised marketing into the opportunities presented by LinkedIn’s network.
How to create good LinkedIn content
The most important thing to remember here is that having a LinkedIn profile isn’t enough. There’s no point being in a network if you won’t interact with it. Creating connections is an important start to this – but the real potential comes in cultivating them. In short: create, post and share content that people want to engage with. Focus on developing content that informs people and offers genuine interest to your audience – keeping in mind that what’s interesting will vary depending on who your audience are and where they are.
LinkedIn allows for longer posts than your average social media platform – and its users are more likely to want to read them as well. This presents an opportunity to use your LinkedIn platform as something of a synthesis between a social media platform and a blog.
If you’ve got something interesting to say about what your company has done or a development in your sector, and you think people could benefit from a little inspiration, then this is precisely the platform to come to. Create content that offers real value and you have the potential to reach thousands of people around the world.
It can often be pretty difficult to come up with decent social content spontaneously – particularly if you’re a busy company with a lot of other things on your mind. So the trick is in the planning. Sit down with your colleagues, pool some ideas, create a content calendar and formulate a plan.
Make LinkedIn an integral part of your marketing strategy, rather than a carefree blogging exercise you run on the side – and the platform will reward you for it.
And if you’re looking to sell your services or product into foreign markets, then this tool that connects you with them directly will be invaluable. The trick here is in not just creating content, but in creating localised content; that which is tailored specifically to the needs and cultural context of the market you seek to target. We spoke about how important this localised attitude to content is when we discussed the phenomenal marketing strategy of Innocent Drinks.
So if you’re looking to sell to companies in France, Germany, India or elsewhere, then ensure you’ve got separate LinkedIn pages in their respective languages offering tailored content, specific to their local interests and audience. From there, the CEO and brand ambassador profiles can copy and share content at will, based on the companies, sectors and markets you wish to target.
If you want some inspiration for good quality content, then check out our blogs on some of the very best: Tesla, Bentley, John Lewis and General Electric. And remember, the team of language translation experts at Bubbles are always on hand to translate social media content for your different global markets. Get in touch today if you’d like to discuss a specific project.
