A year after launching in Arabic, LinkedIn’s head of MENA marketing solutions, Jake Thomas, tells Eleanor Dickinson why brands should use the platform to help, not sell
Of all the techie corporate offices in Dubai, LinkedIn’s has to be the one most resembling a Silicon Valley playground. Based on the ninth floor of the Business Central Towers – the ones with the infuriatingly slow lifts – the ‘professional’ social network’s hub boasts the usual hot-seating, colourful walls and the obligatory cosy coffee space. Then there’s the pool table, the table football and the arcade. Whoever said social networking in suits had to be boring?
Sadly the head of MENA marketing solutions, Jake Thomas, has not invited me over to play video games. Instead we are discussing LinkedIn’s evolution from corporate Facebooking to major player on the Middle East and North Africa digital advertising landscape, one year on from the site’s Arabic content launch. “When I started at LinkedIn four years ago, it was a great opportunity to connect with people,” Thomas explains. “The content experience wasn’t where it is today. And now, depending who you talk to, it’s a professional network and it’s the world’s leading professional publishing platform.”
LinkedIn’s advertising – which includes sponsored banners and ‘native’ content marketing – has flourished over the past year, as shown through its latest revenue figures of $780 million. Of that, marketing solutions accounted for nearly 30 per cent. Within the MENA region all looks healthy, with user numbers jumping from five million when the office opened in 2012 to 17 million members in 2015. This dramatic growth is reflected in the office itself, which has grown from just six employees to more than 90 in those three years. “It’s been an exciting couple of years,” Thomas quips.
He adds: “When I think of our audience, we are addressed towards white- collar workers and in the UAE we have penetrated pretty highly. And in Qatar, which is very small, we have by our estimate the majority of ‘knowledge workers’. In Egypt, there is potential headroom there. Saudi, of the total population, what is the potential knowledge worker population? In the UAE, it is a relatively transient region, people coming in and out, but we have seen fairly quick adoption here. But I am expecting to see that across the region.”
The network’s partial success in the MENA region is undoubtedly underpinned by LinkedIn’s mobile set-up. Continuous revamps and a steadfast refusal to allow banners appear to have helped tap into a region heavily skewed towards smartphone usage. But what else differentiates LinkedIn from its social networking rivals is its selectiveness of just who gets to advertise. As Thomas puts it: “Not to be glib but you’re not going to necessarily see fizzy drinks, butter and jeans advertised on LinkedIn in a simple way. The mindset at LinkedIn tends to be golden-orientated and aspirational – you tend to be leaning forward, trying to achieve something.
“We have a focus towards B2B and what I call high-consideration business- to- consumer, so things with long sale cycles and things that tend to be expensive,” he says. “When you think of the type of brands on LinkedIn, we work very closely with brands to help them engage with our audience and the way to do that is by providing utility and by being helpful – so the idea of not selling but helping. We tend to work with brands who provide an experience, which is a little bit different than just simply saying ‘buy this now’. That’s a really interesting mindset for a brand. And brands globally have started to realise that if you can tap into a goal- orientated mindset by helping them, the results are super, super powerful.” Asked to rattle off a list of big names, it becomes apparent that these ‘helpful’ brands are mostly banks.
But what seems incongruous about LinkedIn’s business model is that – in contrast to other social networking platforms – brands are able to send content directly to users’ inboxes, even on mobile. For a company that prides itself on its carefully selected clientele, such a seemingly intrusive methodology seems somewhat surprising. However, Thomas is adamant that the platform is not resorting to spam tactics. “We’re hugely protective of our members’ inboxes,” he says. “We ensure everything goes through LinkedIn so it’s not necessar- ily something they can do without involving us. We ensure our members only receive one commercial mail in a 60-day period, which hugely limits brands to get into the inbox, so those communications stay highly valuable.”
He adds: “People are bombarded with thousands of messages per day – brands have to earn the right to engage with them now. That should be the mindset in this region, to acquire customers through actually proving you can help them.”