The Brief
A Japanese hospital bed manufacturer with a strong domestic track record wanted into Europe. The product was solid. The problem was that European procurement managers research vendors online before they'll take a meeting, and this company had nothing to find. No LinkedIn page. No executive profiles.
The CEO had presented at two MedTech conferences in Germany but never followed up with content afterward. No posts, no engagement, nothing. Sales team had been emailing hospital procurement offices for months. Open rates were basically zero.
Our Strategy
We started with the CEO. He did not see himself as a content creator and said so more than once. We reframed it: you already give presentations at conferences, LinkedIn is where those presentations keep working after you leave the building. That got through.
His first posts covered what procurement teams actually worry about. EU bed safety standards. Infection control requirements for hospital furniture. Total cost of ownership over a ten-year lifecycle. He wasn't selling beds. He was showing buyers he understood their world. An early post comparing safety certification timelines across four European countries got picked up by a German hospital supply trade account. That gave him the confidence to keep posting.
Company page went live the same week. Content was built for specific readers: procurement managers, equipment distributors, healthcare facility architects. We cut anything that looked like generic company news. Every post was structured around a question a buyer might actually search for.
LinkedIn Ads filled the gap between visibility and pipeline. Sponsored content targeted procurement decision-makers at hospitals with 200+ beds in Germany, France, and the UK. Offer was a product spec comparison sheet, low commitment but genuinely useful for someone in evaluation mode.
One adjustment mid-campaign: UK ads underperformed. Click-through was about half of Germany and France. We reworked the creative to lead with NHS-compatible certifications and the numbers improved over the following two weeks. Not dramatically, the UK stayed the weakest of the three markets, but it got to a point where the cost per lead made sense.
The Result
Nine product demonstrations booked in the first quarter. That was the number the client brought up on every call. Behind it: 1,800 followers on the CEO's profile, 2.9% engagement rate, 650 company page followers. Ads produced 74 qualified leads at $52 per lead across three markets. Germany carried most of the volume. France performed well on engagement but converted slower. UK was acceptable, not great.