Thought Leadership Content on LinkedIn: The Key to Efficient Growth in 2024

The era of the growth-at-all-costs strategy is over.

Companies push for profitability today instead of projecting it into the future.

Your budget and headcount have been reduced, but as a growth professional, you’re still struggling to hit your numbers.

In my work as a growth marketing consultant for B2B SaaS companies, I work with companies from Seed to Series C, which gives me a wealth of experience.

And my best secret to effective growth right now is right before your eyes every day on LinkedIn.

Today I’ll profile three success stories of founders who have leveraged thought leadership content to grow their businesses. Bring these examples to your company’s founders and head of marketing as a proof of concept and ask for buy-in and budget to start doing something similar.

Branded social media is dead

Unless you’re Wendy, no one gives a damn about your corporate-branded Twitter posts.

What people care about is what your founder has to say. To see proof of this, we can look outside the world of technology and venture-backed startups to one of the most successful companies ever.

A thought leadership content OG is not a SaaS founder; he is 93 years old and from Omaha, Nebraska. When Warren Buffet releases his annual letter to shareholders, it ends up on the front page of financial news around the world.

Everyone from savvy Wall Street investors to r/WallStreetBets scammers pores over every word in his letters to pick up a clue about his next investments.

Why is this? In the case of Warren Buffet, he is the most successful investor of our time. His success allows him to do so speak with authority.

Founders, senior leaders, and even individual entrepreneurs can also demonstrate thought leadership. Sharing insight into how you run your company and your perspective on today’s issues gives you a chance to build your authority.

But it all starts by consistently showing up on LinkedIn and sharing something interesting.

Personal brands are the future of social media, and founders and employees with strong personal brands will win in the world of efficient growth.

Let’s explore three success stories of how brands have leveraged thought leadership content to grow their business.

Warmly

Warmly reveal the people and companies who visit your site and automate personalized contact via email, LinkedIn and chat.

On the sales side, Warmly helps reps hit their sales quota by helping them know exactly when to reach out and what to say to stand out.

For marketers, it provides a way to unmask anonymous website visitors and automatically act on them to create sales opportunities.

Steal this tactic

In 2024 they made a bold move: their CEO announced that they would take the popular “build in public” marketing tactic for small-scale independent SaaS hackers to the extreme and share “100% of our metrics, numbers sales, video recordings of meetings, disagreements, ups and downs.”

Brands have to take bigger risks to stand out, and there’s nothing bigger or riskier than sharing your monthly revenue numbers, wins, and losses every day on a public platform like LinkedIn.

Massimo himself says it:

The sales orchestration space is more crowded than ever, and we’re a small startup going up against big giants like ZoomInfo, Drift, and Qualified.

They have bigger sales teams than me, bigger marketing teams than me, and I have less than 2 years of runway left to try to become profitable. I’m the loser.

I have to do something to bend the curve or be left in the dust.

But how did he behave?

The results

In the fourth quarter, Warmly spent less than $30,000 on marketing programs, of which $0 went to paid advertising.

However, their inbound demo requests have increased 8x since their announcement, accounting for nearly 80% of their total demo requests each month.

The graph they shared is in line with the usual trend of every fourth quarter that I have personally seen within a SaaS company. Typically, revenue drops like clockwork from October to December due to the holiday season and tight budgets. However, this tactic proves that it is possible to reverse the expected seasonality with the right bet.

Take away

While your company may not be willing or able to share as much transparency as Warmly, ask yourself what you could share to help you stand out.

Warmly’s CEO also has 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, which gave him a good audience size to start from (this number was probably lower at the time of the announcement), so if your CEO decided to do the same thing with just 500 followers, it probably won’t have the same effect.

Start making small bets now, so you have a larger audience to draw from when you want to make a big bet on LinkedIn.

Air

Air is a creative operations platform that frees creative teams from hours of work in their day by eliminating tedious tasks.

Disclosure: Air is one of my consulting clients and they gave me permission to use them as an example in this post 🙏

Its primary buyers are creative directors who work at a marketing agency or in-house at the brands I’ve listed above. These highly creative people are often forced to use software that wasn’t built for the creative process and doesn’t respond well to tired marketing campaigns.

Air is forced to develop interesting and engaging campaigns to attract the attention of the target audience and its team is structured to do this every quarter.

Steal this tactic

Air has a small but powerful marketing team that creates campaigns to generate interest and demand for their product among target audiences.

They primarily have four people who build and run these campaigns:

• An organic content manager, with the budget and freedom to do interesting things
• Two marketing managers
• Me, as a paid advertising consultant to run LinkedIn ads

A manifesto on creative operations

In collaboration with their CEO, the Air team wrote a physical book about Creative Ops and why it no longer works today.

They launched the book on their social media channels (primarily Instagram and LinkedIn via Shane’s account) and directed people to a custom landing page: https://air.inc/space

The book contains beautiful images and quotes that resonate with problems creative teams are having today, like this one:

This is just one example of Air’s marketing campaigns: They also hired influencer Kareem Rahma (over 213,000 followers on Instagram) as their company’s Chief Imagination Officer and helped their CEO earn the Top Voice badge on LinkedIn.

Results

Here’s what Shane said publicly about their efforts on LinkedIn.

I learned how our product works and how to improve it exceptionally quickly because LinkedIn is the only place on the Internet that can quickly expand a targeted network around your business.

For us it all started with some connection requests and some actual notes asking for advice…

Take away

You don’t need to share your revenue numbers publicly on LinkedIn to get the attention of your target audience.

Air Content works so well because their CEO is completely involved in the process and gives the content manager almost free rein to develop creative ideas.

So I can take their unique organic content and put some wind in my sails with paid ads. Air has some of the best performing Thought Leader ads in my entire client portfolio based on CTRs and they have the lowest CPLs.

All I’m doing is repurposing the already great content their team created.

June.so

June.so is a product analytics platform that allows B2B SaaS companies to easily and quickly extract insights from existing data streams.

Steal this tactic

Turn your founder’s research and product insights into a free eBook and publish it on LinkedIn.

I first noticed this post two days after it was posted on LinkedIn and it already had more than 1,000 comments.

Now, three months later, it has doubled to over 2,000 comments, an astonishing long-term growth.

You only get the eBook if you leave a comment, which is a smart strategy to increase visibility, but be careful not to overuse this tactic as it gets old fast.

Results

Enzo also shares the results of some of his efforts on LinkedIn from 2023.

21% of signups came from LinkedIn after its posts generated nearly 10 million impressions.

That’s an incredible number of signups from a channel with zero ad spend.

Take away

June’s founder has over 40,000 followers on LinkedIn at the time of writing. But no one starts with tens of thousands of followers; they must be built over time.

Here’s what he said about spending time on LinkedIn in 2023:

This year I decided to focus heavily on LinkedIn. During the second half of the year I posted every day. And the results were surprising… 20% of our customers came from Linkedin 😮

Divides the content into three segments:

1. 60% of a page on learning the product.
2. 15% on exciting personal stories from building a startup.
3. 15% off entertainment like memes.

Enzo’s personal LinkedIn account is an important acquisition channel built over time, but anyone can do it if you have the right dedication and buy-in.

Wrapping up

2024 is the year of authority-driven content, and brands like Warmly, Air, and June.so are at the forefront.

They all have founders who understand the value of building a public audience and leveraging it as a growth channel.

And it’s not just the founders who do this; Smart agencies and individual entrepreneurs are building $20,000 a month businesses by ghostwriting for executives.

Meet with product and content teams to outline a 3-month content roadmap. Get insights from recent customer calls and ask your CEO to spend 45 minutes each month asking them questions about company and industry trends. Use AI tools to record, transcribe, and create first drafts of your content.

The post Thought Leadership Content on LinkedIn: The Key to Efficient Growth in 2024 appeared first on CXL.

Source link