Steal This LinkedIn Strategy (Dave's Newsletter)

LinkedIn for B2B: What's Working Right Now (And How To Sell It To Your Leadership Team)

Editor's Note: I've been writing on LinkedIn for over a decade, and I still think it's the most underrated B2B marketing channel. LinkedIn has made me more meaningful connections than Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook combined. Candidates. Teammates. Partners. Friends. It's influenced millions in revenue. And yet I still hear the same objections: "Our buyers aren't there." "We can't measure it." "Nobody wants to post." So I hosted a live session with Dasha Shakov (Head of Marketing at Proton.ai), Finn Thormeier (Founder of Project 33), and Emeric Ernoult (CEO of Agorapulse) and they broke down what's working on LinkedIn right now, how to get started from zero, why thought leader ads outperform everything else, and how to prove ROI.

If I were running marketing at a B2B startup today, LinkedIn would be our primary PR channel.

The founder would be sharing content 3–5x a week. So would the head of marketing, head of sales, and head of customer success.

But you have to stop thinking about it as "getting your CEO to post on LinkedIn” and start thinking about it like hiring a PR agency.

You don't measure PR ROI by leads generated. You know it's about more than that…

The same is true for social media. The ROI comes from testing your messaging, connecting with customers, finding partners, building an employment brand, getting a DM from someone out of the blue.

People buy from people. And there's a huge opportunity in B2B to use social media as your main marketing channel.

Here’s the playbook that’s working right now on LinkedIn.

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WHAT WE'RE HEARING

The LinkedIn for B2B Playbook

Who Should Post? (Hint: People, Not Company Pages)

Personal profiles get significantly more engagement than company pages. But who should you lean on?

Think about it in three buckets:

1. Who has relevant expertise for the people you sell to? If you sell to VPs of Engineering, who in your company has relevant engineering insights? Maybe it's your founder. Your CTO. Your CIO.
2. Who is close to the customer? If you're close to customers, you have relevant insights. Your CRO. Head of Customer Success. Your CEO.
3. The X factor. People in your company who just have something special. Maybe they're funny. Super charismatic. The IC who's well-respected in the open source community because they contribute.

But here’s the catch…they need to actually want to do this. Otherwise they'll stop quickly.

If you only have one person posting, start with the person who has the most expertise relevant to the people you're trying to reach. Usually that's the CEO or founder.

What To Post (And How To Never Run Out Of Ideas)

Anything can work on LinkedIn. Some people crush it with 11-minute videos. Others with three-line text posts.

It's a numbers game. You need reps and you need ideas. Here's how to make sure you always have both.

Pay Attention To What Makes You Stop Scrolling

Every time you see something you want to click on, share, comment on, or save – write it down. What is it? What's the angle? What's the tone?

Is it someone telling a story about their journey? Someone sharing what they learned? A personal post?

Save the posts you love and use them for inspiration.

Create A System

Ideas can come from anywhere in your company.

One company has a Slack channel called "stuff customers say" that everyone has access to. People post messages all the time: "Customer did this." "Customer just said this." "You won't believe what just happened." That channel became their CEO's main source of content ideas.

Other systems that work:

• Keep a Google Tasks list just for content ideas. Every time something pops up – write it down.
• Feed your CEO's recorded calls into ChatGPT. Ask it to find patterns. When the CEO repeats the same story multiple times to customers, that's your signal it's meaningful.
• Save your best comments on other people's posts. Turn those 3-line comments into 500-word posts next week.

Become An Expert Your Customers Trust

Help them get smarter about your industry. Help them get better at their job.

You can be funny. Entertaining. Add humor. But what wins is having expertise and sharing what you're learning.

This is why the CEO or founder is usually so perfect to drive this. They have deep expertise in the industry. They didn't just wake up one day and decide to get rich starting a niche cybersecurity company. They probably worked at a company for 20 years prior, and that led them to start this.

That kind of experience is what makes the best content.

Example: Grant Lee, founder of Gamma (an AI presentation app), doesn't just talk about Gamma. He talks about broader trends in AI. What they're learning. How they're building as a smaller company.

You Can’t Be Promotional 100% Of The Time (So Be Strategic About It)

If I promote something for Exit Five three days in a row, engagement drops.

But here's the thing: engagement and results are not the same thing.

Sometimes a post will get 30 likes and 3 comments – terrible for organic engagement. But then you check your CRM and see it generated 300 new contacts that day.

Or you post about a program you're running. Only AI bots comment, but you get 5 DMs from legitimate prospects who saw that post.

Bottom-of-funnel content will get less engagement because you're talking to a very specific person who's ready to buy. And that's fine. Not everything needs to go viral.

But when you strike the right balance of being helpful and adding value then mix in promotional posts from time to time, it’s possible to drive serious results.

B2B Marketers’ New Favorite Channel: LinkedIn Ads

One of the other things that makes organic LinkedIn content even more important today is the creation of LinkedIn Thought Leader ads.

Thought Leader ads let you take a post from a personal profile and promote it as an ad that shows up as a regular post in the feed, which means you can test content organically first, then put ad budget behind what's already working.

Here's why they work so well:

1. They don't look like ads. People scroll past ads. But a thought leader ad looks like someone's post. You see it's sponsored, but that's not the first thing you notice.
2. You’re not guessing what will land. Unlike regular ads where you're shooting in the dark wondering what will work, with thought leader ads you post organically first. See what resonates. Then put ad budget behind the winners.
3. The numbers are incredible. For Dasha Shakov (Head of Marketing at Proton.ai), thought leader ads are 3x more effective than all their other LinkedIn ads combined. For every dollar in, they get three more dollars back if it's a thought leader ad.

Here's the playbook:

• Post organically on LinkedIn
• Watch which posts perform well
• Take the high performers and boost them as thought leader ads
• You can even edit the post after it's live (change the link, add UTM parameters)
• Run them to cold audiences and retargeting

Test organically, boost what works, and track the engagement signals to fuel your outbound. That's what’s working right now.

How To Sell LinkedIn To Your Leadership Team

Here's the truth: so much of LinkedIn is a feeling.

But when you can't just say "it's a feeling" to your CFO, here's what to do:

1. Stack the deck early. Get them to feel it. When the CEO writes that post and an investor pops out of nowhere to re-engage, or a prospect they've been chasing for months finally responds – they'll get it.
2. Position it as an experiment. No one wants to commit to posting forever. It seems daunting. But posting for a quarter and seeing what happens is easier to stomach.
3. Add self-reported attribution. Put "How did you hear about us?" in your forms. Add LinkedIn as an option. Track it in every sales conversation. It’s not perfect, but LinkedIn shows up all the time when you ask.
4. Use tools that track LinkedIn influence on pipeline. Tools like Fibbler show which LinkedIn posts (organic and paid) are influencing deals in your CRM. Again, not perfect attribution, but it gives you data points.
5. Track engagement-to-pipeline signals. Use your LinkedIn ad engagement data, push it to Clay, and use that to prioritize outbound. When someone engages with your content multiple times, that's a signal.

Here's the good news: you don't need to convince leadership to go all-in on day one. Start small, prove it works, show some early wins. The more wins you have, the more trust you'll get – and the more freedom you'll have to do this right.

It's All About Reps: The More Time You Write Here, The Better

You'll post something you think will crush and it gets 12 likes. Then you fire off a random thought in line at a coffee shop and it takes off.

That's why you need volume. And the good news? Posting on LinkedIn is free. If you post something and it flops, you get to try again.

So keep a running list of ideas. Every time something pops up – a comment you made that resonated, a point from an all-hands, a story your CEO told on a sales call – write it down.

Ideas are everywhere if you're looking for them.

– Dave

P.S. What's your biggest challenge with LinkedIn right now? Is it getting started? Getting executives to actually post? Measuring results? Or something else? Hit reply and let me know – I will try and help you out with a few lines of wisdom back

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