We know, theoretically, that organic social is important.
We know this because B2B marketing conferences in 2024 are essentially your LinkedIn feed in the flesh.
We know this because there are many, many evangelists exalting the power of LinkedIn. Some of these evangelists are a bit hyperbolic, but they’re probably not wrong.
Years ago, I even wrote about this idea of “decentralized content marketing,” where many individuals in your company create content aligned with your messaging on social media.
Yet, still, we as a company have struggled to maintain consistency on social media.
Mostly because neither I nor my two co-founders particularly enjoy spending time on social media. If we’re being authentic, we’d each rather be reading books or writing long form essays (like this one).
Despite the fact that technically, as a business owner, I can do whatever I want, it’s also my responsibility to do things that work and grow our business.
So we hired Finn McKenty to teach us how to do LinkedIn better, and here’s what we came up with.
Specific and simple goals
Previously, we had lofty and vague goals. We wanted, broadly, to directly generate leads and we wanted to get a ton of impressions.
As a former experimentation leader, I am ashamed to admit that we didn’t get any clearer about our success metrics than this.
We also tried to track only our inputs, posting 5X per week each. This was better, because at least there were concrete numbers to focus on, but solely focusing on inputs made it feel like a checkbox activity.
Now, we’ve got really clean goals: Get 5 leads per month from LinkedIn and close one of them.
Secondary goal is to get on more podcasts and speak at more conferences. In other words, to manufacture serendipity.
But I’d say the overall objective is to build a magnet to attract audiences who are interested in our ideas. Because then we can influence deals in the pipeline as well as attracting new clients, and we can just generally meet and be known by people we want to meet and be known by.
As I told Finn in our first call, “The more conversations I have with qualified and interesting people, whether it’s in person, just a Zoom catch up, whether it’s on the podcast, that’s kind of the proximate goal is to just get in front of these people.”
So basically, we want to use LinkedIn to get to know more people and have more people know us.
Anchoring on differentiated belief statements
“How is Omniscient different from [other agencies]?”
Whether or not it’s asked explicitly, almost every prospect thinks about it when they talk to us.
We have answers, but never really spent the time to distill them into clean bullet points. But it turns out that these differentiators are also VERY GOOD themes for us to write about on LinkedIn.
We were previously pretty scattered in what we wrote about, which was fine because it helped us stay interested.
However, we’re running a business and don’t just want to post stuff for funsies. We want to drive actual growth. So we need to narrow what we post about so people remember us and self-qualify as followers and leads.
The framework Finn uses is a sort of funnel based on three stages:
- The first belief statement should be a “filter” that establishes their worldview and gets people to agree or think differently.
- The second belief statement should establish how to capitalize on the opportunity or solve the problem established in the first belief.
- The third belief statement should be a specific framework, tool or process for achieving what was discussed in the second belief.
Our work with Finn coincided perfectly with our re-working of our guiding concepts (or how we differentiate our work product as an organic growth agency):
These, essentially, will be the layers of the funnel that we’ll write about on LinkedIn as well.
The TOFU filter is we believe SEO and organic marketing should drive attributable business outcomes. We know there’s a contingent of marketers that disagree with it, but our clients like it, and we back it up in many ways from our strategy frameworks to our analytical expertise.
MOFU is going to basically be about making better organic growth decisions, which relates to our prioritization ideas, how we talk about building content portfolios, moving the needle with technical projects, data and analytics, etc.
Finally, we’re leaning on what most clients say they love about us: we’re a strategic partner that is embedded in the team, but we also actually deliver and get shit done. Too many “strategy” audits that just sit there in Google Drive. Clients like that we keep each other accountable and ship stuff at a high velocity and to quality standards. Lots we can write about here about how we do that through process, people, change management, etc.
So it may not map perfectly to Finn’s funnel model, but it backs into differentiators of our agency that are evidence-based and objective, to the point where we have models, frameworks, case studies, and experience to actually have substance in all of these areas, instead of some silly “create an enemy” positioning like “backlinks are bad” or “technical SEO doesn’t matter,” which we don’t believe and is just marketing drivel.
Content formats: what we’ll actually write about
The blank page is tough. Having constraints helps.
Like, I know what “types” of content work in SEO. Is it a listicle, a “what is” page, a comparison page, etc.?
With LinkedIn, I didn’t know if I should write a satirical meme post, a personal vulnerable story, a tactical how-to, or just a selfie with some inspirational quote.
We narrowed this down, and in our next call, will come up with an actual content calendar based on content formats.
So far, for top of the funnel content, we’ve got:
- Meme plus commentary – Not just a funny meme, but something funny and entertaining with a bunch of commentary and nuance. Like my Midwit meme posts.
- Industry “not so hot takes” – Strong points of view on broad industry trends that are a bit polarizing but nuanced. Example here.
For the middle of the funnel, we’re looking at frameworks and video-based content.
Frameworks, because we’re growth nerds and that’s a strength of ours. Also, you can see that Usman, on our team, is already amazing at these.
Finn says we have to do some video-based content because it helps people match our faces to our names and ideas long before ever getting on a discovery call.
He also recommended we do “story time” posts for the middle of funnel, where we talk about our career and life to communicate our backgrounds and where we come from.
Bottom of the funnel is really simple: case studies, testimonials, etc.
I’m not sure where this fits in, but I’ll also do some meta-content about the agency itself, mainly because it’s fun and I think people enjoy following along and getting to know how we operate. Like this recent post on our team offsite in Costa Rica.
Nothing in isolation: LinkedIn and integrated marketing
I think that one reason we haven’t been able to make LinkedIn “work” like we wanted it to was because we looked at it in isolation.
Now, we’re thinking about it as a part of our broader marketing system that includes SEO (yes, we drink our own champagne), outbound sales (we’re doing some fun experiments with Clay and automation based on signals and triggers), our podcast (where else would we promote a B2B podcast?), and LinkedIn thought leadership ads.
Like I said before, we’re looking at LinkedIn as a magnet, a place that we can get to know and be known by marketers, SEOs, growth leaders, and other smart people we can connect with.
Basically, we realized that we were previously trying to mimic what full time creators were doing. But we’re not full time creators, and we don’t have the same goals or audience requirements. We actually need a smaller audience that is more targeted, which takes a lot of the pressure off to “go viral” or do things merely for attention.
As long as we build trust and share smart stuff over time, we think it will pay off and augment our existing channels and system.
So if you’re not already, follow me.
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