The era of growth-at-all-costs strategy is over.
Companies are pushing for profitability today instead of projecting for it in the future.
Your budget and headcount are slashed, but as a growth practitioner, you’re still on the hook for hitting 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 large breadth of experience.
And my best secret for efficient growth right now is right in front of your eyes every day on LinkedIn.
Today, I will unpack three success stories of founders who have leveraged thought leadership content to grow their businesses. Take these examples to the founders and head of marketing at your business as a proof of concept and ask for buy-in and budget to start doing something similar.
Table of contents
Branded social media is dead
Unless you’re Wendy’s, no one gives a shit about your corporate-branded Twitter posts.
What people care about is what your founder has to say. To see evidence of this, we can look outside the world of technology and venture-backed startups to one of the most successful companies ever.
An OG of thought leadership content isn’t some SaaS founder; it’s a 93 year old from Omaha, Nebraska. When Warren Buffet publishes his annual shareholder letter it makes the front page of every financial news outlet worldwide.
Everyone from seasoned Wall Street investors to r/WallStreetBets hustlers scrutinizes every word in his letters to glean a hint of his next investments.
Why is this? In the case of Warren Buffet, he is the most successful investor of our time. His success lets him speak with authority.
Founders, senior leaders, and even solopreneurs can also showcast thought leadership. Sharing a glimpse into how you run your company and your perspective on today’s problems gives you a chance to build your own authority.
But it starts by showing up consistently 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 unpack three success stories on how brands have leveraged thought leadership content to grow their business.
Warmly
Warmly reveals individuals and companies visiting your site and automates personalized outreach to them through email, LinkedIn, and chat.
For sales, Warmly helps reps hit their sales quota by assisting them to know exactly when to reach out and what to say to stand out.
For marketing, it provides a way of unmasking anonymous website visitors and automatically taking action on them to create sales opportunities.
Steal this tactic
Warmly made a bold move in 2024—their CEO announced that they’d be taking the popular “build in public” marketing tactic for small-scale SaaS indie hackers to the extreme and share “100% of our metrics, sales numbers, video recordings of meetings, disagreements, high highs and low lows.”
Brands need 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.
Maximus says it himself:
The sales orchestration space is more crowded than ever before and we are 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 underdog.
I need to do something to bend the curve or get left in the dust.
But how did it perform?
The Results
In Q4, Warmly spent less than $30,000 on marketing programs, and $0 of that went to paid ads.
Yet their inbound demo requests have been 8x’d since their announcement to represent almost 80% of their total demo requests every month.
The graph they shared bucks the usual trend of every Q4 I’ve personally seen within a SaaS company. Typically, revenue declines like clockwork from October to December due to the holiday season and smaller budgets. However, this tactic shows that you can reverse expected seasonality with the right bet.
Takeaways
While your company might not be willing or able to share such transparency like Warmly, ask yourself what you could share to help you stand out.
The Warmly CEO also has 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, which gave him a good audience size to start from (this number was likely smaller at the time of announcement), so if your CEO decided to do the same thing with only 500 followers, it likely won’t have the same effect.
Start making small bets now, so you have a bigger audience to draw from when you want to make a big bet on LinkedIn.
Air
Air is a Creative Operations platform that gives creative teams hours back 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 core buyers are Creative Directors who work either at a marketing agency or in-house at the brands I listed above. These highly creative people are often stuck using software that wasn’t built for the creative process, and they don’t respond well to tired marketing campaigns.
Air is forced to develop interesting and engaging campaigns to get its target audience’s attention, and its team is built around to do this every quarter.
Steal this tactic
Air has a small but mighty marketing team that builds campaigns to generate interest and demand for their product with their target audience.
They primarily have four people building and executing on these campaigns:
- A head of organic content, with the budget and freedom to do cool shit
- Two marketing managers
- Me, as their paid ads consultant to run LinkedIn ads
A Manifesto on Creative Ops
In partnership with their CEO, the Air team wrote a physical book on Creative Ops and why it’s broken today.
They launched the book on their social media channels (primarily Instagram and LinkedIn via Shane’s account) and drove people to a custom landing page: https://air.inc/space
The book is of beautiful imagery and quotes that resonate with problems Creative teams are having today, like this:
This is just one example from Air’s marketing campaigns: they’ve also hired influencer Kareem Rahma (213k+ followers on Instagram) as Chief Imagination Officer of their company and helped their CEO achieve a Top Voice badge on LinkedIn.
Results
Here’s what Shane has publicly said about their LinkedIn efforts.
I’ve learned how our product works and how to improve it exceptionally quickly because LinkedIn is the only place on the internet that can rapidly expand a targeted network around your business.
For us, it all started with a few connection requests and some genuine notes asking for advice…
Takeaways
You don’t have to publicly share your revenue numbers on LinkedIn to get the attention of your target audience.
Air’s content works so well because their CEO is fully bought into the process and gives their Head of Content nearly free reign to develop creative ideas.
Then I can take their unique organic content and put some wind in its 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 creates.
June.so
June.so is a product analytics platform that empowers B2B SaaS companies to easily and quickly pull insights from their existing data streams.
Steal this tactic
Turn your founder’s product research and insights into a free eBook and release it on LinkedIn.
I first noticed this post two days after it was posted on LinkedIn, and it already had 1,000+ comments.
Now, three months later, it’s doubled to 2,000+ comments which is amazing long-tail growth.
You receive the eBook only if you leave a comment, which is a smart strategy to boost visibility, but be careful about abusing this tactic as it gets old fast.
Results
Enzo also shares the results of some of his LinkedIn efforts from 2023.
21% of signups came from LinkedIn after his posts generated nearly 10 million impressions.
That is an amazing number of signups from one channel with zero ad spend.
Takeaways
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 dedicating time to LinkedIn in 2023:
This year I decided to go heavy 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 😮
He breaks his content down into three buckets:
- 60% one pagers on product learning.
- 15% on emotional personal stories from building a startup.
- 15% on entertainment like memes.
Enzo’s personal LinkedIn account is a major acquisition channel built over time, but anyone can do this 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 leading the charge.
They all have founders who understand the value of building an audience in public and leveraging it as a growth channel.
And it’s not just founders who are doing this; smart agencies and solopreneurs are building $20k/month businesses ghostwriting for executives.
Sit down with your Product and Content teams to map out a 3-month content roadmap. Pull insights from recent customer calls and ask your CEO to commit to 45 minutes every month where you ask them questions on company and industry trends. Use AI tools to record, transcribe, and build 1st drafts of your content.
