Jason Vana, Christina Nalband, and Nick Bennett discuss using LinkedIn for branding and pipeline. One client generated $20 million in revenue from a LinkedIn-first content strategy. They argue that positioning yourself as an expert through niche content works better than chasing leads, and that employee advocacy must be strategic but authentic, not forced.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by RevGenius, and we're on a mission to bring in Inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. Going to leaders and companies, how can folks strategically leverage LinkedIn to engage, nurture, and produce top-of-the-funnel activities? Let's let's get down to brass tacks here.
So I'm gonna be super controversial because this is what I do. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I'm Sassy Jason. So I love calling this crap out and being. Being all sassy about it. I think the biggest way, and this is what I've seen, this is what I've seen with a lot of our clients, is most B2B companies still look at content as a marketing tactic, that it is, it is an activity that drives leads and drives funnel. And so they, they, you know, they look at KPIs that, that follow that kind of funnel. They look at how is content being being effective, it's because it's driving funnel, it's driving more leads and we're getting more MQLs. And like, that's all I hear from a lot of B2B marketers. And I was the head of a B2B marketing or head of B2B marketing in a company. So I know that I've been there. But really when you look at content, it really is a branding tactic. And this is where I actually posted about this about a month ago. And I had some of the worst DMs on LinkedIn, like, you're a heretic and how dare you say that and you don't know what you're talking about. Because we've been trained to think content is a marketing tactic that should drive leads. But what happens is when you look at content and you say, I'm doing this to drive top of funnel, I'm doing this to get people in my nurturing campaign, get them to sales, what happens is you get a bunch of crap. Content. I've had conversations with people recently that they're like, I don't even use Google anymore because all the content that's been SEO optimized is all this very generic, basic, like I could get better information talking to a 5-year-old than getting off of Google because all these content marketers have focused on SEO and just like their goal is I want you on my website. So you book a demo so that I can sell to you. That's kind of the marketing brain when it comes to content. But when you switch it and you look at it from a branding perspective, when you put out content in order to position yourself, that the goal is not leads. The goal is I want to be the expert. I want to be the resource. I want to be the Dave Gerhardt. I want to be the RefinedLabs. I want to be the company that is putting out so much information that people look at us and say, we're the ones that are the experts. Like, that's, that's what I did with Shift was I said all the content I'm gonna put out. I tell my, I tell my prospective clients this all the time. If you don't wanna hire me, go read my last 3 years worth of LinkedIn posts. You'll have a branding and marketing strategy to grow your business. I give it all away. And what happens is when you position yourself that way, the leads and the top of the funnel stuff comes in. It's a different mindset in way of my goal is not leads. My goal is I'm gonna be a resource. I'm gonna be the expert. I'm gonna be the one people look at and say, if I have branding or content help, I'm going to that guy because he knows what he's talking about. I've tried some of his strategies for free. I've seen results. Now I want to get the real results by having him do it for me. That's, that's the goal. When you do that, when you can come at your content in the way of whether it drives leads or not, I'm gonna do this, you drive much better leads. Like, I— we, we are on track to be a 7-figure industry or second 7-figure agency Within 8 months because of, of LinkedIn content and trying to like, and positioning ourselves rather than my goal is I wanna drive leads. My goal is I just want y'all to go on LinkedIn and say, this dude knows what he's talking about. When you do that with your content, whether it's LinkedIn, blog posts, podcasts, whatever it might be, my goal is positioning. You will get higher quality leads. And leads that are, have more buyer buying intent because they've turned to you as a resource and you are the one they go to. So when they are ready to buy, they say, I'm not gonna go to these 5 other competitors who are putting out content that like, I have to go download this or I have to sign up for this or I have to do that. It's this person's doing it, he's an expert, I'm gonna go to that person. And that's, that's really been my My strategy. That's what we've done with our clients. And we've seen clients have, you know, drive— one of the companies I worked with drove $20 million worth of revenue just from that content strategy. Nothing else but that content strategy. $20 million in revenue that year. Yeah, $20 million of revenue that year. That's pretty awesome results from content. But I didn't treat it like marketing. I didn't look at You know, typical, the typical metrics to understand how is this working. It was, I just want to position us as the best brand out there and this is, this is how we're going to generate leads and it, and it works.
I love that. Any other strategies from Christina or Nick that you, you, you'd add to that to help the folks watching?
I mean, the only thing that I would add is Working for a martech company and selling to people that are exactly like me, it's— I took the path of talking about field marketing initially 2 years ago. And so, you know, there's 800 million plus people that post on LinkedIn, 800 million people on LinkedIn, not 800 million people that post, but no people talk about field marketing on a consistent basis, more of like what it is, what's the foundations, What are the gaps in field marketing? How does it tie into revenue? I took that path and I think that ultimately, and that was before I even worked at Atlas, but I think it plays into a huge piece of how we drive a lot of the pipeline revenue because I am connected to our ICP and our target accounts. When they see every day me posting content and they reach out saying, hey, our contract's up with your competitor, I'd love to get a demo. Like that happens more often than you think. Like I'm driving 2 to 3 inbounds per week myself. And I think it's like a huge, huge difference from a marketer. If I was doing this in engineering and like developer, like it wouldn't matter. Like my network would be useless. That's why I'll probably never go back to like IT or anything like that. I will stay in martech or sales tech for probably the next foreseeable future. But, um,
Christina, anything to add?
I think from the sales side, I would add, I said this, I said this before, but it has to be in the onboarding process. And I think that's a big missing link. I mean, if you're, if you are an entrepreneur or you're doing this on your own, it's, it's definitely different. But if you're at, like, I work at Alice, right? I'm in a B2B martech organization. We have, more than one person selling the product. And I think this needs to be agreed upon by the executive team, right? Like this needs to be a strategic decision of, hey, we're gonna use LinkedIn. Who's doing it well right now? And, and what are you doing? Right? And then it should be incorporated into the company's onboarding process. But you also have to let your employees decide. Like what you can't do is say, hey Joe, you have to post on LinkedIn. Like that's not gonna go over well today. Right? So I think you, you have to, Show people what works, decide as a company you wanna do it, but you need to let your employees decide. And then once they do, you can't just talk about your product, right? Like it's the same thing of influencers on TikTok or influencers on Instagram. As soon as you insert an ad, your views go down, right? As soon as you start selling or hard pitching, your views are gonna go down, your demo requests are gonna go down. So I think just like allowing people to be themselves, making it a strategic thing, that's what Drift did really well. It was an intentional strategy. strategy. And then yeah, like, be yourself, be passionate about what you're talking about. And it's a funnel, right? Oh, I like Nick Bennett. He's authentic. He's teaching me things. Oh, what does Nick Bennett do? He works at Alice. Ooh, that's interesting. I'm gonna message him because I'm thinking about gifting, right? Like, it all— as long as you're authentic about it, and it's intentional, it can be a really good thing.
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