Christian Klepp, Niall Ratcliffe

Niall Ratcliffe  00:00

So content, there’s two things that are working right now. The first thing, if you’re looking at awareness content, it’s content from lived experiences and unique perspectives. The person doing this better than anyone right now is Stephen Bartlett. If you look at some of his content recently, it’s been, he’s been getting 1000s of likes, and you could say it’s getting 1000s of likes because he is famous, he has a massive podcast. The reality is all his content is baked in a lived experience. What I mean by that is he’s sharing things that only he can share. For example, he has a podcast with something like 16 million subscribers. He regularly shares the data that only they have on what’s happening behind the scenes, for example, the audience numbers, the metrics, how it’s growing, the things they did to grow it.

Christian Klepp  00:43

When leveraged the right way, LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful platform for B2B companies to build their brands, establish credibility in the vertical, and generate qualified leads. Many companies, however, are using tactics that are either too salesy or aggressive, leading to a trust gap and zero pipeline. So, how can B2B companies build trust, sales, and pipeline on LinkedIn without breaking the bank? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Niall Ratcliffe, who will be answering this question. He’s the CEO of Noticed, one of the UK’s fastest growing B2B marketing agencies. Let’s dive in. Okay, and away we go. I’m gonna say Nile Ratcliffe. Welcome to the show, sir.

Niall Ratcliffe  01:29

I’m excited to get going with this one. I feel we got a lot to talk about. I’m excited to get into it. Thanks so much for having me.

Christian Klepp  01:34

Oh, absolutely, absolute pleasure. You know, we had plenty to talk about, I think the last time we spoke, and just before I hit record, we had plenty to talk about then as well, but yeah, I’m really looking forward to diving into this, because not only is this something that’s very pertinent to B2B marketers, but I think a lot of folks are going to be able to take away a lot of like action items from this conversation, and we’re going to be talking a lot about LinkedIn, I think was the rumor, right?

Niall Ratcliffe  02:03

And I think I promised you that I was going to share a few secrets that some of the fastest growing B2B companies are using on LinkedIn that they don’t actually want to share about right now.

Christian Klepp  02:12

Indeed, indeed, indeed. Well, but don’t give too much of it away, like you know, we’ll let them wait a little bit longer before we dive into that, all right. And away we go. So, Niall, you’re on a mission to help B2B companies get noticed, no pun intended, on LinkedIn by their ideal customers. So, for this conversation, let’s narrow it down to the following topic, and then we’ve got plenty to be able to unpack from there, right? So, how B2B companies can build trust, sales, and pipeline on LinkedIn, so this is a bit of a two-barreled question here, and I’m happy to repeat, but like let’s kick off the conversation with the following question. So the first one is, and I know you know how to answer this really well, but what is it about LinkedIn that you wish more B2B companies understood? That’s the first thing, and the second thing is, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggle regarding LinkedIn?

Niall Ratcliffe  03:06

Yeah, the thing I wish more people understood is what LinkedIn is fundamentally is a platform. So, over the last three or four years, Christian, people have started to see LinkedIn as a social media platform, and I completely understand why they think that way. When you look at it from a surface level, it has all the things that social media platform does, it has posting, it has likes, it has comments and reposts, and all these other things. So people used to say, like, it’s the B2B social media, like you have Facebook for your personal stuff, you have LinkedIn for your work stuff, and that’s kind of true. But the reality is, from a business level and a fundamental level, LinkedIn was built as a networking platform. What that means is that the whole platform is built to help you connect or start conversations with other people. Then, when you look at marketing from a fundamental level, all marketing and even sales activity is literally just trying to start conversations with people. So, back in the day, you would have door-to-door sales: how many conversations can you start, how many doors you knock on, you have cold calling. How many calls do you make? How many conversations do you start? Cold email, how many emails you send, how many conversations you start. And LinkedIn, as a platform, is built with an aligned objective to help you start conversations with people. I think that’s what a lot of people miss. And the mistake a lot of B2B companies are making, well, there’s two of them. Is one, they see LinkedIn as a job site, so they use LinkedIn for recruitment and forget that it is actually a marketing channel, and the second thing is that even if the ones that are starting to adapt to LinkedIn see it as a social media channel, treat it like they threat Facebook or an Instagram or a Twitter or an X, when actually LinkedIn is a networking platform, and if you don’t fundamentally see it that way, that is where you miss out on the real opportunities on LinkedIn, and that’s a lot of what we’re helping companies do with our LinkedIn strategy we implement.

Christian Klepp  03:06

Those are really great insights, I think, and we’ve, we’ve seen it, like, you know, this has been an ongoing trend, I think, for years now, where, to your point, one is, I feel that LinkedIn is becoming a little bit like. Facebook, where people are just venting their frustrations, they’re telling a lot of stories, where they’re, you know, it’s, you know, the vulnerability story, and I think every so often sharing stories like that is okay, but if that’s that’s that’s the only thing that you post, then it starts becoming a pattern, and I think, for me, it’s like I always go back to, what is the end game? What is your objective of doing this? Okay, so that’s one thing. One observation, the second observation, which I’m sure you, you have plenty of experience with, people are using LinkedIn as like a pitch slapping platform, right? So it’s the, you know, leveraging whatever software there is out there, and they’re just like spamming everybody, right, because they’re seeing it as a platform with all these contexts, but they’re just going about it in a very intrusive and aggressive way.

Niall Ratcliffe  03:06

Yeah, and ironically, the thing that they are getting wrong is also what makes LinkedIn work as a platform, right? So the reason everyone feels so offended by these like cold pitches in the DMs (Direct Messages) on LinkedIn is also the reason that marketing on LinkedIn works, because it’s person-to-person interactions. So, Christian, I think I get something like 50 to 100 cold emails a day, and cold emails were almost like known that they are pitch slaps. So every cold email we get is a pitch slab. I get probably two or three cold calls a day. I don’t know who’s that delete my number to all these databases. Well, I probably get two to three a day, and every cold call is, can you want to buy this? Can I sell you this? And with those, we’re trained to do that. Just ironic that you say on LinkedIn, in particular, you get pitch slapped, when actually we get pitch slapped across all go to market strategies, it’s all a pitch slap. The difference with LinkedIn, however, is that it feels much more personal because it’s a specific person who’s contacted you and you can see their head and you can see their name and they’ve got in contact with you, which is why it feels personal, which is ironically when you reverse it and you start to think about it doing it the right way, it’s also why it works, but it’s personal to personal. So, I don’t actually think it’s LinkedIn, in particular, that people pitch slap more than other channels, but it’s actually that LinkedIn feels so much more personal than code email, cold calling, etc.

Christian Klepp  03:06

The pitfalls. I like to split LinkedIn up into what we call the LinkedIn pyramid, and there’s four layers of it. The first layer is positioning. Positioning is the fundamental layer of LinkedIn, and again, people have to understand that, because LinkedIn is built like a networking platform, the massive benefit of it is that you have this personal profile, a company profile that you’re able to build out like a landing page, and by not building out like a landing page, you’re massively hindering any LinkedIn strategy you have. If you have a content-heavy strategy, if you have an outreach heavy strategy, if you have an ads heavy strategy, everything leads back to your profile, so for example, if you’re imagining your LinkedIn feed right now, if there’s a paid ad on it, you’ll see it’d see my head, it’d be a thought leader ad. The next step, nine times out of ten at a time, but we’ll click on your head, go to your profile, and have a check of who you are, even before they react to the ad, fill in your lead form, they’ll check who you are, and that’s a beautiful thing. You can control if I’m running ads on Facebook, for example. It’s not natural to go and check the profile out first. If I’m sending the cold email, they might Google me, they might go to AI and search who I am. I can’t control the next step as well. But on LinkedIn, with everything that I’m doing, they’re going to my profile, which allows me to connect the next step and position myself in the right way. Some research came out of Stanford, I think it was in 2018 that said on average 74% of people judge your profile on LinkedIn about 3.2 seconds, so you know you have about 3.2 seconds to hook people in and explain exactly what you do, and that is why it’s vital to have your banner professionally designed with a clear outcome on it, a headshot that’s professionally shot as well. I always say to people, when I say professional headshot, they always think they need a studio and everything else. Like an iPhone camera nowadays is such a good job. Just like, make sure you’re light. If I took a head shot now, it’d be fine with my iPhone. Just make sure it’s well shot. And then clear, and clear is the key word, outcome, and. You can provide people, you have 3.2 seconds to put it across. I think one of the biggest pitfalls is that they forget that that fundamental level of, yeah, mean you can talk all day about different types of content you can do on LinkedIn, different types of outreach, different types of ads. The reality is the foundational level of that LinkedIn pyramid, the proper LinkedIn strategy you should be using starts with positioning, and that’s getting the profile right and turning it into a landing page.

Christian Klepp  04:16

Never actually thought about it that way. A personalized pitch slap, okay, but that is that, that is true, in fact, because you also get pitch slapped with emails, right? And sometimes even in these emails, you’ll have the person’s e-signature, and they may, they might have their profile picture with, in fact, a link to their LinkedIn profile, if they are actually legit and genuine, right? More often than not. Okay, okay. But let me segue to the next question, because based on what you’ve said, like, what are some of these key pitfalls, and there are many, but what are some of these key pitfalls that teams need to be wary of that they need to avoid, and most importantly, from a constructive perspective, what should they be doing instead?

Niall Ratcliffe  04:16

It’s a great question. We could be all day, Christian. Think about,

Christian Klepp  04:16

I know.

Christian Klepp  10:23

Fantastic, fantastic. What was also, what are some of these other things? Because you talked about the foundation of the pyramid, what other parts of the pyramid are there?

Niall Ratcliffe  10:30

Yeah, so level one’s positioning, getting your positioning right, making sure you come across perceived in the right way. Level two is content, so making sure you have distribution. The beautiful thing about LinkedIn, as well, is that you have a two-way connection with people you’re connected with on personal profiles, that means that if I add people to my network, I’m able to distribute my content to them. It’s not like any other channel in that way. So, level two is content. When I say content, I’m not just talking about personal profiles, I’m talking about personal profiles and company page content. Layer three is outreach, so layers one and two are essentially just for getting the perception right, getting the awareness, and layer three is where you’ll start to make some money and start some conversations with outreach. I’m just optimizing for how many conversations can I start every single month, which is the top level strategy, and then level four of the pyramid is ads, and ads come into it for really more of a large enterprise companies that have already exhausted all over three layers ads like a I think people like Gary Vee (Gary Vaynerchuk) or an Alex Hormozi you’re these like big gurus really put people on to ads in the early days and made it seem easier with Facebook that you could just throw up an ad and make money, and I think people translate that to LinkedIn and get teased by this idea of, like, oh, I can pay to get in front of these people, and the reality is, can actually get in front of these people for free with the first three layers of the pyramid. So I only say that ads is the tip of the pyramid, and they only want to be used when you really want to go to a scale that you can’t reach without reach, but for 99% of companies, you don’t need to touch ads. I would say you don’t touch ads until you can literally set on fire 5000 a month of your marketing budget without caring where it goes. Once you’re at that stage, that’s when you have the type of capital that you can spend on a monthly basis just to scale it with ads. Other than that, just layer one positioning, layer two content layer three outreach.

Christian Klepp  12:23

Fantastic, fantastic. I’m glad you brought that up right, because I find that that’s such a dangerous assumption that people have that don’t know how LinkedIn ads works, right. And we can go down a very deep, deep, deep, deep, deep rabbit hole with that one, but just on a surface level, please just quickly explain to us how LinkedIn ads works, because for example, there’s a bidding system, right?

Niall Ratcliffe  12:47

Yeah, well, the first thing people don’t even understand is that LinkedIn ads work very different to any other type of ads. There’s different types of LinkedIn ads you can run standard ads, like almost like a meta ad, where it’s like your company page runs an ad on the profile. You also have thought leadership ads, where you can promote a post that you’ve already shared on LinkedIn. You can have conversation ads, where you can essentially send messages to a mass amount of people, but, like you said, there’s a bidding process where you’re setting your budget and what you’re willing to go up to. But even without getting too technical, LinkedIn ads are expensive, and the reason they’re expensive is because the audience on LinkedIn is so valuable. There’s 10 million C-suite execs, 64 million decision makers, and the average salary on LinkedIn for a LinkedIn user is $75,000 a year. There’s a massively high value audience, and that’s why you’re able to bump up the prices of the ads. What it also means is that for most businesses it just doesn’t make sense, like maybe if you have a just 250k average order value and you have experience with ads, but like I said, even then the first three layers will suffice and bring you an ROI that you need. The only reason you want to use ads is if you’re really trying to reach a scale of reaching 10s, hundreds of 1000s of people, and you’ve already exhausted all the organic channels.

Christian Klepp  14:03

Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s really important for people to know that right before they start saying, like, well, what about LinkedIn ads? Right,

Niall Ratcliffe  14:10

it’s tempting,

Christian Klepp  14:11

right?

Niall Ratcliffe  14:11

I think the fusion is tempting. We wanted a client a few years ago, and they were maybe paying us in the lower four figures, and we were bringing something like 12 new inquiries a month, and they were like, “What’s what? Why is our like cost per lead here? We’re paying $6 a lead on Facebook, like, why don’t we run Facebook? Why don’t we link to that and get the same? And it was like, “Well, yeah, but you’re actually getting a dramatically cheaper service working with us than the agency fees you’re paying for the meta ads, plus the cost of lead as well, and but people love the fact of, like, I pay x, I get one lead, and that is tempting, but ironically it’s much better to know I really. Reach out to this many people free of charge, and I get this many leads, which is a much better equation, even though it’s not – I was gonna say, as traditional, but ironically, ads is quite modern.

Christian Klepp  15:11

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so in your experience, and we talked about this previously, but what are you seeing that’s actually working right now on LinkedIn regarding content and outreach, and please provide examples where relevant.

Niall Ratcliffe  15:23

Yes, great questions. So, content is two things that are working right now. The first thing, if you’re looking at awareness content, it’s content from lived experiences and unique perspectives. The person doing this better than anyone right now is Steven Bartlett. If you look at some of his content recently, he’s been getting 1000s of likes, and you could say it’s getting 1000s of likes, because he is famous. He has a massive podcast. The reality is, all his content is baked in the lived experience. What I mean by that is he’s sharing things that only he can share. For example, he has a podcast with something like 16 million subscribers. He regularly shares the data that only they have on what’s happening behind the scenes, for example, the audience numbers, the metrics, how it’s growing, the things they did to grow it. I could go on LinkedIn right now, and I could go on ChatGPT, and I could do 10 tips for LinkedIn outreach, and I could post that, but also the other 360 active users on the platform could also do that exact same post. What they couldn’t do is explain to you a campaign that we’re working on behind the scenes, the data we’re seeing on it, and that is something from lived experience. Example, I recently did a post that shared a comparison of my stats of posting articles, 1000 to 2000 word articles on LinkedIn versus videos, the stats of what was working and what wasn’t. No one else could have shared that post other than me, because only I had the data that is content from lived experiences. Another example would be, let’s say Steven Bartlett did a post about the lessons he learned from being in a house where his parents argued, he could only share that because only he was in the house listening to his parents argue. It’s content from lived experience. It’s AI-proof content. The second type of content that’s working is what we call fishing content. So, what fishing is in the wild, obviously, you have a fishing rod, a fishing rod, you throw it into a river, a lake, whatever, it has a hook and bait, and you see which fish bite on it. And one more thing about generator leads on LinkedIn, and we want content to aid that. We do phishing content. So, what we do is we create content in our niche directly to our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). For example, for us, I might be explaining LinkedIn outreach or LinkedIn in general as a marketing platform, and we will make it as high utility as possible. When I say high utility, I mean as useful and actionable as possible in the next 60 minutes, so if I see a post that’s like I explain exactly how to optimize your LinkedIn outreach campaign, that is massively useful for anyone doing LinkedIn outreach, and they can go and action that in the next hour. I focus on high utility content, and the reason I do that is that I want to see who’s putting their hands up that are interested, so if a CMO engaged up my content around how to optimize your LinkedIn outreach campaign, I know that as a CMO that is interested in LinkedIn outreach, which is essentially intent for our sales team to reach out to them. If I did a post that was on a story of how I learned a lesson by walking around a lake, I could have 1000 likes on it, but that is not there’s no intent there, there’s no hand raises. So the two types of content awareness that you’re focused purely on lived experiences and unique perspectives, and then your phishing, which is really high utility, and make sure to be in your niche. And honestly, there’s not many things outside of that that are working at all right now.

Christian Klepp  18:38

Absolutely, absolutely, I love the fishing one too, it almost sounds like fishing for compliments, yeah,

Niall Ratcliffe  18:43

yeah,

Christian Klepp  18:44

because there’s quite a bit of that on LinkedIn as well, right, like,

Niall Ratcliffe  18:46

yeah, too much of that, if you ask me,

Christian Klepp  18:49

you brought up a really great point when you spoke about the lived experiences, because, and I wanted to talk to you about that a little bit further, because you are seeing a lot of AI slop, right, yeah, and there’s a lot of people that I know, who in fact are copywriters, that do admit that they are using AI to generate their LinkedIn posts, right? And at some point you’ll see it, right. And so, why do you think a lot of people are doing that versus what you’ve just mentioned? Is it because of time and effort?

Niall Ratcliffe  19:20

Yeah, so I think there’s something really interesting to know, that the understanding of, and the data of, as well. So, when I first started posting on LinkedIn, it was in a time that I call the LinkedIn gold rush. It was about 2020 to 2023 and I was getting probably 20 to 100,000 views a post, and that’s with, you know, anywhere from zero to 30,000 followers at that point, but I was getting a massive amount of views for a small following, and the reason that was is the supply and the demand on LinkedIn, the equation was massively one-sided. So, at the time, there’s this stat that was thrown around that there was only 1% of active users actually posted, and I think there’s about 300 million active users on the. Platforms and not total users are not active users, people who go on the platform, but only 1% posted. So, from LinkedIn perspective, there was a massive demand for content, or a really small supply, because only 1% of people were producing it. And what that meant is people like me, with zero to 10,000 followers, they had to show it to more people, because all these people wanted content. What shifted from 2023 to 2026 is that that supply and demand equation shifted, but we actually went from about 1% of people posting to 5% of people posting, that doesn’t seem massive jump, it’s only 4% but actually meant 10s of millions more people posting and hundreds millions more posts on a platform, so it didn’t even out, but the supply and demand equation became a little bit more even, and that meant that reach completely collapsed. So this is a report that Shield Analytics did. They actually recently closed down, but before they closed down, Shield Analytics did this report, and it was actually the best, in my opinion, analytics platform on LinkedIn, analytics tool for LinkedIn, and they had billions of polls went through the platform every single month that they were analyzing, and the averaged out the average amount of impressions you would get per follow account, and their survey resulted in this statistic that I is really ingrained in my head, that now if you have 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, that you only get 735 impressions per post on average, so in the past you get 1000 yeah, you have 1000 followers, you would get 10s of 1000s impressions. Now you have 10,000 followers, the average, I think it’s 735 or 734 impressions per post, so you’re actually not even showing it to your audience, never mind more people than your audience. Now the question was about AI and why people are doing it. A big thing that happened is in that gold rush, everyone saw people like me making a bunch of getting a bunch of followers and making a bunch of money on LinkedIn. So two things happened to shift the supply and demand equation. People from other platforms, Marx was on X on Instagram said, “Wow, over on LinkedIn everyone’s is easy, let’s go and post there. That’s what increased the post, and the second thing is everyone who was sat on the sidelines, the active users who weren’t posting with this massive thing that exploded called ChatGPT and all these other AI tools, and they said, I want a little bit of that, but I don’t want to put in the effort. So they went to the AI tools and they said, write me up a LinkedIn post, and they copied and pasted it, and ironically, by doing that, not only did they not get involved in the gold rush, but they actually ended the gold rush by completely shifting that supply and demand dynamic as well.

Christian Klepp  22:31

Wow, that’s incredible. That’s incredible, that that statistic you mentioned earlier, about was it 10,000 followers, and you only get like 700 impressions. Is that, is that linked to the way that the algorithm behaves?

Niall Ratcliffe  22:46

That’s literally, you know, a lot of people talk about Brew 360 and the new LinkedIn algorithm. The reality is it’s it shifts slowly over time. So, Shield did another report, about, I think it was about a year ago, 18 months ago, and it’s about 1100 but it’s actually dropped on average by 400 impressions of posts since then, so it’s not necessarily the algorithms harming you, but like I said, the supply and don’t request just simply shifted back in the day. Your LinkedIn has to fill the feed for every user, so you go on your feed, Christian, but you’re going to have to show you, John, let’s say 30 pre-loaded posts. Back in the day, there’s only a short small group of people to get those posts from, so they showed it to a lot of people. Now there’s just, there’s just dramatically more people posting, and that means that they can’t show every post to more people.

Christian Klepp  23:26

In our previous conversation, you talked about something along the lines of the new way that B2B brands are winning on LinkedIn. Care to share that with us?

Niall Ratcliffe  23:36

Yeah, so it’s really interesting. So I have an interesting look at the fact that brands come and companies come from all over the world now to get help with their LinkedIn through us, and by doing that, we’re able to have a good impact for them, but also we have to see what everyone else is doing, and I think it’s interesting that a lot of brands are doing things that they don’t necessarily talk about online. I think that’s because while LinkedIn isn’t a new platform, it feels like the results that people are getting there are new, so there’s two different strategies that people are doing behind the scenes right now that not many people are talking about. The first one’s from a content perspective, there’s this massive explosion of personal branding, and everyone thought about founder-led content, and we pioneered a lot of it in the UK. What it meant is you take your CEO, founder, C-suite execs, and you’d get a couple of them to post on LinkedIn as the face of the brand, and while that worked and was great, it’s really tough to get leverage and scale with it. So, let’s say one person, even if they’re going viral every week, you might get 100,000 impressions a week. It’s like, well, how do we double that? Well, we can’t, we can’t post more. So, on the content front, a lot of companies launch what we call ETC programs, so employee-generated content programs. There’s two ways you can do them. We do both for clients. The first one is you can simply pay an agency like us, and we will take over not just one or two, but you can even do five. Of us six key employees in the organization, so a head of marketing, a head of sales, a CTO (Chief Technology Officer), a CMO, a CEO, and what you get is this ever-present feeling on LinkedIn, where that company is everywhere, because all their team are posting, and it’s an ETC program, and what it does is rather than needing a founder to go viral and get hundreds of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of impressions, you actually only need each person to get 10,000 which is massively more realistic with how LinkedIn operates nowadays, but also allows for scale. If I’m getting 100,000 impressions a month, I want more impressions. Guess what? Let’s go over to sales and add the head of sales instead. Let’s add another 10,000 impressions, and it becomes much more scalable, and you can project it out as well. The other thing they do is internal advocacy programs, so SEMrush is one of my favorite examples of this. SEMrush actually hired, I think it was only a small team of two or three, so literally the only job they had is to encourage the other SEMrush employees to post more about SEMrush online, and what that meant is SEMrush literally, they went from something like 100,000 followers to 500,000 followers, not by increasing their company page content, but by getting more of their team to talk about semos, and again, this feeling that semos were everywhere, especially in 2024 and 2025 and what that meant is this incentive structure, so if you get certain amount of followers, you get this reward, certain amount of impressions you get this reward, and it means that you can get your whole organization at scale to stop posting on social media without actually spending much money, so they’re two things from a content perspective, and I don’t think anyone’s really talking about, I think SEMrush, in particular, really tried to keep it undercover. HubSpot is another example. HubSpot actually admitted their CMO admitted in a podcast, but they are in their interview process. They’re currently looking for, in normal roles, all roles on the company creator profiles. What that means is, let’s say they’re hiring for an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writer, they’re still looking for someone who can create content. So, almost tick boxing that interview, which is a bonus point, is you are a content creator, and the reason they’re doing that is that they understand that these ETC programs and getting your whole team to post can be massively valuable from a brand-alone perspective. You don’t, you no longer need to spend hundreds of 1000s on ads to get the brand out there. Instead, you just encourage your employees to post, and a really easy way to do that is just hiring people who are already posting, which is what HubSpot are doing.

Christian Klepp  27:19

So, it’s basically somebody like you said that’s already posting, they have already things on LinkedIn, or they’re already writing articles on LinkedIn, things of that nature, right?

Niall Ratcliffe  27:29

Exactly. And, ironically, we did it accidentally when we first launched. One thing I talk about a lot is, I think it was in 2025 24 Now, we did 17 million impressions on LinkedIn with a company page that only had 5000 followers, but the key was is that the impressions were an accumulation of our entire team becoming content creators rather than trying to pack everything into one page, one profile, which has been increasingly harder.

Christian Klepp  28:00

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s incredibly interesting. Let me, let me just take a step back and recap this a little bit. All right, so three things that you were talking about, right? This is the juicy stuff, folks. Like, just get a serve yet and wipe your mouth, right? Like, so the employee-generated content, I think, was the first one you mentioned. The second was the internal advocacy programs, and then the third one was hiring people who are already content creators. So, I mean, the third one, I think, for me, is clear as day. The second one, and the first one, okay? So, employee-generated content, so we know, and you’ve probably come across this more times than you care to remember. Yeah, Nile, that’s great, but you know, we don’t have time to write content, all right. And so that’s where they probably either default to, like, okay, let AI write it, or they outsource it to agencies like you, right. So, where’s where’s the balance?

Niall Ratcliffe  28:59

For 90% of…, not 90% but like for any small SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), I’d start with the internal advocacy program, and the reason I say that is because it’s, it’s literally virtually free. So let me give you an example. For us, yesterday we got 70 million questions. What the only thing we had was what we call an incentives page in Notion, where we have our like processes, and it’s literally, if you hit a certain follow account, you get rewards. It’s like 500 followers, you get an audible voucher. And then it was like 1000 followers, you get dinner, and it was like 220 500 followers, you get a night away. Then a weekend away, there’s a weekend abroad, and it’s like a week abroad. It’s like we paid out something like 4000 pounds in prizes and got 17 million impressions from like an earned media value, it’s an absolutely no brainer, but not to mention I like rewarding the team with prizes for talking about us as well, it’s like a fantastic win-win, and that’s exactly what SEMrush did, Semrush did a larger scale with hundreds of employees, but what SEMrush did is literally hired two or three. People internally to literally just do that and give them resources and give them incentives to go and do it. So, if you’re scared about budgets with an ETC program, just do an employee advocacy program, and if you have the budget, it’s much easier to just do ETC with an agency.

Christian Klepp  30:17

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, this next question is almost going to seem like a recap of everything that you’ve just said, but if you know you’re advising B2B companies to get out there and start taking action, right, so in terms of building trust, sales, and pipeline on LinkedIn without having to spend 1000s of dollars in ads, talk to us about what you think they should be doing, what are the what are the steps? What are the key components that should be included in the process?

Niall Ratcliffe  30:43

Yes, if I was to go away today, and I want to get, let’s say, 10 to 15 qualified meetings a week, that’s exactly what I would do. The first thing I would do is get positioning right. I would choose probably four or five people in the organization that I want to be the face of the organization, more than likely, depending on the size, it would be a founder or a CEO, a head of marketing or marketing lead, head of sales or a sales lead, and I’d probably have one more person in there as well, but sales, marketing, CEO, founder, maybe a CEO or something like that, that maybe have a different perspective. I would then get the positioning right in all of their profiles, plus the company page. What I mean by get the positioning right is, I would get professionally designed banners, professionally done headshots. I would rewrite their headlines to be very, very clear on the outcome the company provides. I’d rewrite their about section to be personal to them and give like a really relatable feel. And I would add resources to the featured section. The featured section just goes just below kind of your headline on your LinkedIn page, and it’s a great place to give a next step. So, for example, you can put a lead magnet. We have free playbooks, that type of thing. Just means that anyone who comes to the page, you can collect the leads. I do that first positioning. I then create content strategies for all for those people, and I would make them diverse to each person. So, from an agency perspective, we actually do an onboarding call with each person, which is an hour long to get to know their story, how they work in the company, that type of thing. If you’re doing it internally, you just develop a content strategy for each person to make sure that they’re unique, so yes, they’re talking about the company, what the company is doing, but always their perspective on it. For example, the head of marketing might talk about some campaigns they’re doing from a marketing perspective. The sales person might talk about commercial growth, the CEO, and what the CEO might talk about vision and where the company is going. I’d then put out content. I’d probably put out two to three posts a week per profile, but I wouldn’t go for five, no less than two. I’d then start outreach campaigns from each person. I would do an A/B style campaign, probably depending on what their ICP was. What that means, I would build a big list of all of the dream accounts in the industry, and I would then set separate by segments. So, for example, let’s say my buying committee, I could go after it was CFOs, commercial directors, and heads of sales, I would pick which person would connect best with them, so maybe the head of sales would connect best with the commercial director, maybe the marketing director would connect best with the CEO, and I would set outreach campaigns for all these people to go to those target audiences. My outreach campaign would be asset led, so what I mean by that is I would create an asset that was valuable to my ICP, for example, let’s say my ICP are really interested in how to use AI automation in their marketing, and like create a quick two-page PDF that explains the different ways, but the fastest growing brands are using AI automation in their marketing. I would create that PDF, and my first message would be really conversational, I would say, Hi. Love what you’re doing at this company. You guys are absolutely killing it at the minute. I put together this PDF. I’ve been sent out to companies like yours that are at this staff range and growing quickly. I thought it might be useful for you guys. Are you against me sending it over? It’s really software like they’ll either say they’ll either ignore you and say no, not wanting it, or they’ll say no, just feel free to send it over. I’d love to have a look. It’s really soft, but I’m shrunk with value. I always say this: you’d never like knock on someone’s door and just like have nothing to offer them. If you go to a wedding, you bring a gift. If you’re to someone’s house, you bring like wine. So, in a sales conversation, I want to do the same thing. So, I’d show up like that, and that is literally it. I’d manage all their inboxes in one inbox called a uni inbox, and I would have a sales rep whenever a reply comes in getting back to them straight away to start the sales conversation or calling them using other channels to start that conversation as well. That’s really, really simple, and that would compound over time. So I get the positioning right, I start posting content, and then do outreach. The key thing about LinkedIn, not to forget here, and why content is important, is when you do outreach campaigns on LinkedIn, they all start with a connection request. So I might send a connection request to you, Christian, and then I might try and send you a message. You might think, you know what, I don’t want this AI automation guide right now, so you ignore her, because we’re connect. Said you’ll then see my content on your feed next week, and it might be in three four weeks time, or 369 months time, but you actually said, “Do you know what we need to be doing more AI automation? That guy sent me a message, and then you’ll go back to it, and with that, there for people, I could start 12, I’d reach out to about 2400 prospects a month, and I’d probably be starting anywhere between 100 to 200 conversations a month, positive conversations, which is a lot more than you would get with the type of budget that that type of campaign would cost.

Christian Klepp  35:37

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s an absolutely amazing plan. I wonder, here’s my reservation with that approach. Now I know you’ve got a good answer for this, right? Because you’re talking about focusing on these specific roles within the companies, right? So you’ve got the founder, CEO, CMO, sales, and all that, and then you’re developing content strategies for each of these four providing unique perspectives, how do you make sure that you try to tie it all together, that it doesn’t, they all talk about the company in their own way, but how do you make sure that it doesn’t go off tangent, right, in in a very fragmented direction, and that’s the, I think that’s the word I’m trying to look for, how do you make sure that it’s not the approach is not fragmented,

Niall Ratcliffe  36:19

Um, ironically, I want it to be a little bit fragmented. I want my head of marketing talking about different things from my other person, and there’s simple ways that you can actually bring it together, even if they talk about completely different topics. My favorite one, everyone has the same color head behind you, and everyone has the same start of the headline. That seems like a really nothing thing on LinkedIn, but it has this omnipresent feel of like all of my team have yellow heads behind them. We’ve got yellow heads, but it’s like the background is yellow behind them. What that means is that people just see these yellow heads on their feet and they’re like, who are those guys? And I might be talking about my entrepreneurial journey, my internal marketing person might be talking about a campaign that’s coming up, my co-founder might be talking about endurance events, but no matter what, bringing people in for different reasons. Maybe someone is interested in ultra marathons, like my co-founder, and comes across his post because of that, but then is aware of our brand now. And then actually, when my sales director reaches out to them, they’re like, oh, I know that company, they have the co-founder who does the running,

Christian Klepp  37:27

yeah,

Niall Ratcliffe  37:27

Or so it’s like it’s actually like these two different ways I was thinking about it when you were saying that, my first thing is like everyone’s taking a different angle on the same thing, and naturally that brings it all cohesively, but my honest opinion is I want it to be a little bit different. I want my people who will relate to, for example, a female who is head of sales is a very different person to who might relate to a male head of marketing or someone who is into endurance sports versus someone who is into knitting, and by talking about knitting, you might bring in a different talk of what type of audience than you would talking about endurance sports. So, by being fragmented, ironically, sometimes an advantage as well.

Christian Klepp  38:13

Okay, sounds good. Niall, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Please, quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Niall Ratcliffe  38:28

Yeah, so the easiest way to get in touch with me is through LinkedIn. Niall Ratcliffe, just search me there.

Christian Klepp  38:32

That was an obvious one, right?

Niall Ratcliffe  38:33

Other than that, if you’re interested in what we do or need help with LinkedIn, just go to noticed.co and you’ll find us there as well.

Christian Klepp  38:42

Fantastic, fantastic. Once again, sir. Thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Niall Ratcliffe  38:48

Thanks so much for having me.

Christian Klepp  38:49

All right, bye for now.