Every marketing dollar you spend on trade shows, outbound, podcasts, or paid ads eventually sends a buyer to LinkedIn. What they find there is going to either multiply that investment or work against it. Most B2B companies are managing their spend, but ignoring the tool that can back their efforts with credibility and substance.

Too many B2B companies treat LinkedIn like a broadcasting channel. You push out a post, hope something lands… maybe you even go viral. (Gasp! A girl can only hope, right!?) Then you simply measure likes, engagement rate and follower growth, and then call it a day. Or worse, you hand the company page to someone three levels down the org chart, post occasionally, and that’s fine because LinkedIn “isn’t really your main channel, anyway.”

I totally get why this happens. LinkedIn is one of fifteen zillion things on a B2B marketer’s plate. There are campaigns to run, events to plan, a website that needs updating, and a sales team that needs better collateral. So LinkedIn continues to fall to the end of the priority list in terms of both time and budget.

LinkedIn is more than just another B2B channel to manage

Your company presence on the platform can support and amplify all of your other marketing efforts. But for many companies, their presence works against them.

The trade show where you spent $30,000. The outbound sequence your SDRs have been running for six weeks. The podcast appearance where your founder absolutely crushed it. The warm referral from a client who already loves you. All of those touchpoints eventually send someone to LinkedIn. And when they get there, what they find either confirms the good vibes, or it creates doubt.

Why haven’t they posted in 3 months? Why doesn’t their founder even have a banner photo? The SDR emailing me has a profile that talks all about making President’s Club… he’s more concerned with his commission!

That’s the function LinkedIn is really serving in your buyer’s journey, whether you’ve designed it to or not.

I’ve Been The Buyer in This Story. It Didn’t End Well.

A while back, I was looking to switch social media scheduling tools. A trusted resource recommended one to me, and the website said all the right things. The pricing worked, and I even did a trial and piloted it with a customer. All systems go, right?

Until I was doing my due diligence and I checked out their LinkedIn. This company, selling a social media scheduling tool, hadn’t posted in 8 months. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X…. same thing.

I tried messaging the company. I tried messaging the person listed as their CEO and then their Head of Product. No one ever responded. Absolute silence, so I went with another tool.

They didn’t lose me on features, and they didn’t lose me on price. They lost a hot, referred, ready-to-buy customer because their LinkedIn presence created a doubt their website wasn’t enough to overcome. And the fact that nobody was home when I came knocking was the final straw.

That’s the credibility layer working against a company. And if it can happen to a social media company based on their own social media presence, it can happen to your company, too.

The LinkedIn Credibility Problem Nobody Is Managing

Let’s say a B2B company invests significant budget in demand gen. They’re running paid campaigns, attending industry events, doing outbound. The sales team is busy drumming up consistent pipeline activity.

But the company’s LinkedIn presence just sits there, working against everything else they’re spending.

The company page has a nice banner image and posts that go out twice a month announcing webinars or earnings updates. The executive profiles read like resumes written in 2019; it’s a sea of “results-oriented” and “strategic vision.” The sales reps are sending connection requests with no context, DMing prospects with templated pitches, and wondering why response rates are so low.

This is a huge miss. Four out of five people on LinkedIn drive business decisions. 93% of B2B marketers are active on the platform. And 40% of users engage with Company Pages every week. The prospects evaluating you are there, paying attention, and making judgments, and your brand might look polished in your pitch deck but be totally forgettable (at best) on the platform where it matters most. Even worse, you might be sending confusing signals or mixed messaging to members of the buying committee that you haven’t had the chance to interact with yet.

Everything you’re spending points people toward LinkedIn at some point. And your LinkedIn presence should make the case that your company is trustworthy, experienced, and worth taking seriously.

LinkedIn’s Algorithm Is an LLM Now. You’re Balancing for Bots and Humans.

LinkedIn’s algorithm is now effectively an LLM. That changes the job your presence has to do.

You need enough content and keywords for the bots to understand your profile and your expertise so the platform serves you up when people are searching for your skills or looking for content around your subject matter. But once the humans arrive, everything they read has to build trust. They have to like what you’re saying enough to want to reach out and work with you.

Balancing for both the bots and the humans is a big deal now. Most companies fail on both sides at the same time. Their pages don’t have the right context for the machines to understand and they’re also too generic for the humans to remember. Get it right and the platform surfaces you more, and when the people land on your page they like what they see.

Memorable Doesn’t Mean Flashy. It Means Every Piece Tells a Story.

And preferably the same story.

Meh to Memorable is the frame I use because I think it’s realistic about where most B2B companies are starting from. Not broken or offensive, simply a bit forgettable. Which, in a crowded market, is its own kind of expensive. But that’s a post for another day!

Memorable doesn’t mean flashy. (And I beg you not to jump straight to unhinged in the name of being memorable.) It means your presence reflects the caliber of your business, and that every layer of it tells the same story.

Small Details Build Trust

I still smack my forehead like my 3rd favorite emoji when I see AE profiles where the entire About section is resume bullets: President’s Club, 130% of quota, top performer three years running. Are you trying to find a job or close a deal?

Put yourself in the prospect’s chair. This AE is positioning themselves as your advisor, your advocate, your partner… and their profile is a billboard for how much money they extract from customers. How is that buyer supposed to believe they’re getting the best deal?

I’ve also seen profile photos a full twenty years out of date. It seems harmless until the networking coffee, when the person who walks in looks like the profile picture’s grandfather. Trust is built on small details, but it’s eroded by small ones too.

When Every Layer Tells The Same Story, LinkedIn Becomes a Lever You can Pull

When every layer lines up — the Company Page, executives, SMEs and the sales team all telling the same story — LinkedIn stops being another channel you maintain out of obligation and starts functioning the way it was always supposed to be. It strengthens and connects what buyers hear about you and what they find when they go looking to validate you. It makes a warm referral even warmer, and makes your outbound less of an uphill battle because the credibility is already there when your prospect joins the party.

Where To Start: Fixing Your Company’s LinkedIn Presence (In The Right Order)

When companies decide to fix this, they usually want to jump straight to a complex content plan and editorial calendar. Here’s the sequence that works for my clients.

Step 1: Fix Your LinkedIn Company Page First

Start with the company page, because it’s the foundation for the entire presence. Everything else gets built on top of it, and every other profile in your ecosystem ultimately points back to it. Yes, you’ll need a content plan for the page, but also take some time to optimize what you have in place, assess what’s working, and determine what internal resources you already have at your disposal that can help.

In tandem, study the landscape. What are your competitors saying? What are customers asking for and looking for? What are they already telling you in comments and user groups? Your positioning on LinkedIn shouldn’t be invented in a conference room. The best part of social media is that all this insight is sitting in plain sight in the conversations your market is already having daily.

Now we build upon that foundation.

Step 2: Build Your Founder or SME Profiles

Leverage your founder or an internal subject matter expert. This is where most companies either skip ahead or get it wrong, usually via ghostwriting. But there’s a huge difference between ghostwriting that shapes a founder’s actual thoughts and opinions into formats that work on the platform, and ghostwriting that does the thinking for them. The first is the best practice, and that’s what becomes a force multiplier for your overall presence. The second is a huge credibility risk. The people who know that executive IRL can tell immediately that they don’t speak or write like that, so it rings obviously fake. The same logic applies to AI: use it to format, brainstorm hooks, or pressure-test your argument. But the thinking has to be yours. (Well, it has to be theirs – you get the point!)

Step 3: Get Your Sales Team Visible (AKA Social Selling)

Bring in the sales team and biz dev folks. There will always be the reps who will tell you that social media is marketing’s job. The good ones follow the money, though. They see the value of quality outreach and relationship building. And a good marketing team knows how to serve up the right support so reps can get in, do what they need to do, and get on with their day. This is social selling, and it isn’t about turning your AEs into influencers. It’s about making sure that when a prospect checks the profile of the person who just emailed them, what they find helps to build the case instead of undermining it.

Step 4: Turn Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

Don’t forget broader Employee Engagement. I know there’s someone on your customer success team that has a secret product hack that all of your customers would love to know about. Or someone on your product team working through the roadmap who could share insights into what’s coming and how they prioritize new features. Most employees want to help with your social media efforts, but they just don’t know how. Your employees can be your best brand ambassadors. 

Two Objections I Hear About LinkedIn Content All the Time

“Isn’t the personal stuff a bit much? This isn’t Facebook.” It’s not Facebook, but the lines are more blurred than ever. People do business with people they like and trust, and they struggle to like or trust a logo. Sharing stories and anecdotes isn’t unprofessional, although you should trust your gut when deciding which stories make the cut. These insights are how the humans in the bots-vs-humans equation decide you’re real, credible, and someone they want to work with.

“We might alienate someone.” You might, but that goes back to the judgement and discernment that will come from trusting your gut. As the saying goes, if you’re for everyone, you’re for no one. Strategic content doesn’t alienate, but it does filter. It will push the wrong people away exactly as much as it pulls the right people in, and that’s the point. You do have to be willing to let your content do some of that qualifying for you.

How Much Time LinkedIn Actually Takes

LinkedIn takes real work and real effort. It’s a genuine form of networking now, and networking has never been free.

The bare minimum for anyone building their presence on the platform is about 15 minutes a day of strategic engagement. That will keep you present and keep the credibility layer from working against you. But if you want to move the dial and really accelerate your impact, you’ll need more than an hour a week. Or you need a support engine behind your founder and subject matter experts so those hours count. That’s the system I help marketing and comms teams build.

When a buyer goes looking for you today, after the trade show, the cold email, or the trusted referral, what do they find?

If you’re not sure, (or if you are sure, but you don’t love the answer) you’re in the right place. I help B2B marketing and comms teams build a LinkedIn presence that backs up every dollar they’re already spending. Let’s talk about what Meh to Memorable looks like for your company.