Tommy Clark’s Post

If I was tasked with helping an early-stage SaaS founder (pre-seed - Series A) launch a founder-led content strategy here on LinkedIn to increase inbound leads—here’s the exact playbook I’d run: CONTEXT: Over the past 15 months, I’ve helped 30+ SaaS founders launch organic social content. My agency Compound Content Studio has also been at or near capacity since we started and on pace for [redacted] in revenue (sorry, not sharing that yet)…most of which has come inbound from social or referrals. PLAYBOOK: STEP 1) Pick your platforms. For SaaS companies—post on LinkedIn and post from your founder's account. Once you nail LI, consider X. But start here in 2024. STEP 2) Establish your content positioning. This really isn’t a ‘content’ problem—it’s a company problem. If you are unclear around who you help and the problem you solve, translating that into compelling social content will be hard. Example: I won’t shut up about B2B SaaS social strategy. I attract B2B SaaS founders and marketers who want to use social to get leads 🤠 STEP 3) Make sure your profile is presentable → Clear, high-res PFP close up to your face → Good headline using the formula [ROLE + COMPANY + VALUE PROP] - look at mine → Update your featured link in bio to be either a newsletter/lead magnet OR a client case study Now, you’re ready to ~start shipping~ STEP 4) Commit to a cadence. Ramp up to 5x per week. Nobody is concerned about you “posting too much.” You can’t post 2x per month and expect to win on LinkedIn. That’s like lifting weights 2x per month and expecting to build muscle. Not gonna happen. Frequent posting does 2 things: A) You build the SKILL of content output. B) You collect data on what performs and what doesn’t. STEP 5) Start posting. Of those 5 posts per week, start with these formats: POST 1: Business-related personal story. POST 2: Story-based listicle. POST 3: Customer anecdote. POST 4: Polarizing industry opinion. POST 5: Case study post. STEP 6) Assess what works. Break this down by: -Topic -Hook style -Content format What ‘works’ can mean 2 things. What maximizes content performance? What drives the most inbound interest? STEP 7) Double down on what works and prune the rest. Hit your winning angles over and over again. Ideally, you want to find repeatable topics, stories, etc. Think of it like finding a winning pitch when fundraising. When you find a winning pitch, you're not just gonna throw it out in the next investor meeting because you're scared to sound ‘repetitive.’ Run it into the ground. STEP 8) Commit to at least 90 days of shipping consistently. Going to the gym for 7 days straight won’t give you a chiseled six pack. Sending 100 cold emails won’t get you a calendar full of sales calls. Posting for 1-2 weeks and going dark won’t build you an inbound engine. 5 content pieces per week for 90 days. Then you can tell me if it ‘didn’t work.’ That’s all. Out of characters. If helpful, fwd to your fav SaaS founder 🤝

A lot of B2B marketers tell you not to shill your product on social. I used to be one of them. Ugh, I cringe when I look back at some of my old takes. But that’s personal growth, right? You still shouldn’t make EVERY post about your product. But you can position “bottom-of-funnel” posts in a way that makes them perform quite well. Here are a few of my favorite post templates to test: (1) Periodic company updates. Post these monthly, and quarterly. Share your top 3 highlights. Then share your top 3 learnings. Then share what’s next on your roadmap. This works well when you include an eye-catching growth metric in the hook. (2) List of every feature launched in the first 6 months of the year. This is a good one for displaying shipping velocity. Position this type of post more as a “milestone” than a product shill. Give props to your engineering and product teams. We ran this with a client and the post drove ~5 high-quality demo requests. (3) New hire posts. LinkedIn originated as a hiring platform. People, and the platform, still eat new hire announcements up. Lean into this in your content strategy. Especially as an early company where every hire is especially significant, make a post to announce. (4) Case study posts. Tried and true. Narrative case study posts always hit. Like the feature list, position the case study as a milestone you're proud of as a founder, not a sales pitch. Generally, including the most compelling metric in the hook is best practice here. My recommendation? BOFU content should make up ~20% of your content output as a founder of an early-stage SaaS company. So, if you're posting 5x per week, 1x should be BOFU. 1x case study per month 1x new hire post per month 1x company update post per month 1x feature highlight per month There. Just gave you 25% of your content calendar. PS: I shared more of 'what's working now in B2B social' in the most recent edition of Social Files. Let me know if you want me to send it to you.

Every early-stage SaaS CEO I talk to lately says they want to ‘test’ LinkedIn content. 90% of them have a WILD misconception of what it means to properly test a content strategy. Here’s how it usually goes down (and how you can win in 2024): You have no idea how often I get into a sales conversation and it goes something like this… “Yeah, we want to test-run founder-led content on LinkedIn. Thinking we post like 2x per month and see what happens.” Here’s why this approach is misguided: (1) Nobody knows who you are. You need to be popping up in your ICP’s feed near daily to change that. I like 5x per week as a cadence. (2) Content is a skill. Whether you're writing your own, or giving feedback on content a partner produced for you. You need to develop a sense of what ‘works.’ That doesn’t happen on 2x per month. Think of it like this. You don’t get absolutely jacked—or beach-ready if you're not trying to be an absolute unit—by going to the gym twice per month and doing a 6-minute abs workout. Expecting that would be silly. Building a great physique takes consistency. 3-5 workouts per week, over the course of months. Content works in a similar way. Consistency of posting builds awareness and trust with your ICP. Consistency of posting also builds your skill as a content creator—and smart CEOs will look at this as something to run towards, not away from. My recommendation? → Start with 3x per week as a bare minimum cadence. → Ramp to 5x per week. This is a good sweet spot. There’s a reason why all of the SaaS founders on LinkedIn we look to as having a ‘dialed-in’ content strategy post damn near daily. They understand the value of consistent publishing. I’ll leave you with a quote from bodybuilding legend, Ronnie Coleman: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-a** weights.” Quite relevant to content, too.

Early-stage SaaS marketers. Want to get your CEO posting more on LinkedIn? Here’s the exact framework we use with our clients to craft 5x pieces of founder-led LinkedIn content every week for a Series A SaaS CEO: (1) Prepare 7-10 content prompts based on topics that we think will perform well on LinkedIn, specifically with the startup’s ICP. We’ll balance this between: - TOFU: Broader business-building and ‘founder life’ topics that perform well on LinkedIn, but may cast a wider net - MOFU: Industry-specific thought leadership that is value-based (not salesy) and is targeted to your ICP - BOFU: Product-related content like customer anecdotes, case studies, company updates. (2) Get the CEO on a 30-45 minute Content Interview where we run through each of these 7-10 prompts, in a conversational format. Think of it like a podcast that isn’t getting published anywhere. Should feel casual to the CEO, but the prompts give us the structure to extract relevant source material. (3) The transcript from that Content Interview serves as the source material for the LinkedIn content. The transcript is the marble block. We’re the sculptors that craft it into a piece of art worthy of the LinkedIn timeline. The beauty of this format is that the content that’s ‘ghostwritten’ is not really ghostwritten at all. The posts were ideas and stories that only the CEO can write about, because they’re unique to him or her. (4) Our team turns that transcript into 5x posts for the week with optimized hooks, cleaned up flow, and proper formatting to succeed on LinkedIn. The content is matched to the tone of voice of the CEO because it came from the interview. We’ll also have tight feedback loops with the CEO to refine tone of voice in Month 1 of this project. If I was a busy CEO who understood the power of founder-led content, but doesn’t have the time to sit and write for 5-10hrs per week, I’d either: - Have the marketing hire on my internal team own this process. Just copy-paste this workflow. I also have a YouTube video that lays it out in even more detail. - Work with an external partner like a freelancer or agency to run this process. If you want to test-run this, bookmark this post. And follow me for more insights on how to win with social content as a SaaS startup.

There are 5 things smart SaaS founders should NEVER do in their marketing. I’ve helped 30+ SaaS founders launch a Linkedin presence over the past 15 months. I’ve spoken to another 50-100+ so are wanting to use content to get leads for their startup. Today’s video goes over 5 common mistakes to avoid in your content marketing, if you want it to work. (1) Spreading yourself too thin. You don’t need to be on 5+ platforms as an early stage company. You just need to dominate one. That “one” is LinkedIn. Look at what Adam Robinson has been able to do off of this platform alone. (2) Sporadic posting cadence. A shocking number of founders I talk to want to “test” LinkedIn by posting 2x per month. Haha. Good luck. 5x per week is the cadence I’d aim for if I was a founder serious about using this channel to grow their company. (3) No differentiation. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you can do in marketing. You need a strong POV. You have one, you're just scared to share it. I like how Jimmy Kim has taken a strong stance against the goliath in the ecom ESP category. It’s working well for him and Sendlane. (4) Corporate HR speak. Jargon dilutes your content. Avoid. Think about those HR trainings you were forced to watch in that job you ended up leaving. Yawn. Yet, a lot of SaaS companies have content that reads in that same tone. The fix? Write like you speak. (5) Mis-targeting your ICP. You need to have Founder-Content-Market fit. Does your content attract the right ICP? And is your founder the right person to publish that content? Great example of someone doing this well is Austin Hughes. More detail in the video deep dive. Also, LinkedIn has a weird time cutoff on videos. If you want the full, 23-minute version of this, check it out on my YouTube.