Our CC LinkedIn content strategy is a subset of our wider content strategy. (I’ll add here that we should all have documented content strategies.) Also, I realise ours is not the same as one for a large enterprise. But, as our content strategy says, these documents are a ‘North Star’ that will always guide you. 

 

The ‘Why’ of a LinkedIn Strategy

LinkedIn has become a much bigger part of our content strategy in the past two years. There is always a danger of doing too much on borrowed media (in the classic owned/borrowed/paid/earned model), but we made a call that LinkedIn is only going to get more important – and that it will be kept relatively free of toxic content or AI slop. 

We benchmark ourselves against nine other agencies (ask me how to do this and I’ll share), post every weekday (making us more consistent than our competitor set), and have won at least one big client directly through LinkedIn. 

I would say this, but I think we should all be active on LinkedIn, as individuals and as companies. 

  

The What (or is this ‘How’?) 

Our in-house LinkedIn management team is just three of us (me, Eve Michell and Daine Lindsay), with the rest of the team contributing content. We’re a subset of a wider socials/newsletters team. Both meet briefly early each week, back-to-back. 

We have two main targets in mind:
 

• Primary audience: our clients/prospects 

• Secondary audience: people who might work for Collective Content one day, either as staffers or freelancers 

A third group that we reach, and which sometimes engages with us, is tech leaders. This is mainly because of some of the team’s background serving CIOs, CISOs and other tech leaders back in their journalism days. It also differentiates us from other agencies that do thought leadership and content marketing in the tech or professional services sectors. 

Our focus is on utility (the Hippocratic Oath of content marketing being ‘First, be useful’), showing we know certain subject areas, and sharing our culture, which involves humour. Our main goal is to build trust. This ties in with what we generally promise our clients, namely that content will lead to ‘trust through understanding’ (funnily enough, our tag line) and help them win.

  

Our posts

We maintain a calendar that looks ahead roughly a month. We’re not shy about swapping posts in or out at the last minute, especially as news breaks or we notice too many similar types of post bunched together. 

What’s our mix? We break it down as: 

• Posts that showcase great vendor work – the examples are probably about half the time from clients of ours, although not always work we’ve created 

• Reposting partners’ or clients’ posts 

• Writing tips from the team  

• Editing tips from the team  

• On-location photo posts, e.g., when we’re on a video shoot 

• Event posts, often using our unique format (especially great when we don’t have audio or video from a live event) 

• Clips from our podcast 

• Carousels – which can be on almost any content-related subject 

• Promotional posts – these are rare but, when done, unashamedly boost things such as our ‘How to choose a content agency’ guide or our newsletter Posts about AI – not so much a post ‘type’ but a subject that comes up hourly, in all its thorny ways 

• Curated news articles that involve our ecosystem 

• Reposts of Becky Thompson’s partner marketing series 

• Our end-of-week round-up – everything from people we’ve met and events we’ve attended, to favourite meals, non-business reads and pets, lots of pets! 

And we spend a lot of time in the LinkedIn dashboard working out which posts have worked and – on a good day – why. 

  

Bottom line

I could say our goal with LinkedIn is to generate leads or new business. But, honestly, it’s about showing would-be clients or staff who we really are and what interests us. Over time, you can say this is brand building. 

Take a look at our page to see it all in action: https://www.linkedin.com/company/collective-content/  

What are you doing with LinkedIn? I’d love to hear. Or to help.