Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

It’s my birthday today! I turn 25.

A lot has happened in the past year. Grew Compound, my agency, from a team of 1 (myself) to a team of 9—and soon to be 10. Published 45+ editions of Social Files (thanks for reading).

Today’s edition is one of my favorite yet.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Exit Five’s ~$1.5M LinkedIn Strategy

How Dave Gerhardt built a profitable B2B media business with social content

Dave Gerhardt’s built a $1.5M+ per year business off the back of his LinkedIn presence (most recent revenue estimate I could find…could be higher now!).

Exit Five is a B2B media company that covers all things B2B marketing. Dave also wrote the book on founder-led content. Literally, it’s called Founder Brand. Buy it.

According to Dave: “If you have a strong POV about your industry and your customer's problems and you're willing to write about them here on LinkedIn, you can tap into arguably the greatest marketing and PR channel ever created.”

Today I’ll walk you through the genius of the Exit Five LinkedIn playbook. We’ll cover:

• How to position your LinkedIn account to be magnetic for your ICP

• What real ‘consistency’ looks like, and how Dave has built trust with his audience on LinkedIn

• How Exit Five has manufactured a ‘Content Ecosystem’ that makes it feel as if they’re everywhere

• How Exit Five uses its podcast as a content engine for LinkedIn

By the end of this piece, you’ll have at least 3-4 specific strategies you can apply to your LinkedIn motion today.

You need to trust LinkedIn.

Too many founders I talk to have a deep-rooted skepticism of LinkedIn, and ‘content’ in general. They view it as a waste of time. A distraction.

With that POV, you're dead on arrival.

One reason why Exit Five wins so big on LinkedIn is because Dave believes in it. The belief breeds consistency—he posts daily.

He’s been posting on LinkedIn for years. he started writing on LinkedIn during a previous role as CMO at Drift. And he’s kept showing up long enough to build a massive, engaged audience.

Dave knows that LinkedIn is the money maker.

He wrote (in a LinkedIn post), “The ROI from social media is not just in direct sales (which you can see over time) but it's in the content you're creating, the signals you're getting, the DMs, the hello's at in-person events from people who feel like they know you.”

On our podcast episode together, Dave mentioned sometimes feeling the urge to ‘do a documentary’ or something crazy like that. Then he remembers that simple LinkedIn posts drive the majority of his business.

That trust in the channel makes it easy to post. It also makes it easy to encourage the rest of the team to post (more on that playbook shortly). Start here.

Dave’s nailed Exit Five’s content positioning.

One of Dave’s LinkedIn recommendations is to be the ‘go-to resource’ for your ICP.

Another way to frame this is to ask yourself: Why should someone in my ICP follow me?

If you can’t answer that question, you don’t have a LinkedIn strategy.

Exit Five embodies that. It’s crystal clear what their answer is. They’re positioning themselves as the go-to resource for B2B Marketing.

I think a lot of founders are apprehensive about LinkedIn because they don’t want to turn into a dancing monkey content creator. Good news. You don’t have to play that game.

According to Dave, “You don’t have to be the next MrBeast.” You don’t need millions—or even hundreds of thousands—of followers to print money with LinkedIn. The number varies by founder, but if you have 5-7K high-quality followers, you can build a legit startup.

In 99% of cases, just posting about your expertise—as it relates to your product—is enough to build that core group of 5-7K hyper-engaged B2B cult members.

Dave has the credibility to position himself this way on social. He has the decade of experience in B2B marketing as a C-suite exec. Credibility is a multiplier.

Ask yourself—what’s the topic that I am most equipped to write about, that my ICP cares about?

Dave’s Content Funnel

A Content Funnel is a way to organize your LinkedIn topics. Here’s a quick primer for the uninitiated:

→ Top of funnel content = broader “founder life” topics that cast a wide net, but aren’t super specific.

→ Middle of funnel content = industry-specific content that is targeted to your ICP. This has a smaller ‘total addressable audience’ but often attracts more relevant followers.

→ Bottom of funnel content = product-related content like case studies, feature highlights, etc.

Let’s map this to Dave’s content.

TOFU: Dave often posts about his journey as a founder. One theme I’ve seen a lot lately is the idea of transitioning from ‘solopreneur’ to building a ‘real company.’ This type of content would fall into the TOFU bucket, as it’s more broadly appealing to founders and professionals on Linkedin.

Here’s an example of what a top of funnel post would look like:

MOFU: All of the posts that are valuable to B2B marketers, but not direct sales pitches for Exit Five. All of the podcast clips would fall into this category.

BOFU: These posts would be customer reviews, product announcements, and other content that directly promotes Exit Five. I would also say sponsored content falls into this category.

Here’s an example of a bottom-of-funnel post that both:

• Directly promotes Exit Five

• Performed quite well on LinkedIn

Here’s a savable graphic you can refer to as an example for how to build out a content funnel:

Exit Five’s Content Ecosystem.

This is the secret sauce. When companies go from founder-led content to building a true Content Ecosystem, they graduate from ‘personal brand building’ to a more sophisticated strategy.

The term ‘Content Ecosystem’ sounds fancy. To be honest, it just means having multiple accounts post on behalf of your company.

The best brands on social media have a cast of characters. Take Represent, a rapidly-growing British apparel brand, for example. Their founder, George Heaton, has built a cult-like following on social media. His brother, and co-founder, Michael is also active. The company accounts also have a coordinated strategy. It’s all calculated.

B2B companies are starting to do the same. Just look at beehiiv. Or RB2B. Or FERMAT. The list is starting to grow—and Exit Five is on it.

There are 3 parts to this:

→ Founder content

→ Employee content

→ Company content

Every one of E5’s 5 team members is active on social media.

→ Dave Gerhardt; Founder & CEO

→ Dan Murphy; COO

→ Danielle Messler; Head of Content

→ Matthew Carnevale; Marketing Manager

→ Anna Vermillion; Operations Assistant

They’re company page is also consistently posting—and doing quite well for a a company account in 2024.

This ecosystem playbook accomplishes a few things:

1 - More eyeballs. Duh. Sure, there’s some overlap between the accounts’ followings. But getting more people in the mix increases the likelihood of new marketers coming across Exit Five.

As of writing this piece on September 22, 2024, the Exit Five content ecosystem has 270,694 followers on LinkedIn.

2 - Omnipresence. When you have multiple people posting to LinkedIn, your audience feels like you're everywhere. They can’t escape—and I mean that positively.

Whenever I open LinkedIn, I can’t scroll more than a few times without seeing a post from Dave or Matt or Anna or anyone on the Exit Five team. Their content ecosystem creates an echo chamber for B2B marketers, like me.

The strategy, in a meme:

3 - ICP coverage.

For example, Dave’s content might be helpful to a newer marketer straight out of college, but that marketer might actually relate to Anna’s content more. Someone in a Marketing Manager position might relate to Matt’s content more. You see where I’m going with this.

Think about your favorite TV show. Two people watching the same show are likely to resonate with different characters. The same thing applies to different people on your team who are posting content.

4 - Recruiting. The promise of building a personal brand is a great way to attract talented team members to your company.

It’s such a win-win. The company gets increased visibility from and connection with their community. The employee gets to build a priceless asset that stays with them the rest of their career.

It’s funny, because so many companies are afraid of letting their employees build a brand. What if they leave?!?

Yes…so what? If an employee is ambitious enough to build a personal audience, they’re gonna do it anyway. Might as well have them do it in a way that’s mutually beneficial.

Podcast to LinkedIn pipeline.

This isn’t rocket science so I won’t spend a ton of time here.

But, the podcast strategy is worth calling out. Here’s how it looks:

→ Dave records an episode of the Exit Five podcast

→ They produce and publish the long-form episode

→ They produce and publish short-form clips of the episode

→ They send clips to the guest who appeared on the show

That last point—sending clips to guests—is such low-hanging fruit. Make it EASY for your guests to share your show. Send them clips. Write a draft of sample copy.

The upside is massive. For example, when I was on the show, the Exit Five team notified me when the episode was up and supplied me with clips to post.

The clip I posted popped off and hit 1.1M views. Yes, million.

On top of the visibility, podcast is also a smart move because it creates a social proof flywheel. A lot of the guests are happy Exit Five customers—like myself 🙂

And of course, if someone is willing to sit and listen to you talk for an hour about a subject, they trust you. When they need a product in that category…who do you think they’re buying from?

You get it.

Commit to content.

Exit Five is an example of what happens when B2B companies commit to content.

It’s not “Sure, we’ll test this channel for 30 days and can it if we don’t see leads increase by 67%.”

It’s “We’re committed to posting content to LinkedIn for years. We know it works.”

It’s no surprise that the business is growing at the clip that it is. It’s no surprise that Dave was able to fill a conference with 200 of the smartest B2B marketers (the LinkedIn playbook for the event deserves its own case study).

TLDR?

Start posting content to LinkedIn. Then, encourage your team to. Do it for a long time. Bring in revenue. Simple, not easy.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• How to Grow Your B2B Brand on LinkedIn by Exit Five 🎥

• The MKT1 Guide to Positioning by Emily Kramer 📝

• 5 LinkedIn Templates You Need by Tommy Clark 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, appreciate you allowing me into you inbox every week.

Question for you. What’s one B2B company you think is crushing with social and content lately? Always looking for examples to study and share in the newsletter. Reply and LMK.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: I just released a template pack, with 30+ of the prompts we use with B2B CEOs at Compound.

PPS: If you want Compound to run a founder-led content motion for you… save a spot on our waitlist here. We’re at capacity through September, but looking to partner with some SaaS startups in October.