Social Files by Tommy Clark
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Is founder-led LinkedIn content worth it for your business?

Is founder-led LinkedIn content worth it for your business?

An honest assessment.

Tommy Clark
June 09, 2025

Hey!

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

Hope you had a great weekend. I just got back from a week in SF. We just completed our first round of in-person client content shoots. Went great!

Now, on to today's essay. This might surprise you to hear me say this, but it doesn't make sense for every company to invest money into creating LinkedIn content.

Today, I want to help you figure out whether LinkedIn makes sense for you and how you should approach investing in the channel in a way that's most responsible for your specific company.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Is founder-led LinkedIn content worth it for your business?

An honest assessment.

Every week, I take 5-10 calls with B2B founders who are interested in posting on LinkedIn. On each of those calls, almost without fail, some version of the following question comes up:

“Is my audience actually on LinkedIn?”

And that question naturally leads to the next:

“Is it worth it to post on LinkedIn?”

And that leads to:

“Is it worth it to hire an agency [or someone in-house] to produce our LinkedIn content?” If they don’t ask this…well, they’re at least thinking it.

My answer to this line of questioning might surprise you. There are specific types of B2B companies that have a much easier time seeing ROI from LinkedIn. Today, I want to help you answer each of these questions for yourself.

Is your audience on LinkedIn?

Quick answer: if you are building a B2B company—like a SaaS or an agency—I’m almost certain you will benefit from publishing content on LinkedIn. I say ‘almost’ only because I’m sure there’s some weird edge case I’m not accounting for.

But for most…there is no downside to posting.

If you want to get an understanding of the ROI of LinkedIn content, I’d recommend reading this piece after you're done here.

TLDR of my case for founder-led content:

You'll get more leads.
You’ll have a higher closing percentage with those leads.
You’ll drive more traffic to your website.
You’ll see better performance across adjacent marketing channels—paid media, cold outbound, events, etc.

The more relevant question to answer is the last I listed above: “Is it worth it to hire an agency [or someone in-house] to produce our LinkedIn content?”

Certain types of companies have a much easier time getting to those benefits earlier on. While others are a slower burn.

In my experience, the types of companies who play LinkedIn on easy mode operate in the following categories: GTM tech, marketing tech, and HR tech. I’d also add any companies who sell to early-stage founders.

Why?

The target audience for each of these types of companies is hyperactive on LinkedIn. They read content on the platform, and they themselves actively engage.

There is an overflowing well of buyer attention sitting there, waiting for your company to dip into it. As long as your content is high quality, you’ll start seeing ROI from LinkedIn posting in weeks.

In contrast, think of a company selling into IT professionals at enterprise companies.

Yes. They’re on LinkedIn. No. They’re likely not on as often, nor are they engaging with content as much as a seller at an SMB startup. Folks in this category are often lurkers, if they’re on LinkedIn at all.

So, it takes longer to get in front of many of them. And it takes longer to build trust with them. Therefore, it takes longer to translate attention on LinkedIn into demos booked and revenue generated.

For these types of audiences, founder-led content is more brand marketing than direct response. In contrast, a GTM tech founder will likely see content translate into meaningful pipeline pretty early on—more of a direct response channel. Earlier-stage companies need content to behave like a direct response channel.

So…with these ‘slower’ audiences, whether you invest budget into LinkedIn content is dependent on your own tolerance for waiting. Do you have the runway to invest $5-10K per month into working with a good content agency for 8-12 months before seeing consistent demand coming from LinkedIn content?

If the answer is no, you should hold off and just post yourself as the founder. Instead of eating into your monetary budget, pay for LinkedIn growth with your own time.

Rub the sticks together and create that first spark of momentum, then bring in support once your content—and company as a whole—is in a healthy place. An agency should be an amplifier for a channel that already shows signs of working.

Does your ACV support working with an agency?

The second criterion you need to consider is simple math.

If your audience is active on LinkedIn, does the average contract value (ACV) of your product support working with outside help.

Take these two scenarios for example.

SCENARIO A:

Agency retainer: $7.5K per month
ACV: $10K
Demos booked per month: 30
Close rate: 30% (rough average for a product at this ACV)

9 of those 30 demos will have closed. That means $90K in contracted revenue off of $7.5K in content spend.

And worst case, you only need 1 deal closed to break even on agency spend while you scale your content presence.

You’d probably want to keep feeding spend into the money printing machine.

SCENARIO B:

Agency retainer: $7.5K per month
LTV: $500 (using LTV instead of ACV because who the hell is signing a contract for a $500 engagement)
Demos booked per month: 30
Close rate: 40% (probably higher given lower price point)

12 of those 30 demos will have closed. That means $6K in contracted revenue off of $7.5K in content spend.

Even this scenario isn’t that bad, and probably easily fixable by generating more traffic from the content. But, as is, this wouldn’t make sense at scale—unless you don’t care about LinkedIn being profitable.

As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that ACV is actually much less of a concern. It is something to consider. However, the actual constraint for companies being successful on LinkedIn is going to be the volume of leads that you're able to bring in.

Because even at $500 LTV, which is relatively low when it comes to B2B products, you only need to generate 15 sales per month from LinkedIn to break even on the channel.

So, your constraint isn't going to be the LTV. It's likely going to be whether or not there are enough people that you can attract with your content.

The verdict

I don't think there's any downside in posting on LinkedIn as a B2B company. Your audience is on there.

What you need to consider is how quickly you'll be able to translate that audience into actual revenue generated.

If it's going to be a slower burn, I'd recommend posting content yourself, even if it's slightly less consistently. It's just financially irresponsible to burn $5K-$10K a month, working with an agency for 12 months before you see any real traction.

If you're in a category like GTM, Marketing Tech, or even E-commerce Infrastructure, which lends itself better to generating revenue directly from LinkedIn, then it would make sense to engage with an agency. This is especially the case if you don't have time to produce your own content.

I'm sure there are exceptions to what I laid out here, but generally speaking, if you follow this thought process and are this intentional when betting whether or not to work with an agency on your LinkedIn content, you'll be in a good spot.

If you want to get a sense of what the workflow should look like when having someone run a founder-led content motion, read this essay next. Hope this is helpful.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

The Only LinkedIn Content Strategy You Need in 2025 by Tommy Clark 🎥
Storytelling Masterclass for Normies by David Perrell and Nat Eliason 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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