Alrighty, part of the plan now after the rebrand (executivebrand.org -> founderbrand.org and Project 33 -> Thormeier.co) is to share more of my own thoughts and lessons, starting with a reshare of my all-time best performing LinkedIn posts of 2026, slightly expanded on.
Tools used: Riverside, Ordinal, Claude, Fibbler, Jungler, Clay (no affiliation with any of them)
If my CMO told me we need to “do more on Linkedin”, here’s how build our content / thought leadership strategy in the next 30 days. Let’s say we sell $100k ACVs into the Fortune 5000:
1. Focus on people, not the company page. I think this is now well-established: personal profiles get about 8x the reach of a company page given the same amount of followers
2. Make a shortlist of potential candidates among the execs and SMEs at our company. I’d be looking for people who
(a) have relevant expertise for our ICP (if we sell to technical leaders, I’d be looking at my technical leaders)
(b) are good communicators/presenters (they’ve done keynotes or webinars before, they present at our All Hands, etc)
(c) have credibility or an existing audience/big network (not necessary, but if I can choose between two people and one already has 10k connections on Linkedin or is well-known in our industry, I’d obv prioritize them)
One obvious must-have person for this is our founder/CEO.
(The best case scenario is that the founder and execs write all their content themselves, consistently, at least twice a week. Not always is this actually the reality. If they were that kind of person, they would already be doing it right now at least to some extent and you weren't worrying about "activating" them)
3. Send the list to my CMO to share their own perspective, take out or add anyone
4. Reach out to everyone on my list to ask for a 15min call. On that call, I basically want to find out if they have the bandwidth for it (I need 1-2h of their time per week) and if they want to do this and are excited for it, aka to share their insights and expertise with our audience (no point otherwise)
5. Depending on what I get back, I’d pick 1-2 execs/SMEs to prove it out with them
6. Get a bi-weekly recurring 30-45min call on the calendar with each of them (use Riverside or Descript to record)
7. During that call, I’ll interview them. My goal is to cover at least 4 topics/questions, which would give me 2 posts per week per exec
8. I’d start out using this super simple framework for my 4 questions:
(a) Industry commentary - take an industry trend everyone’s talking about ask ask them for their POV, 2 cents, and what it means for our customers
(b) Customer story - ask them to take me back to a recent customer or prospect conversation they had, what it was about, what their takeaway was (can be a case study)
(c) Company/product related - take a recent announcement/feature release/milestone from our company and ask them to talk about it from THEIR perspective, why it matters, what’s exciting about it to THEM etc
(d) Personal - something that has "nothing to do with work" (s/o Darren McKee), ideally a story where they felt/learned something
9. Feed the verbatim transcript (one post at a time) into Claude to write a Linkedin post draft. You need to give specific timesstamps, exact instructions on what you want the post to focus on/the angle, and pre-write the hook. Never ask Claude to write a “Linkedin post”, ask it to write a “mini essay” based on the transcript, because Claude has its own (wrong) preconceptions of what makes a “good” Linkedin post. There is a TON of nuance here and you really need to tweak the system. But the same applies to writers. You can’t just hire any random writer and throw them on a task and expect a good outcome. You need to hire a GOOD writer, then train them on what good looks like for you, give them a clear brief for each assignment, iterate, give feedback, etc. Same is true for AI. Most are just lazy, that’s why you get slop.
10. Review and edit the draft. Needs to be someone who understands attention and Linkedin, ideally the same person who runs the interviews with the execs.
11. Media/post format
For every post, ask yourself if there’s a picture that directly relates to the topic of the post. If you talk about an event, is there a picture of your exec at that event? If you talk about a company milestone, do you have a picture of the team at your last offsite? If yes, use it. If no:
Review the Riverside recording and see if the exec’s answer can be clipped into a clean 1-7min video. Doesn’t always work, because oftentimes there’s back-and-forth or an answer isn’t the most concise. But if you do, use it
For everything else, do a text-only post. Don’t bother with carousels or graphics
12. Send the posts to my execs for approval. In the beginning, it might be helpful to review/approve the posts together on a 30min call so it actually happens
13. Once approved, schedule them out at 2 posts/week using Ordinal or any other scheduling tool. Agree on a day and time with my execs, mornings are usually best. Then add cal invites for the posting times to their calendar so they know it and ideally block some time during the day to respond to comments & messages
14. This is the organic motion, but I still need to prove pipeline impact
15. Next up, I’d work with my CMO and/or sales team to build a target account list of our 500-1,000 top dream customers
16. Add that list to Linkedin Ad Manager and build an audience targeting our most relevant decision makers at those target accounts
16. As soon as I have the first few exec/SME Linkedin posts live, I’d run them as Thought Leader Ads towards that audience. Ideally I have a $5k/month starting budget. My goal is a 30-day frequency between 8-12 (imo perfect). I’d adjust budget or audience size to work backwards from there (meaning if I only get approval for a $2k ad budget, I’d reduce the audience to the extent that I still hit my frequency target).
17. Retarget ad engagers with Conversation Ads to book demos (still super underutilized). For a client selling a $100k ACV product into large manufacturer, we're right now booking demos at $2,500 a pop with Director level decision makers)
18. I’d get Fibbler (I’m not affiliated), and connect our CRM and our Linkedin Ad Manager. It’s a cool tool that allows me to track pipeline and revenue influence of my Thought Leader Ads on our active pipeline we have in our CRM
19. Next I’d get a Jungler and Clay account, connect my exec/SME’s profiles to Jungler, push the organic post engagers Jungler tracks via their webhook into a new Clay table (this way I have a view of every single person who engages, meaning likes or comments, on any of my exec/SMEs’ posts)
20. Inside of that Clay table, I’d first enrich every person with more company information, then run them through an ICP filter, then push every ICP engager into a new Slack channel that has my CMO and the participating exec/SMEs in it, and then I’d do a lookup function for every ICP inside of my CRM to identify if any of them are in active pipeline and push their Linkedin engagement history into a custom property (I know that’s a lot, I have separate videos detailing all of this)
21. Use the signals to score and prioritize our target accounts in your CRM and have Sales reach out the most engaged accounts (email, cold call etc)
22. Using this, I can build a report inside of Hubspot (assuming that’s our CRM), that can show me every single person who is in pipeline AND engaged with our organic Linkedin content to give me the equivalent of the Fibbler report for the organic side (Fibbler only shows pipeline influence from my TL ads)
23. I think the proper goal to shoot for here (once the motion is running), is for total influenced pipeline to be at least 12x the program spend (salaries + tools + ad spend etc) after 4-6 months (again, I’ve written separately about why I think this is the right goal and why specifically these numbers, just shoot me a DM if interested). Meaning, if we say fully loaded cost is $15k per month (between 5k ad spend, employee, contractors and tool costs), then that’s $90k over 6 months. That times 12, so I would want to get at little over $1M in influenced pipeline during that time period. Why 12x? Because the industry average close rate on the influence pipeline is 25%, and I want to get at least a 3x ROI on that, so 4 × 3 = 12.
24. Once we can show this pipeline impact, the only logical next step is to roll this out to more execs/SMEs at our company.
If you read this far, let me know if you like this format and this type of newsletter. I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks :)
This is solid 👍