Every year you spend more to reach fewer people.
For marketing and communications, and everyone who needs to make a company visible for a living.
Trusted by teams at
AKD
Capgemini
ABN AMRO
TNO
Siemens
Teva
KNVB
Is this you?
You put more into ads every year, and yet reach fewer people and convert less.
You and your team post on the corporate channels, but no one else in the company seems to care or contribute.
Your colleagues have huge expertise that can contribute to the positioning and content strategy of the company, yet getting them to write something is impossible.
The CEO and board agree that visibility matters, right until you ask them to post something themselves. (Then everyone is suddenly very busy)
Broadcasting stopped working
Most companies do online and social marketing like it’s 2020.
You drop a post on one of the corporate channels only to see two days later that the only like came from Eric at the IT department.
Reach on branded accounts, specifically LinkedIn, has collapsed, and today, almost nobody sees what you post, unless you pay for it.
Then there is a second problem. People scroll past the polished brand post you and the team worked on for 4 hours.
The good news is that reach didn’t disappear. It moved to people, and most companies keep paying for the reach their own people already have.
Your competitors are already out there
While you decide how much to spend on the next campaign, your competitors’ employees are already in your audience’s feeds, and slowly they become the names they remember, like and trust.
The reach you lost on your own company accounts didn’t disappear.
It moved to the people and stakeholders inside and outside of your company.
So the solution is simple. Help them to use that reach and create a win-win for everyone.
The cost on inaction
Every month without this your company is spending time, budget, and energy on activities that don’t compound. Posts go out, but they don’t build toward anything.
Employees might share content, but it doesn’t reinforce the message. Ad spend drives impressions, but not the right conversations.
The real cost isn’t what you’re spending on LinkedIn. It’s what you’re not getting from it. Companies with aligned strategies are building authority, filling their pipeline, and attracting talent from the same audience you’re trying to reach. They’re not doing more. They’re doing it together.
The gap between companies with coordinated presence and those without isn’t visible in a single post. It becomes obvious over six months, undeniable over twelve.
What strategic marketing is
Strategic marketing builds your company’s reputation through the biggest asset you have.
The ambassadors that you see every day.
Your colleagues, the executives and the board, the partners and stakeholders.
Personal profiles generate 5x more engagement, and 77% of people trust employee voices over brand communications.
The organisations that win are the ones that align what marketing, sales, leadership, and employees do on B2B platforms like LinkedIn with actual business objectives.
Two things have to work together:
✅ Content with a point of view, planned around what the business needs. ✅ Internal and extrenal ambassadors to carry it.
You decide on the direction, and your internal and external brand ambassadors give it a face people trust.
And it’s the one thing no competitor can steal from you.
How it comes together?
Start from the goal
We begin with what the business needs, more leads, better talent, the right partners, not with a posting schedule. The plan comes from the goal, not from a calendar.
Activate your people
Your leaders build authority, your sales team turns presence into pipeline, and every employee contributes at the level that fits them. Not everyone posts. Everyone has a role.
Measure what matters
You track the pipeline your content influenced, the quality of talent walking in, and the partners who reached out because they’d been reading you. Not impressions.
Thought leadership, social selling and employee advocacy each do their own job.
Strategic marketing is what lines them up into one system, pointed at
the goals you’re measured on.
Get that right, and you stop being a company full of busy people and start being the company known for one thing.
What success looks like
We start with what the business needs: more leads, better talent, and the right partners. What tools and posting schedule is something to worry about later.
- Need leads? Build thought leadership and enable sales teams
- Need talent? Show culture through employee voices
- Need partnerships? Position leadership as industry authorities
- Need retention? Stay valuable to existing customers through consistent insight
Next there is a series of steps we take together. Some you can skip, some might need more attention but a typical order looks something like this:
What changes when you get this right
When your content and your ambassadors pull together, you stop renting attention and start building a reputation the ad budget can’t buy.
One story, told by many voices, pointed at the goals you’re judged on.
The numbers behind it:
Figures from Edelman, Refine Labs and independent B2B research, not individual client results.
The additional benefits:
- Marketing, sales and leadership tell one story, instead of three.
- You can show the board how you’re building trust at scale
- You make your strategy future proof no matter what platforms algorithms do.
- One plan tells every team what to do, and why.
Three ways to work on this
Depending on where you are, one of these comes first.
When we work together we settle which one in the intake call.
Insights
A masterclass that gets everyone on the same page.- Why people get more reach than the brand accounts
- What’s worth coordinating, and what to leave alone
- The goals worth building the plan around
- A shared starting point before you spend more
- Usually the kick-off the rest builds on
Strategy
An audit and a plan that connect your activity to actual business goals.- Establishing targets, and tactical approaches to expand your platform page
- Developing strategic positioning for key figures to amplify content.
- Creating a framework that makes employees WANT to become brand ambassadors
- Defining content pillars, formats, that connect with your target audience and support business objectives
Skills
Training so your team can run it themselves.- Clarity on the topics and audiences you need to build trust with.
- Define key messages for each stakeholder group
- Develop an organic growth strategy (invites, cross-promotion, employee activation)
- Integrate AI tools for content efficiency without losing authenticity
- Your marketing team learns to run the system, not just produce content
- A routine you keep after the training ends
Proof
None of this comes from a book. It’s how I’ve worked with B2B teams since 2011.
Questions I get a lot
We already have a content calendar and an agency.
Good. You probably don’t need more content; you need it pointed at a business goal and carried by your own people. That’s the piece an agency can’t fake: the voices of the people who actually work there.
Isn’t this just employee advocacy?
Advocacy is a very important part of it. Strategic marketing also aligns leadership and sales and ties the whole ambassadorship effort to numbers you can take to the board.
How would we even measure it?
By what you’re judged on. The pipeline you influenced, the quality of talent walking in, and the partner conversations that start warm. Impressions don’t make that list.
More on Strategic Marketing
Recent writing on building a reputation through your people and content, instead of buying reach.
Start a conversation
Tell me where your marketing is stuck, and I’ll tell you straight which of the three fits, or whether you need something else first.