The blueprint for B2B comms success in 2024 has 3 simple elements. Getting attention is the biggest challenge facing sales and marketing professionals in B2B organisations today.
Take social media. The LinkedIn newsfeed has a seemingly endless supply of content that you could pay attention to. That’s where the Six Sells blueprint comes in handy. For the past 5 years as Six Sells, and for a time before that as individuals, Karen and Mike have developed the blueprint for increasing reach, frequency, and engagement on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
This is an organic strategy, that can be bolstered with paid media or run purely as an organic strategy. You can take this and run it in-house, or we are on hand to offer consulting, training and agency done-for-you services as needed.
So here are the 3 best elements to integrate into your LinkedIn strategy in order to increase reach, frequency and engagement, but first 3 facts for you to consider:
1 - People pay more attention to other people vs brands
2 - Humans are wired to like stories
3 Your senior people have a huge, familiar social following
Once you have understood those facts of life in the social media news feed, the 3 core elements that Six Sells recommend make a lot of sense:
1 - The right stories
2 - The right people
3 - The right media
Now for the detail...
Your audiences spend more time scrolling their LinkedIn newsfeed than they do sat in front of your sales team, so social media is clearly an important communications channel.
However most companies social media strategy starts and stops with the company page. Company pages are important to build a brand, but, people pay far more attention to the personable content of other people on LinkedIn than they do to brand content. It's a human thing - people would rather hear the thoughts and ideas of other people than content from a faceless brand - it’s human connection. So, building a social media communications strategy that has your people at its core is important.
I really like what Brain Labs are building with their company page on LinkedIn. They have blended stories that lead towards their value and expertise, with their senior people telling those stories, and with video which brings out important non-verbal human communication signals. We don’t work with Brain Labs, but I would be certain that the result is well above average engagement, and more attention, from more people, more often.
How to tell the right business stories in B2B communications?
These might lead from a challenge your ideal clients have and towards your solution. The Problem, Agitate, Solve framework is an excellent tool to tell such a story. Example:
“Many [your ideal clients] are struggling with [a key challenge]. This is a big and urgent challenge because [detail of challenge and cost to your ideal client of doing nothing], which is why we are [overview of your solution]”
The right stories may be championing the category more than your brand, or they might just be talking about the challenges and asking questions, or simply sharing thoughts and ideas to maintain frequent visibility while building trust, reputation, and interest.
Should our CEO be active online?
The right people are your senior leadership team who are best placed to tell each story. Could be your CEO, your head of sales, your country managers or anybody who is well placed to tell the story for your brand. The more of your people that share their thoughts, ideas and personable content, both from your company and their personal pages, the bigger your brand’s attention footprint will become.
What is the right format for B2B storytelling?
This is dependent on your people, and their individual skills, preferences, and comfort zone - for example, I love video, but have a face for radio, so I tend to stay behind the video camera when filming clients, and stick to podcasting and writing for my own content. Although I am working hard on my video content, so watch this space, and please be kind!
If you have the internal resource to deliver on the above, then I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing more of your people-shaped communications in 2024.
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Who is Six Sells?
Six Sells is a UK-based executive visibility and thought leadership agency that works globally with CEOs and senior leaders in media, advertising, adtech and technology.
Founded in 2018, we turn each executive's expertise into distinctive, authoritative content in their own voice, built to reach two audiences at once: the humans that matter to them, and the AI models those humans now ask for answers.
Our work combines executive ghostwriting, video, podcasts, photography and awards to build familiarity, trust and authority across LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Substack, the trade press and the wider web.
We also help executives and their companies improve their visibility in AI search and large language models (LLMs) through generative engine optimisation (GEO), increasing the likelihood that platforms including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude can discover, understand, cite and recommend their expertise.
Email hello@sixsells.co.uk for more information.
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