Team-Led Content: The B2B Marketing Growth Channel You're Probably Ignoring | #24

Your team is sitting on fantastic insights. Engineering, operations, finance. Every department has expertise and experiences that your prospects genuinely want to hear about and the great news is that you don't need a massive budget or a complicated setup to start getting those insights out there.

In this episode of The 1% Insight, I dive into why team-led content on LinkedIn is becoming one of the biggest opportunities in B2B tech marketing right now and how it works best when it runs alongside your brand account, not instead of it.

Both channels play a crucial role, and the companies that figure out how to get them working together are the ones that are going to build serious trust and mental availability with their target market over time.

Most of your prospects aren't making a buying decision today, but they are forming opinions every single day. Personal LinkedIn pages are consistently outperforming brand accounts when it comes to reach and engagement. 

That doesn't mean the brand account isn't important, it absolutely is. But when your team members are also sharing valuable, relevant content through their own personal brands, it creates a content ecosystem where prospects are landing on your company from multiple angles. That's a powerful position to be in.

I run through a practical framework you can start implementing straight away, from getting buy-in across departments, to recording insights in a simple conversational format, to building a content calendar that keeps things consistent without putting the heavy lifting on non-marketers.

Key insights for B2B Tech Marketers:

• Personal LinkedIn pages are gathering significantly more engagement than brand accounts. People connect with people more than they connect with logos and that creates a brilliant opportunity for your team to extend your brand's reach.
• Brand content and team-led content work best together. This isn't about choosing one over the other. It's about creating an ecosystem where both channels reinforce each other and increase your chances of being in front of the right prospects at the right time.
• You don't need a podcast to get started. A simple recorded conversation with a team member, focused on the problems your ICP faces, gives you a fantastic bank of insights to repurpose across short-form video and text.
• The secret to making this work long term is building a system. A content calendar, captions written in each person's tone of voice and an easy approval workflow makes it frictionless for your team to stay consistent.
• Frame every piece of content around solving real problems for your ICP. Your team's unique expertise and insights are a genuine differentiator and that is what will set your company apart.

Thanks for listening to The 1% Insight! 

• Access our free resource: Build a B2B Tech Content Strategy That Fuels Your Pipeline: How B2B Tech Companies can turn Content into future Pipeline & Demand utilising Social Media & Podcast Marketing 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of the 1% Insight, your podcast for everything B2B technology marketing. In this episode, we are going to be chatting about why your best content creators are already sitting in your teams and how you can develop both your team and your company content strategy. Over the last number of years, we've seen the importance and the rise of creators, but not the typical creators that you would have been used to seeing maybe on Instagram, etc., branding the term influencers. What we are seeing now in the B2B content space is that team members, they don't have to be C-suite level either, it doesn't have to be the co-founder or the founder, and people who work in the company who are building their personal brands based on the industry, the insights, the topics that interest them, and they're building personal brands on LinkedIn mainly and distributing content that is relevant to their target audience. Previously, companies may have been a bit hesitant to this, maybe thinking of scenarios where the person is building up their own profile to then leave the company, but it's not the case at all. Instead, it's actually becoming a huge lever for sales and growth, where actually prospects who are out of market right now, and we speak about this a lot on the 1% insight, but a lot of your target market are currently not making a buying decision. They're currently maybe in with another vendor, uh, they're in agreement, but they are forming opinions every day. A core part of this independent research and opinion forming stage is happening on social channels. Your prospects use LinkedIn as an example on a daily basis. There's been a growing trend of not just company-based content and not just founder-based content now, it's team-level content, which is a really interesting strategy, but something that hasn't really been done at large scale in B2B marketing. So this poses an opportunity and a challenge for B2B technology marketing teams to start utilizing your team members, their insights, their personal brands on LinkedIn, along with your company brand account to start creating this content ecosystem essentially, uh, where everyone is generating fantastic piece of content, fantastic insights, they're connecting with prospects that might not be following the brand page, and vice versa, and it creates a really positive meta effect for the company. Another point on this is that if you reflect back on your brand account and if you're running through the analytics on a monthly basis and you're looking at the performance on LinkedIn, for example, will keep running with the LinkedIn example, and then you compare it to maybe the founder-led content that is also kind of running in parallel with this on a monthly basis, you'll notice that the usually the personal pages, especially on LinkedIn, will receive higher levels of engagement and still engage with you know highly relevant prospects and highly relevant people if you are going after that in terms of that's a part of your strategy, in terms of having your team members or founders or C-suite level executives to be connecting with you know potential prospects who could be interested in your service in the future or product, then you'll you'll see that gap there where essentially personal pages are getting a lot of reach in comparison to brand accounts. So both play a role. This isn't a message to say ditch the brand account and just go all in on team level content, and it's not saying ditch the team level content, don't give it a chance and go all in on the brand account. It's about how both of them work together and it's going to be essential for winning new business and building that trust and mental availability with prospects over time as they are making buying decisions. The first question you're probably asking is why should we go ahead with running a team-level content strategy? The reason for that is that your team is sitting on fantastic insights. Now, I'm not saying go and share company level insights and trade secrets with you know around your product, etc. But your team members have different experiences, different expertise that they can bring into content that will set your company up far above the rest. Another point, like we mentioned earlier, is that personal LinkedIn pages are gathering fantastic uh engagement in comparison to brand accounts. Not for every post, but really human-led content, uh, people trust people more than they trust logos, and that probably will never change. If you look at any of the probably top-level examples, you'll see a fairly similar trend where people are connecting the people who behind the company rather than the company. Both play a role, but if you're looking to maximize your content marketing efforts, uh, this is a channel that is often overlooked and is one channel that really you should be uh looking at at targeting going into 2026 and beyond. And an objection you might get is basically if you're listening to this, chances are you're on the B2B technology marketing team, the content marketing team at your company, and usually it falls on you to develop this content and run the content system, and you're usually uh the one you know in the content. But it is worth expanding that, trying to get buy-in from other departments, whether that be the engineering team, the finance team, different people, operations, different people will have fantastic insights that you know they don't necessarily share, they didn't position themselves or they don't think in themselves as someone that can post on LinkedIn. But later on in this episode, we'll chat through how we can actually make it easy for them to for us to capture those insights where it doesn't feel like a stress on them as such, and then also how you can help them utilize the content in an easy manner and make it kind of frictionless because that is going to be the main uh roadblock and bottleneck you'll probably run into is trying to get buy-in day one, and then the consistency of having that content is another issue. Yes, someone could post once or twice, it's more about how can we build a system that allows your team to post consistently over time. Moving on to how we can actually create this content. So I'll run through a very simple framework on how you can actually implement this today or at least pitch it to your team or management to say, listen, we should start utilising personal brands and our team members uh on LinkedIn. So as you're listening to this, it's a podcast that we started. We do it for many other brands as well. The one thing we found has been exceptionally important in that is that getting people onto uh a call, perhaps if you're working remotely or you've team members scattered across the country or continents, um, then it's really important to make it easy for people to join on. So, for example, joining on in a web-based browser uh in one of the many tools that you can use for recording video podcasts, obviously the icing on the cake is if you can get the mic set up, you can get the camera set up, um, a bit of staging, etc. Of course, that's icing and cake, but the the main thing is actually just to start and to press record. Uh, obviously, once you have uh a premise for the show and that it's providing value to your audience, uh I would say getting the content is more important than the icing and the cake stuff. You should definitely keep that in mind, but getting started, I think you should definitely just focus on trying to get something that is consistent and provides value and you can always upgrade the quality. But if there's nothing to upgrade, then you know you're you're there's nothing to uh kind of work off. So with that, whether that be in a podcast-based format or you don't want to set up a podcast, you don't have the time for it, you want to just actually record the insights. I would get people on, your team on, to basically first of all address what problems are we solving for our ICP, and then from then take their specific insights. So if you're bringing someone on from the finance team, or if you bring someone on for the operations team or the engineering team, utilize their specific insights and how that can help solve problems that your ICP face, and that's how I'd frame it. Um, I'd use it as a conversation. So uh maybe somebody on the marketing team can become the interviewer in this scenario where you're chatting through different scenarios, you're pressing record. Um, essentially, so if it's online on a browser-based podcast recording system, basically you can optimize to record for video and audio. That's a really important point. Get the video and audio, not just audio. It gives you a lot more content opportunities after that. And then we'll we'll speak about that as well in terms of how you can actually create a system for this. But in terms of just the actual recording, getting people online, getting them speaking about different areas of the business that they know better than anyone else, that they have insights that can provide real value to your target audience and your ICP and help guide them through essentially the buying journey. And that's what we're doing here. We're trying to create as much value as possible for our target audience group for the benefit of someday them opting to choose your company. Or if it's for existing customers, that you're providing them more insights that they didn't have before, and that's extending the customer lifetime value and satisfaction because they're not just getting in a software or AI or a hardware solution, they're getting brand new insights on a weekly basis that is helping them either excel in their given role, um, utilizing the technology, or you're giving them industry insights that they didn't have before listening to that piece of content. So it's important to frame that when you are considering uh starting. There's no point just chatting about random stuff. It's important to be focused on what is it we're trying to achieve here, and the main thing has to be provide value to your target audience, help solve their problems, and give unique insights that is going to help them do that. So frame it like that, just like a conversation where you're asking questions that's relating to your ICP, and just get the person to kind of chat through it essentially. So let them chat about their insights, their expertise, experiences that they've had, um, and kind of walk through that. And obviously, that's all being recorded. And then after that, you have really interesting uh conversations that you can actually utilize true content, and we'll move on to that now. Once the recording is is done and you have uh a bank of content that you can start utilizing, it's important to kind of pick your internal champions. So there's going to be some people that are more open to this than others. There's no point trying to ask someone to do this if they're not going to enjoy it, if they feel uncomfortable doing it. Um and I wouldn't take that approach when you know asking people up front uh and just let them know what's involved so that they can kind of make a decision for themselves and not be kind of forced to start creating content when they don't necessarily want to, or that's not their personality. Um but if there is someone or many people, if you're uh fortunate enough, that will be open to speaking about it and open to building their LinkedIn personal brand, those are the people that you want to communicate with. Um so I would set up a channel in whatever communication group that you you have or that you use at your company, create a space for all of you where essentially this is going to be the your content kind of group as such. And after doing the recordings with those people, I would set up a calendar. Um you can use any kind of system that you want, really. Um, we have used Notion in the past and we use it for content calendars. For clients, it works quite well. Uh it's intuitive, it's easy to use, and that's what we want really. We just want something that's going to be able to be able to map out that person's content. So you'll be able to see different content tiles across the week, um, over the course of months, where basically the marketing team can start creating content. So taking the existing uh either a podcast or just for the purpose of this creating content, you can edit it then into video formats and text-based content based on the transcripts. You have a couple different format options for that. And from there, then we're developing that unique pieces of content. So you're kind of branching off from the core piece of content and your team is creating uh bite-sized bits of content from that episode or from that long-form piece of content. Um, I would suggest if you are going down this route, it is worth rolling into your podcast with it because if you're creating content with your team, you're creating content with guests, you're talking to industry leaders, you have co-hosts in each chat route as well, it adds a really nice dynamic to it. And also the long-form content is really important for that kind of trust building over time. But if a podcast isn't something you've started or you're just looking to get this up and running now, for the purpose of this, just use the the call recording as your content piece and build out the content from there. So you'll just be mainly going for short form content as a result of that, because long form won't be living anywhere as such. It's just used for the purpose of gathering the social content that will fuel your team's content strategy going forward. I would set up a calendar for each person. I would, depending on the posting frequency, I would then add the content and the caption uh for them so that basically they'll be able to access all of their content. It's no, like they don't have to go editing the content, your marketing team is going to do that. Uh they don't necessarily have to generate the captions, your team can do that. I would, if you are trying to redevelop like tones of voice, I would utilize Claude, for example, and start training a model on the transcripts that you have with your team members so that it's very specific to them so that like the AI model can essentially understand their tone and replicate that so you're not getting like everyone talking the same, especially in the captions, it would just look very generic. So everyone will have unique ways of their style, their personality, and it's important for that to come true as well within the content. So that's worth keeping in mind as well if you are going down that route, is that to make sure that the tone matches. Obviously, it fits, you know, they're not going to be going off and saying anything. You have to put some guardrails on it in some regards when you're doing the company content. Um, you know, they they can't just probably start chatting about anything and everything. There probably has to be some guardrails um to keep it on brand um so that you kind of control some level of it while still allowing them, if they want to, create their own captions, use the content in any manner that they do. But really you're kind of facilitating it, making it easy for them to post it and to build their brand. Um that's what I would do in terms of content, set it out in Notion or any other project management that you have, that you'll be able to easily visualize the content and that they'll be able to download the video, download the caption, and then they'll know, okay, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I need to be doing this. Um you could go a step forward and like add them to your social media scheduler so you connect the person's accounts and you do it on their behalf, but they have a chance to review and approve. So basically they can make edits to the video, they can make edits to the caption to make it sound more like them, but then you're posting on behalf of them. So that's like another extra step, but uh usually um just getting them the content um that's ready made and uh suits their tone of voice is a good way to get them going and it keeps them consistent. So to summarize what we're speaking about today on the 1% inside is basically the importance of actually having uh both a team-led content strategy and a company brand account strategy. Personal brands are becoming a really utilized channel for B2B teams in 2026, and it's a growing trend. You will see more of it, you'll see more personal accounts, personal brands developing in different niches and different industries. So it's important that your team uh gets on there um and start sharing their unique insights basically to help uh increase the odds of a prospect landing on your company, landing on your team members' content, and getting real value from it. Which many of those prospects aren't in market right now. The whole purpose of that is that they're forming opinions right now. We want your company to be placed high up on their short list when they do eventually get into a buying decision process that from your team's content, from your brand's content, and other channels, of course, that they opt to choose your company to go with. And we spoke about how you can make it easy for your team members to record the content. The marketing team is taking on the heavy workload, and you're kind of facilitating uh to make it as easy as possible for the team to post the content by creating content based on the long form that you record, and then ensuring that the consistency of this and it keeps on brand and their own personal brand is that you're providing them a content calendar with the content, with the videos, with the captions that is in their tone of voice, in their personality, in their style, and then you're giving them the chance to review and approve uh the content so that if there's any feedback to be made, you can alter it and and make it uh more on brand for them. Then there's other elements of it in terms of making sure the profile is optimized in terms of professional uh headshot. You're gonna be looking at the title, you're gonna be looking at the cover photo, their bio, etc. That's a whole nother episode that maybe we can get into um further down the line on the 1% insight. So I hope this episode was of value. And if it's brought any other ideas for your B2B technology marketing team, make sure to comment on this episode or wherever you're seeing this, whether it be on social or Spotify or Apple Podcasts or YouTube, um and share what's been working with you and your team. And if you have any other questions, feel free to let us know. We'll catch you on the next episode of the One Percent Insight.