If you’re a B2B marketer choosing a LinkedIn strategist, you want confidence that your team’s approach supports the business and reflects current best practices.
Your team already creates content and manages your Company Pages. You’re also delivering campaigns, launches, events and requests from across the organisation. Keeping up with LinkedIn’s changes is another responsibility competing for your time.
LinkedIn is one piece of that workload, but it’s an important part of your company’s reputation. What buyers see across your Pages, leaders and employees helps shape their understanding of your business.
The right strategist should help you recognise what matters, decide where to focus and equip your people to act. Here’s what I’d look for when choosing that partner.
Do They Understand Your Business and B2B Buyers?
A LinkedIn strategist should ask about your business goals, priority audiences and sales process before recommending content formats or posting frequency.
For global B2B organisations, buying decisions can involve technical specialists, procurement, leadership and end users across different markets. Your LinkedIn activity needs to help those people understand your expertise and build confidence in your business over time.
Ask how the strategist would connect recommendations to your priorities and assess progress. Preparing for a market expansion, supporting an established sales team and building awareness of a new offering may require different choices. Reporting should help you understand whether you’re reaching relevant people and supporting buyer interest, alongside the limits of what LinkedIn data can prove.
My approach draws on more than 20 years in B2B sales. That experience shapes how I think about buyer questions, relationships and the information people need to make considered decisions.
Can They Help You Interpret LinkedIn’s Changes?
Keeping expertise current is part of the value you should expect from a specialist. You need someone who can explain which changes affect your organisation and what action, if any, is worthwhile.
Ask a prospective strategist to discuss a recent LinkedIn change. How have they assessed it? Is their advice based on an official announcement, published research or their own testing? Can they distinguish an established feature from a limited test?
They should also be comfortable explaining what remains uncertain. Advice needs context, especially when results from one account are being used to make recommendations for another.
For a busy marketing team, useful guidance helps answer: does this change our priorities, require an adjustment or simply deserve monitoring?
Do They Consider Your Whole LinkedIn Presence?
Company Pages are the foundation of my approach. They give buyers a central place to understand the business and provide a consistent brand presence. Their role connects with executive thought leadership, employee advocacy, sales participation and subject matter expertise.
I often say LinkedIn is a team sport. The Power of Two is how I put that into practice: Company Pages and people working together towards shared business goals.
For example, around a product launch, the Page might explain the business problem being addressed. A technical specialist could share a practical application, while a leader discusses why the investment matters to customers.
Each contribution has its own purpose and perspective. Ask how the strategist would help your people participate in ways that fit their roles, confidence and time. There should be useful options for employees who don’t want to create original posts.
Can They Navigate Global, Regional and Local Priorities?
Global teams may prioritise brand consistency. Regional teams need market relevance. Local teams have customer relationships, events and commercial priorities to support. Those priorities sometimes compete, even when everyone is acting in the business’s interests.
A strategist should help your teams agree:
- Who owns the strategy and each Company Page.
- What must remain consistent and where regional or local teams can adapt.
- What guidance leaders and employees need to participate confidently.
- How content is approved and competing requests are resolved.
This is where governance makes the strategy usable. It should give people the confidence to act without sending every decision back to global marketing.
Try presenting a real challenge during an introductory conversation. If a local team wants its own Company Page, how would the strategist assess the need? Listen for questions about audience, language, ownership, resources and the relationship with existing Pages.
Will They Help You Decide Where to Start?
A review may reveal opportunities across Page positioning, executive visibility, employee participation and measurement. Your team needs help deciding what comes first.
Ask how priorities will be assessed against business goals, buyer needs, available skills, time and budget. A recommendation should also identify dependencies. Agreeing Page ownership may need to happen before expanding regional activity. Employee guidance and training may need to precede a wider advocacy programme.
A useful action plan makes clear what to retain, change, stop or defer, who owns the work and how progress will be reviewed.
For example, with a major industry event approaching and limited team capacity, coordinating the Page, relevant experts and sales colleagues around that event may deserve priority over launching an unrelated programme.
You should be able to explain the priorities internally and be clear about the resources or decisions needed to move forward.
Will Your Internal Team Become More Capable?
Most teams I work with create their own content. They know their organisation and customers. They want specialist direction, current knowledge and confidence in the decisions they’re making.
Ask how the strategist will transfer that knowledge. Will they explain the reasoning behind recommendations? Use your own Pages and content in training? Provide guidance your team can return to when a new request arrives?
Different roles need different support. Page administrators may need content planning and measurement skills. Executives may need help shaping their point of view. Employees may need practical examples and clear boundaries before they feel comfortable participating.
Check whether training, playbooks and follow-up advice are included or separately scoped. A strategy document and a team training programme involve different work.
The aim is for your people to make stronger decisions after the engagement, with a clear understanding of when further specialist advice would be useful.
What Should You Look for in a Proposal?
When assessing a strategist, look for evidence that their recommendations helped the team understand what to do and why.
For example, Katie Eckstrom, VP Marketing at Plugable, described our work together as a “prioritized, evidence-based roadmap”. Her feedback highlighted a content framework built around their IT decision-maker audience, specific Page improvements and a plan for employee participation.
She also reported that the team better understood why LinkedIn mattered to the business. That’s useful evidence to look for when choosing a partner: recommendations grounded in your buyers, with practical direction your people can apply.
When comparing proposals, confirm:
- Which Pages, regions and areas of LinkedIn activity are included.
- Who will deliver the work and what involvement they need from your team.
- What written recommendations, training and practical resources you’ll receive.
- How findings will be discussed and what support is available afterwards.
Assess the investment alongside those commitments. A review of one Page and a wider strategy engagement can have very different scopes, even when both are described as LinkedIn consulting.
When Is B2B Growth Co the Right Fit?
B2B Growth Co is best suited to established B2B marketing teams that want confidence in their LinkedIn approach and practical help aligning their Company Pages and people.
I bring Company Page expertise, more than 20 years in B2B sales and over a decade of using LinkedIn for social selling. My work combines strategy, practical training and guidance shaped around your organisation, so your team understands both what to do and why.
If your direction is already agreed and there’s a specific skills gap, targeted training may be enough. Where several connected issues need reviewing, our LinkedIn Audit & Strategy can help establish priorities before deciding what further support is needed. My LinkedIn Company Page Audit: A B2B Buyer’s Guide explains how to assess that option.
If you want a clearer direction and greater confidence in your team’s approach, bring the decisions you’re facing to an introductory conversation. We’ll discuss where specialist guidance would be most useful and what fits your goals and resources.
