The B2B LinkedIn Strategy Guide

Here’s our new B2B LinkedIn Strategy Guide I wrote yesterday as a resource for our community… it sure is working for us at SaasRise.

We do some unique things with thought leader ads, organic posts, outbound, and ABM list building using LinkedIn that we cover below.

You may want to forward it along to your head of marketing / growth for implementation…

I hope this helps you!

Ryan Allis, CEO

SaasRise & GrowthRise
Austin, TX

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The B2B LinkedIn Strategy Guide
By Ryan Allis

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In this guide I cover how we do marketing using LinkedIn, including how we do...

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ABM List Building & Email Exporting
2. Outbound Email to Our LinkedIn Targets
3. Automate Connection Requests & Messaging to Engaged Prospects
4. Linkedin Retargeting Ads to Website Visitors
5. LinkedIn Ad Audience Creation
6. LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads
7. LinkedIn Viral B2B Organic Content Creation
8. LinkedIn Newsletter

Read Guide as a Google Doc

Tip #1 - Get Emails Out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Our ICP for the SaasRise community is of course SaaS CEOs/Founders. Here's how we built an email list of all of them using LinkedIn.

1. There are 240k SaaS CEOs/Founders on LinkedIn in our target countries.
2. We spent $7k with a data broker named Amin to export ALL of them into a CSV file with verified email addresses for us (just reply to this email if you want Amin’s contact info).
3. You can either export these contacts yourself 2500 records at a time using a tool like FindyMail, Wiza, or EvaBoot or hire a data broker to grab them for you
4. This works well (is worth doing) if you’re doing B2B marketing and your ACV > $2k and up.

Tip #2 - Reach Out Via AI Personalized Outbound Email

We started an Instantly outbound campaign to those 240,000 people who fit the SaasRise ICP.

1. We warmed up new domains and inboxes and added 2,000 people per day to the top of the funnel for 120 days (Instantly makes it super easy to do that).
2. We made sure that links in the outbound email were to a different domain that redirected to the main domain (to protect our main domain sending)
3. We AI personalized every message using Clay (though you can now do it directly in Instantly), based on the prospect’s LinkedIn headline and summary.
4. We’ve getting 6% CTRs and 3000+ qualified visits per month to our website with this strategy.
5. This works well for firms with ACVs > $2k and works really well for firms with ACVs > $10k → especially if your product is good and you have valuable marketing materials to share that help your prospects like case studies, webinars, how-to-articles, PDFs, etc.)

Tip #3 - Reach Out Via LinkedIn To Those Who Engage

We turned on HeyReach to follow-up and automate the sending connection requests to the ~2,500 people per month who click on our outbound campaign (we have 5 LinkedIn accounts connected so we can do 500 LinkedIn connection requests per week).

1. Those who accept our connection request (or have Open Profiles) get a 3 message follow-up sequence encouraging them to apply to SaasRise / GrowthRise
2. We also automate LI connection requests to anyone who fills out a lead form (applies) on our website.

Tip #4 - Turn On Retargeting Ads

We turned on LinkedIn retargeting ads to show SaasRise ads to people who visit our website (within our top 8 “tier 1” countries where most of our members come from). These folks get display ads encouraging them to apply to join the community and for any special course offerings we have like the B2B SaaS Growth Program.

If you want to see what types of ads your competitors are running -- check out the LinkedIn Ad Library.

Tip #5 - Create an Ad Audience With Your Email Newsletter Audience

We uploaded our full email newsletter list as a LinkedIn matched audience so we can show ads to the same people who are on our email newsletter (we were able to match about 153k people)

1. We separately uploaded a list of people who open our email newsletter more than 50% of the time → since those leads are our most engaged prospects

Tip #6 - Create an Ad Audience With Our Full ABM list

We also uploaded the full CSV file of our ABM list of all the SaaS CEOs/Founders in the world (400k people) that we sourced from Adapt, Apollo, ListKit, Instantly, and Seamless.

1. 75% of them matched, giving us a Matched Audience List of 300,000 people to target within our tier 1 countries)
2. We used Primer to increase our match rates / expand our audiences beyond what matches via CSV upload. Use the code SAASRISE to save 10%.
3. We used our data broker Amin to get the lead list from Apollo for $600 per 100k records (reply to this email to get Amin’s contact info).

Tip #7 - Using Thought Leader Ads to Boost Organic Posts

Outside of retargeting we DON’T do any display ads on LinkedIn. We only do thought leader ads to our matched audiences of SaaS CEOs/Founders. Think of this as organic post boosting to your ICP. Do the thought leader ads from whomever in your company is best known within your target market (the face of your company, often your CEO/Founder/Head of BD/Growth)

1. Below is what happened in Sep 2024 when we started doing thought leader ads on LinkedIn.
2. We went from 500 content impressions per day to 10k content impressions per day (by spending about $1200 per month on thought leader ads to boost the organic content to our matched audiences).
   

Each week our SDR from RooCruit, Lee turns our weekly email newsletter into 2-3 shorter (300-500 word) LinkedIn posts using ChatGPT.

Tip #8 - Get Your Partners to Post About Your Firm, Then Boost Their Posts

A highly effective way to announce a big fundraise or a new feature is to give all your partners and affiliates 1 day heads up on the news and have them post about the big news (in their own words) on their LinkedIn on the same day. This is how Clay announced their $40M in January 2025 and got everyone to hear about it on LinkedIn on the same day.

Once your followers make a post about your firm, you can pay to do a thought leader ad to promote their post (just send them a request on LinkedIn to promote their post), giving them more views than normal and promoting your company to their audience.

Tip #9 - Outsource Creation of Viral Organic Posts

We hired Abheet two months ago for $2200/month to ghostwrite viral organic storytelling content for me on the topic of B2B SaaS Growth, VC backed growth, and M&A Exits (the 3 topics I talk about) to drive organic reach within my target audience of SaaS CEOs and Founders.

1. He reached out to me via cold email and I hired him as a test.
2. He’s done a great job – 4xing our daily post impression count to 40,000 while more than 10xing our post engagement (likes and comments).
3. This type of LinkedIn storytelling tends to work when there is a clear "face" to your company who is willing to "build in public" and write about your journey and lessons learned transparently.
4. Here’s what’s happened since then to our daily LinkedIn content impressions and engagements since June 2025 when he began posting for us.
5. Note before he started posting for me, he spent an entire month watching/reading all my content and my book so he could find great angles.
6. If you want Abheet’s contact info – just reply to this email and I’ll send it to you.

Tip #10 - Start a LinkedIn Newsletter

We re-send our weekly email newsletter out as a LinkedIn newsletter. We have 200k+ subscribers on our weekly newsletter and 2,750 subscribers on our LinkedIn Newsletter SaaS Growth Weekly. So every week our SDR Lee from RooCruit sends out our main newsletter on LinkedIn for the extra exposure.

• With newsletters you can have unlimited length posts and use images.

I’m just getting started with LinkedIn – but I’m now up to 29,500 followers, 200,000 weekly impressions on my organic posts within my ICP, 2,750 LinkedIn Newsletter subscribers, and over 1,000 engagements per week.

You can do this too – and it can be a major source of new customers for your company.

Great content snowballs through consistency!

If we keep this up for another few years – we may become one of the top B2B / SaaS / VC influencers out there like Adam Robinson and Alex Turnbull. We shall see!

I hope this guide to B2B LinkedIn marketing is helpful for you!

If you like content like this, come join our weekly SaasRise CEO/Founder masterminds or GrowthRise B2B Marketer masterminds.

-Ryan

About The Author

Ryan Allis built iContact as CEO/Co-Founder from startup to $50M in ARR, 70,000 paying customers, and an exit for $169M to a publicly traded company. At iContact, he raised over $50M in venture capital (including $15M in founder liquidity), and $5M in debt-capital. Today, Ryan is the CEO of SaasRise, the #1 community for experienced SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M to $100m in ARR. Ryan is also a top SaaS Growth & Exit Coach, and has coached the CEOs of of Instantly, Seamless.ai, Tatango, Pipeline, Revenue Accelerator, RNL, Retreaver, Clearstream, YouCanBookMe, Noteefy, RXNT, and many more growing SaaS firms ranging in size from $5M to $160M in annual revenue. He is passionate about helping SaaS firms have successful exits. Ryan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Join the weekly masterminds Ryan leads at SaasRise for SaaS CEOs/Founders and GrowthRise for B2B Marketers and GTM Leaders.