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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

• Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)

• Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services

• Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients

• Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma

Back in February I sent you The LinkedIn Cheat Sheet, which was twelve post ideas so you'd never be stuck for something to say.

Since then I've had a lot of conversations that go roughly the same way. "We're posting, but nothing's happening." “How do we get more engagement on LI”. “What should we be posting about alongside the outbound campaigns you’re running”

Now, like Nick pointed out last week LinkedIn isn’t dead. The algorithm is just an ever-changing bitch, and recently it's changed how it decides who sees your stuff. 

So I wanted to take you on a deep dive into how to get the LI gods to reward you with more engagement. We’ll cover how LI decides who it puts you in front of and how often, what you should be posting about based on your buyers, how your posts should be written, and how to optimise your personal and company profiles.

You’re probably thinking, this seems like a lot of effort Jess, I’ve got deals to close. But increasing your visibility on LI isn’t just about the dopamine hit you get when you see those impressions and engagements go up on your posts. If you get it right, it can have a real impact on the number of replies you get to your outbound, and the number of inbound enquiries you get. 

Why it's worth the effort

Outbound already does two jobs. The first is the one that gets counted. It puts a specific message in front of a specific person and finds the people who are ready to buy now (only about 3-5% of your market), and those turn into meetings.

The second is severely undervalued, and over a year it is worth more. Every campaign also lands in front of the much larger group who are not ready yet. Most of them look you up before they reply, and many more research you completely under the radar. 

But they don’t book a meeting yet, so people think the campaign has failed, but what it actually did was start moving a whole audience along the buying journey (problem unaware -> problem aware -> solution aware -> provider aware, where your market is currently at should dictate what you target them with, but more on that in a future newsletter). 

Roughly 80% of purchases are made with the first company the buyer thinks of, and 50% of opportunities come after the eleventh touchpoint. Campaigns on their own rarely get that far.

Outreach lands better when the name is already familiar, and content works harder when the outreach is pointing people at it. Run separately, they add up. Run together, they compound. This is more effective when your posts and your profiles are echoing the same message, but it’s ineffective if nobody sees them.

So before you write another post, here's the unglamorous foundational stuff that decides whether any of it lands. Then at the end, how to map the whole thing onto your outbound so it all tells one story instead of three.

1. One story, told the same way everywhere

Before we get into how you get more people to see and read your posts, let’s make sure that when they do, they have the desired impact.

You lose the attention and trust of your buyers when your different channels say different things. If your LI content says something slightly different to the website, which differs again from the outbound emails, and again from how the team talks on calls, there’s no consistent story being told. Your buyers can’t easily grasp what it is you do, the problem you solve or why they should want to work with you, because they can’t connect all the dots.

Why this matters: A prospect gets an email, checks the website, looks at a profile and reads a post. If those describe four slightly different companies, they don't consciously notice. They just come away without a clear sense of what you do, and don't reply. Consistency is what makes a message stick after four touch points.

The test: Take the sentence you'd use on a call to describe what you do and who for. Check it appears, in recognisably the same words, in:

• your website hero

• your company page tagline and About

• each personal profile headline and About

• your outbound emails and messages

Where they differ, pick the best version and push it everywhere.

What to align: The problem you lead with. Who you serve. The proof. The differentiator, meaning whichever one you'd actually want to be known for, and it should be visible in all four places.

The practical rule. When a campaign introduces a new angle, the site and profiles either already reflect it or get updated the same week. New message, old shopfront is the mismatch that could stop people from replying

2. Pick your topics, and speak your buyers' language

Unless you’re sending the blandest emails and making the driest content ever, you will be going deeper than just the high-level overview of what your company does and who you serve that matters. So you need to decide the broader story you want to tell and the topics you want to cover consistently.

Pick four or five pillars, and stay on them

Deciding what to post, email about, and create content around can take up a lot of time and brain space. It’s made easier by deciding what your core pillars are and sticking to them.

What is your core mission? Company values? How do you want to be perceived by your buyers? What do you want to be known for? 

Sit down with your team and pick a small, fixed set of themes. Here’s some inspiration for what you could choose from:

• What clients actually ask you in the first conversation

• What you're genuinely opinionated about, because those posts are the ones that travel

• Which area you want to be seen as a KOL in

• What you want to be hired for, not just what you can do

• Plus one lighter pillar for the life of the company, which is what stops the rest reading like a brochure

Then map out each topic you want to cover so that everything ladders up to one of them. Anything that doesn't fit a pillar doesn't make the cut. If you find lots of things that don't fit within one, you probably need to rethink your pillars.

This is not a licence to be dull, and everything you put out still has to earn its place. But saying a few things repeatedly, from different angles and in different formats, is the mechanism. The repetition is what makes it work.

How reach works now

When it comes to making sure your buyers actually see your posts as an extra touchpoint alongside your cold emails, LI messages, and in-person networking, it’s important to understand how LI now decides who sees your content. 

LinkedIn now matches topics, not just networks. The algorithm increasingly decides who sees a post by working out what it is about, then showing it to people whose own activity suggests they care about that subject. Your reach depends on whether the platform has correctly worked out what you are the person to talk about. 

Which means: post about a scattered set of topics and LinkedIn cannot classify you, so it will not put you in front of your buyers. Post consistently about a narrow set and it will, increasingly to people beyond your followers.

So your pillars need to contain topics that your buyers are already engaging with and talking about in their own posts.

But that’s just one half of this…

Use the words your buyers use

You have to write in the vocabulary of the person you want to reach, not internal shorthand. If your buyers have one phrase for a problem and you use a different one internally, you're describing the same thing to an audience the platform will never connect you to. Those words are also the signal LinkedIn classifies you by, so the wrong vocabulary costs you twice.

• Pull phrasing from client calls, job adverts for the roles you target, campaign replies, and client posts/profiles.

• Name the specific problem, not the abstract category - include things like therapeutic areas, modalities, application areas etc

Posting is only half the signal

This has to appear in your profile and company page copy as well as in the posts. LinkedIn reads both when it decides who to put you in front of, but so does the person who clicks through from your connection request, cold message or when they see your post on their feed.

• Company page: tagline, About and specialities carry the pillar language.

• Personal profiles: headline, About and experience entries, in the same vocabulary, written in first person.

• Update them when the pillars change.

3. Running the company page

Company pages have less organic reach than people do, this will always be a fact. Keep posting, as it’s another place people can see your content aligned to your pillars, but start treating it as an asset your people can distribute as well, not just a stand-alone void to dump content into.

Lever 1: Reach your own followers

To get a page post in front of more existing followers, the platform looks for signs it held attention: time spent reading, and comments and replies. Three real conversations in the comments will out-travel thirty passive likes.

• Reply to every comment, since each reply is another signal

• Ask something answerable at the end

Lever 2: Reach beyond them

To extend past your follower list, the highest-value action is a repost with a comment added, not a bare share. That pushes the content into the reposter's network with their endorsement attached

• Ask the team to repost with a line of their own

• A bare reshare does far less, and primarily pushes it to your company page's followers

Lever 3: Spread the message widest

When something really matters, give the team the assets and have each person post their own version in their own words, tagging the company page. Several personal networks beat one page every time.

• Same idea, different words per person

• Always tag the page to pull traffic back

Small things that add up

• Create a LinkedIn Event whenever you run something live, so followers get invited and reminded by LinkedIn for free.

• Make sure every employee lists the company on their profile. That's what links their reach to the page.

• Post consistently rather than in bursts. Two a week forever beats ten in one week and then nothing. 

• Use polls to train the audience to engage. They're the lowest-effort way to get people used to interacting with the page, and the answers tell you what to write next.

• Use the page analytics to see which pillar actually pulls, then do more of it.

(most of these apply to your personal page too)

4. Personal profiles do the selling

Every campaign sends people to a personal profile before it sends them anywhere else. Your profile should not read like a CV (frankly, nobody cares unless they’re a recruiter trying to match you to a new role). It's a landing page for a prospect deciding whether to reply.

Headline. Not the job title. The problem you solve and who for, in the buyer's language. It appears next to every comment you leave and every connection request you send, so it does more work than anything else on the page.

About. First person, written like you speak. Open with the problem, not your history. Three short paragraphs beats one long one. Close with what someone should do if it resonates.

Banner. Free advertising space. Put the positioning line and, if there is one, the current offer or event on it.

Featured. Pin whatever you're currently pointing people at. If a campaign is running, someone clicking through mid-campaign should find the thing the campaign is about, whether that's a guide, a webinar replay or an article.

Engagement habit. Fifteen minutes a day commenting thoughtfully on posts from target accounts does more for pipeline than an extra post. It puts your headline in front of exactly the right people, repeatedly, without asking them for anything. It also makes LinkedIn show your posts to more people like the ones you're engaging with the most.

5. Writing a post people actually read

I cannot stress this enough, LinkedIn’s primary interest is to keep people on their site as long as possible, so it rewards you with more engagement the longer people spend reading your posts and engaging with them. 

The average person spends about two and a half hours a day scrolling. Your post has roughly one line to stop them.

Here’s how to maximise your chances:

Five parts

• Hook: the first line, treated like a newspaper front page. Its only job is to earn the second line.

• Teaser: what the reader gains by carrying on. Where they decide to spend their time.

• Substance: the actual point, the specific detail, the reason you posted.

• Wrap-up: one line on why it matters.

• Call to action: what you want them to do next. Say it plainly.

How it should read

• Short sentences. Write like you speak.

• Around 180 words is about a minute of reading, a good default.

• Leave white space, especially on the second line. Dense blocks get skipped.

• Make one clear point, not four.

• Assume it's read on a phone, because it will be.

• Cut the jargon that only works inside the industry bubble.

Stopping the scroll

• Tall images and video take up more of the screen and are harder to scroll past. Portrait, not landscape.

• One bold statement on the image, answering "what do I get from this?"

• Bright, high-contrast colour: the feed is mostly grey and blue.

• Text on the image readable at thumbnail size.

Every post needs one of three things

• Emotion: it makes them feel something. Recognition, frustration, relief. No feeling, no action.

• Connection: it makes them feel closer to you, or part of something. This is what builds trust over months.

• Opinion: it makes them think, and gives them something to say. Agreement or disagreement both work.

A post with none of the three is information, and information gets scrolled past. In a technical field the easiest to reach for is opinion: have a view about what the industry gets wrong.

Ticking all these boxes gives you the best chance of someone stopping to read your post, and liking, sharing, commenting or saving it, all of which gives you a gold star in LI’s eyes.

What the platform rewards

• The first half hour decides the post. Early engagement determines how far it travels, so be around to reply when you publish.

• Time spent reading counts most. Longer, well-structured posts and carousels outperform one-liners.

• Comments count more than likes. Ask something worth answering, and reply to everyone.

• Your engaged audience sees you first, which is why the daily engagement habit and the posting programme reinforce each other.

The golden rule: post about things you have an opinion on. Write generically about a topic because it seemed like a sensible topic, and you produce something indistinguishable from everyone else in the category. In life sciences, where your expertise is real and hard-won, that wastes the strongest asset you have.

6. What to measure, and what to ignore

Engagement numbers are easy to over-read. It helps to know what each one is actually telling you.

Impressions. "You got on my radar." The headline or topic was interesting enough to make someone pause. No action, but not nothing.

Reactions. "This was safe and familiar." It landed, they agreed enough to tap. A gentle nod, and the weakest of the real signals.

Comments. "You made me want to say something." Where trust starts being built, and the number worth optimising for. Eight comments usually beats eighty likes.

Reposts with a comment. "This says what I believe." The strongest signal there is: someone put their own name next to your point.

The numbers that actually matter. Follower growth, profile views (they spike before enquiries), event registrations and attendance, downloads, and above all reply rate and meetings booked from your outbound. If the content layer is working, that's the number that moves.

What to ignore. Engagement on direct promotional posts. They'll always underperform the educational ones, and they're still necessary. Judge them on enquiries, not likes.

7. Now map it onto your outbound

This is the bit that turns all of the above from "we post on LinkedIn" into something that compounds.

Most companies run their outbound and their content as two separate workstreams. Marketing posts about one thing, the campaigns say something else, and the two never point at each other. Both work harder than they need to and neither benefits from the other.

The fix is to plan them on one calendar, off the same pillars.

First, a correction on how pillars work

Your pillars are not a rota. You don't pick one for October and put the others in a drawer.

They all run at the same time, continuously, because your buyers aren't all sitting at the same point in the same problem. Some are deep in the thing your first pillar covers, some won't care about it until next year, and the ones you want reading you in March need to have been seeing you since November.

Nor does everything have to belong to exactly one pillar. Plenty of your best content will sit across two or three at once. Those pieces tend to be the ones that travel furthest, because they connect things your audience hadn't connected.

So the test is not "which pillar is this month's?" It's simply: Does this sit inside at least one of our pillars? 

The loop

Keep a steady rhythm of anchor pieces. Something substantial enough to be worth someone's time and provide value even if they don’t buy: a webinar, a recorded interview with someone in your team, an opinion piece, a teardown of how something is usually done badly in your industry. One a month is a realistic cadence. It doesn't have to be enormous, and a genuinely useful two-page checklist counts.

Tag each piece with the pillars it touches, which may well be more than one. That tells you who it's for and which campaign it should sit alongside.

Run the campaign on the same ground as the piece. Same audience, same problem, same words, going out in the same window. The outbound now has something to offer instead of something to ask for. "Here's a thing that'll help" outperforms "can I have 30 minutes", because it isn't asking a stranger for the largest thing you can ask them for.

Keep the other pillars alive in the posting. The anchor piece will give you three or four posts on its own, especially if you repurpose that one large piece of content into a few smaller pieces (e.g carousels, single images, a short video clip), but your month's posting shouldn't collapse onto one theme just because that's what you happened to film. Spread it, so that everything you want to be known for stays visible to the people who care about each part.

Point everything at the same place. The campaign references the piece. The posts reference the piece. The Featured section on the relevant profiles has it pinned. Anyone who checks you out mid-campaign finds the thing the campaign is about.

Follow up on attention, not just replies. Everyone who registered, downloaded, watched, commented or engaged is warmer than they were last month, whether or not they answered your email. That list is your best audience for whatever comes next.

Want some help?

Our aim at Succession when working with our clients is to book them meetings now, whilst continuously warming up their audience so they come to them when they are ready to buy.

We do this by mapping outbound campaigns to marketing activities. Creating tools, content and posts that engage, educate and guide people through the buying journey. 

If you want a hand mapping this out for your own team, book a strategy call. Bring whatever you've already got running, and we'll work out the pillars, what the anchor pieces should be, and how to line the campaigns up behind them so it all tells one story.

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