Evan Patterson 💅🏻

Hire Me & Win In The Attention Economy💥 I Help Founders & Startups Grow Audiences 🔥 Ghostwriting • Personal Branding • Social Selling • Community Marketing • Content Strategy • B2B Influencers • Affiliate Programs

👋🏻 You should really click the "...see more" button over there. 👉🏻

😉

I’m Evan Patterson.

Fractional CMO. Personal CMO.
LGBTQ+. AuDHD. Two cats who have main-character energy and paperwork opinions.
Metro Detroit-raised, Chicago-thriving, seeking a EU-husband for dual citizenship (kind of not joking...)

A small but vocal group of humans — plus my mother — call me the Joan Rivers of Marketing. I didn’t ask for that title, but I also didn’t give it back.

My work focuses on helping founders, CEOs, and operators stop sounding like they were assembled by committee. When people understand you quickly, everything gets easier: sales, hiring, partnerships, even that awkward moment when someone pretends they’ve heard of your company before.

My entire approach runs on feral specificity.
Egregiously unique. Audaciously effective.
Ideas with teeth. Narratives with posture. Writing that doesn’t need a spotlight to command attention.

I work in two lanes.

Evan Patterson Consulting
The Fractional CMO lane.

This is where companies finally get a marketing function that isn’t held together by vibes, hope, and a Google Doc last updated during the pandemic. I rebuild the structure, the sequencing, and the decisions that keep revenue steady instead of seasonal.

The second lane
The executive identity work.

Voice extraction. Narrative architecture. Brand presence that doesn’t wobble when the market does. There’s more coming in this lane; something I’m building quietly; and it’s shaping the way I help leaders show up with clarity and actual gravitational pull.

I build systems with staying power.
I build brands people remember without squinting.
I build marketing that earns attention because it deserves attention.

People who work well with me tend to appreciate speed, accuracy, and a sense of humor about the chaos they built before I arrived. People who want a polite museum tour of marketing usually exit early.

My goal is consistent: make you unmistakable.

Fractional Content & Community Marketing Leader

Ditch the gift cards, scrap the underutilized benefits package, and focus on the individuals in your organization instead.

Companies looking to improve performance and retention should care about helping people get further faster towards what matters most in their life. We make this easy with tools to create personalized incentives, meaningful recognition & self-defined benefits that help their people unlock "sacred funds" towards their personal life goals.

Employee Motivation Simplified.

Evan Patterson

Can we talk about how we're systematically destroying the SDR role? $45K base salary. In San Francisco. In 2025.

That's not a job. That's economic violence with a LinkedIn title.

And then we wonder why SDR turnover is 35% annually. Why quality is declining. Why nobody wants to do outbound anymore.

We treat SDRs like disposable batteries instead of future revenue leaders.

I've been that SDR. 80 calls a day. Rejected 79 times. Making less than a Target manager while being told I'm "lucky to have a foot in the door."

The door to what? Poverty?

The math is broken:

Average SDR generates $1M+ in pipeline
Gets paid $65K if they're lucky
Has 18-month average tenure
Leaves with zero equity

Meanwhile, that Series B founder's raising another round based on the pipeline SDRS built.

Here's my radical proposal:

Minimum $70K base (yes, everywhere)
Actual career pathing beyond "maybe AE someday"
Equity. Real equity. Not 0.001% that vests over 47 years.
Training budget that isn't just "shadow Dave for a week"

"But Evan, we can't afford—"

Stop. If you can't afford to pay the people generating your revenue a living wage, you don't have a business. You have a exploitation scheme with a pitch deck.

The companies getting this right are stealing all the talent. And they should.

Time to choose: Evolution or extinction.

What's the minimum you think SDRs should make? Let's get spicy in the comments 🌶️

Marketing for Fractional Execs & Founder-led Companies 🔥 Fractional CMO for Founder-led Startups 🚀 Personal CMO for the Self-Employed ❤️ Freelance Marketer For Hire! 🤩 “He’s the Joan Rivers of Marketing” - my ex boss

I hit 30,000 followers on LinkedIn today. 

I have been posting on LinkedIn since I was 24 years old. I’m 31 now. 

In that time, I met amazing people whom have become some of my closest friends, been mentored by amazingly talented professionals, grew as a person, became happier, more confident, explored various career paths, and made the move to self employment.

Here’s to another 30! Let’s see what happens next. 😎

graphical user interface, text, application

If you refer a founder, hiring manager, or executive who signs, I’ll pay you $3,000 USD.

For context, here are some top achievements for specific clients:

- 20–40 qualified inbound conversations per month generated from LinkedIn alone after installing founder-led GTM systems
- Over $750,000 in pipeline created within 90–120 days from organic content and positioning shifts
- $1,200,000+ in attributed pipeline tied directly to narrative architecture and messaging alignment
- Increased closed-won ratio by 50% due to improved lead quality and tighter positioning
- Implemented a content system that took a startup from generating $1,000 per day on average over a quarter to $250,000 in one month
- 10,000–20,000 follower growth in under 12 months for executive accounts
- 3x–5x increase in profile views within 60–90 days after repositioning
- $25,000–$60,000 retainers closed directly from inbound conversations
- Sales cycles shortened by weeks because buyers arrived already aligned on value

I operate as a fractional senior marketing leader and specialist.

That means stepping in and owning the strategy layer while also executing where needed:

• Ghostwriting and executive thought leadership
• Content marketing systems
• GTM strategy
• Social media marketing
• Executive personal branding
• Newsletter management
• Email marketing
• Search Visibility Optimization (SVO)
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Influencer marketing
• Community marketing
• Channel partnership strategy and implementation

I also have 50+ testimonials you can review directly on my profile. Right now I’m in conversations with:

- Seed-stage through Series C startups in SaaS, AI, edtech, martech, govtech, legal tech, salestech, etc.
- Venture studios
- Software and web developer agencies, marketing service providers, and professional services organizations
- Bootstrapped startups in growth mode

If someone comes to mind who needs senior marketing ownership in any of those categories and sharper strategic direction, introduce me.

I'm open to freelance, fractional, part-time roles, or whatever buzzword we're going with these days.

If it turns into a real partnership and lasts 90+ days, you get $3,000.

Simple. #opentowork

Looking for Head of Marketing, Chief Marketing Officer, CMO, VP of Marketing and Marketing Advisor roles

“Want to make $1,000? Stop scrolling and read. I’ve got space for new clients and I want to pay YOU.”

I can start 2 clients this month.  
I can start 4 more in March.

If you’ve got friends who’d like to make $1,000, tag them here too.  
Maybe they know someone. Maybe they want in. Maybe this gets interesting.

Here’s who I actually work with, and why people hire me.

Fractional CMO  
For founders and revenue leaders who feel like they’re doing a lot, but not moving much.

You come to me when:
- Your GTM feels like a pile of good intentions.
- Marketing is loud, pipeline is quiet.
- Everyone is working hard, nobody is sure on what.
- You want judgment, not another checklist.

I help you:
- Get a position that has a spine.
- Turn chaos into a simple operating system.
- Sequence demand so effort turns into revenue.
- Build content that compounds instead of exhausting you.

Personal CMO  
For executives, solopreneurs, and fractional leaders who know their presence is money, but hate playing content factory.

You come to me when:
- You know you should be visible, but you freeze.
- Your brand feels generic, polite, or diluted.
- You’re stuck in tactics when you should be thinking.
- You want demand to find you.

I help you:
- Clarify your narrative until it’s sharp.
- Create a repeatable content engine.
- Strengthen your executive presence.
- Make your public voice feel unmistakably yours.

---

If you refer someone who becomes a paying client between now and June 30, 2026, I’ll pay you $1,000.

Tag them in the comments.  
I’ll take it from there.

Learn more about me @ www.evanpatterson.io

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Two years ago, I was posting about community marketing roles. 

Today, I operate as a fractional marketing leader for SaaS and AI companies that need senior direction without full-time overhead.

The work has evolved.

It’s less about growing LinkedIn followers 700%.

More about this:

• $1.3M+ pipeline in 12 months for a 6-person AI sales platform
• $500K+ in 90 days from a structured 20-operator ecosystem
• 35% lift in partner-sourced revenue after rebuilding a stagnant channel program
• 3x increase in qualified meetings after clarifying ICP + positioning
• 120% lift in retention and 65% lift in conversion after narrative overhaul
• $900K+ enterprise pipeline across US + UK markets

Same underlying strengths: content, partnerships, influence, social selling.

Different lens: revenue and infrastructure.

I’m opening space for 1–2 new engagements.

Founder-led SaaS or AI.
Past early traction.
Marketing feels busy but not compounding.
Sales team strong.
Positioning unclear.

Part-time. Embedded. Remote.

If that’s you, or someone in your network, let’s talk.

And if you’ve been following my work since the “community marketing” era, appreciate you.

Stop using LinkedIn DMs like a drive-thru window. If your first message contains a calendar link, you’re not efficient. You’re skipping consent.

There’s this strange belief that senior people want to be “optimized.” That is not what these folks want.

They want context, relevance, and a reason this conversation exists beyond your quota.

A cold calendar link says:
“I have decided this is valuable. You’ll catch up.”

A good message says:
“I’ve thought about where you sit. This might matter.”

One builds friction while the other builds signal.

If you’re still the best salesperson in your company, marketing hasn’t caught up yet.

That’s normal.

Founder-led startups often rely on:

Charisma > positioning
Energy > infrastructure
Momentum > structure

It works… until it doesn’t.

Recent outcomes from stepping in at that stage:

$1.3M pipeline in 12 months
$500K in 90 days from structured partner ecosystem
35% increase in referral revenue
3x meetings post-ICP clarification

You don’t need more marketing activity.

You need alignment.

I’m opening capacity for 1–2 founder-led SaaS/AI startups that want marketing to operate like infrastructure instead of a side project.

DMs open.

You can tell when a company doesn’t agree with itself. Here's how:

Sales says one thing, website says another, product has a different definition, and founders tell a story from two years ago.

Buyers feel that mismatch immediately. Internal narrative alignment is a growth lever because it reduces friction everywhere:

1. sales cycles
2. onboarding
3. retention
4. referrals
5. content production
6. hiring

It’s operational coherence that you need, not just "messaging."

Most founders fail with CMOs because they hired too early or for the wrong reason. Here's how to get it right:

A Chief Marketing Officer is not a growth accessory or demand generation specialist with a fancier title.. It’s a redistribution of authority; and that’s where things get uncomfortable for some founders.

Founders who built the early motion are used to being the signal. The closer you are to the customer, the product, the revenue, the more natural it feels to control the narrative. However, growth eventually stops being about effort and becomes more about identity.

Questions like these become increasingly important:
- What do we actually stand for?
- What do we want to be known for?
- What are we willing to say no to?

They’re infrastructure questions often confused with campaign questions.

A real CMO doesn’t just “do marketing.” They build identity infrastructure, define the brand spine, decide what the company amplifies, and what it stops tolerating.

That means re-sequencing priorities, reallocating capital, reframing positioning, and sunsetting work that once felt productive.

It also means pushing back on the founder; not because they’re difficult, but rather because they’re close.

When marketing is treated solely as a service layer, like something that supports sales, supports product, supports founder ego, it can never shape the company; it can only decorate it. 

If every message still requires approval, you don’t have a CMO. You have a senior executor with a bigger title. If alignment is expected without change, you’re not asking for leadership; you’re asking for reinforcement. And more noticeably, if growth is still defined as “more activity,” you’re not ready for strategy. Strategy is filled with subtracton and tradeoffs. Good strategy involves saying no to good ideas so great ones can compound.

This is why most CMO hires disappoint; the founder hasn’t transitioned from operator to CEO. Operators optimize output and CEOs architect systems. Hiring a CMO is less about revenue acceleration and more about emotional maturity. It requires the willingness to let someone else hold the narrative weight of the business.

Most founders don’t need better writing. They need their edge back.

I just published a new article: “Why You Should Fire Your LinkedIn Ghostwriter.”

It starts with a real moment. A founder I was working with looked at his content and said: “In person, people get it immediately. Online, it’s… fine.”

Fine.

Just… fine.

The problem wasn’t grammar, cadence, or engagement. It was signal.

In sales calls, he was surgical: clear tradeoffs, sharp disagreements, and decisions made out loud.

On LinkedIn? The edges that made him "him" were gone. 

- Conviction had been translated into “perspective.”
- Specificity into general insight.
- Tension into comfort.

Nothing was broken, but nothing was building either.

That dissonance between how strong you are in the room and how diluted you appear online quietly reduces revenue potential. In the article, I break down:

- The structural reason signal gets softened
- The difference between sounding smart and being recognized
- Why “random acts of marketing” create the illusion of traction
 -What actually compounds in 2026 and beyond

AI has made polish cheap.
Identity is now infrastructure.

If you’ve ever felt like your visibility doesn’t match your capability, this will likely resonate.

Read the full piece below.

If it sharpens something for you, a like, repost, or follow meaningfully supports the work I do via Evan Patterson Consulting helping founders and fractional executives turn expertise into structured authority that drives real revenue.

A founder once told me, halfway through a sales call review, “I don’t understand it. In person, people get it immediately. Online, it’s… fine.” Fine. 

Open article: Why You Should Fire Your LinkedIn Ghostwriter by Evan Patterson • 4 min read

Why You Should Fire Your LinkedIn Ghostwriter

You don’t need another productivity hack, a posting schedule template, or another AI marketing tool. Here's what to do to double your income this year instead:

Get you someone who owns the narrative while you own the work.

Fractional executives, founder-led operators, senior-level freelancers: you’re paid for judgment.

You’re paid to make decisions, solve hard problems, and sit in rooms where outcomes matter. Every hour you spend trying to “keep up” with marketing is an hour you’re not operating at your highest value.

Most of you have tried something like a ghostwriter who needed too much direction, a junior marketer who required babysitting, or an agency that executed tasks but never really understood the business.

These attempts didn’t fail because marketing doesn’t work. They failed because no one owned it at your level.

A Personal CMO is someone that truly handles that nuance for you. Giving a non-marketer a tool like a ghostwriter or another piece of marketing technology and expecting it to yield good results is like handing me a hammer and expecting me to magicaly become a world class carpenter. That's just not happening.

A Personal CMO isn’t there to pump out content. They architect positioning, tighten the story, connect the channels, protect your voice, and make sure your presence compounds instead of resets every 90 days.

This allows fractional executives and leaders of founder-led startups stay in their zone of genius while folks like me build the system that turns that genius into signal.

That’s the difference. The goal is to make sure the market understands what you already are.

If you’re a fractional exec, founder, or senior operator who’s tired of marketing feeling like a side job… this is the layer you’ve probably been missing.

Now excuse me while I get back to doing mine.

Cold email has developed a stand-up comedy problem. Somewhere along the way, “pattern interrupt” turned into “open mic night.” That's coming from me, someone who loves to crack a joke.

I was just talking to my friend Leanne Dow-Weimer, MBA about this on one of her posts earlier this week.

Every inbox now has:

– The fake breakup line
– The sarcastic subject line
– The self-aware “this is a cold email lol” bit

We're even seeing people tastelessly using the "Epstein" files a marketing gimmick. 

You can feel the writer hoping for applause, but the goal isn’t a chuckle.

The goal is and always has been to get a conversation. But these folks are writing a lot of cold email right now that reads like someone trying to win a retweet, not a meeting.

This is what I would call miscalibrated relevance.

If the joke is doing more work than the insight, it’s theater. The best cold emails I’ve seen don’t have zingers, they have specificity. They demonstrate an understanding of a real constraint the recipient is dealing with. Something operational, political, emotional, or timing-related.

No punchline required. Comedy works because of tension and sales works because of alignment.

When you mix the two without taste, you get neither laughter nor replies. If you want attention, show me you understand the pressure I’m under. That’s funnier than any subject line trick.

Looking for a fractional or contract-to-hire job? I found some job postings for you. Repost if you think someone you're connected with wants to see these.

P.S. I share job postings daily, so follow for more. 

Fractional Technical Recruiter
$80-150 per hour, 10-30 hours per week
https://buff.ly/TzJYB5H 

Fractional Facilitator, Software Engineering
$66-100 per hour, 6-9 hours per week
https://buff.ly/r6kK0Db 

Fractional Talent Acquisition Sourcer
$60-80 per hour, 35-40 hours per week
https://buff.ly/im8o4Da 

Fractional VP, People & Culture
$170-275 per hour, 24 hours per week
https://buff.ly/fLZbZzQ

For the work-from-home cat parents in my network, get you one of these floating desk-mounted cat beds.

Keyboard stepping via the cat has been reduced to near zero. 

(Thank you Hardy, one of my two cats, for being the model in today's content)

Matt Swain

LinkedIn for Founders & Execs

I’ve built my career as a creator, thought-leader, author and entrepreneur who helps executives and founders evolve their online presence into genuine influence. I’ve had the privilege of working with global icons such as Wim Hof, Steven Bartlett and Arthur Brooks, and collaborated directly with LinkedIn to shape the conversation around digital content, executive-led brands and how social influence can drive commercial growth.

At the start of 2024, I founded Triangle Branding, an exclusive B2B thought leadership agency built for category-leading founders and CEOs who want to turn their ideas into influence. We help them build human-led digital reputations by using their own personal voice to drive commercial impact through LinkedIn-first content, strategic storytelling and demand-generation systems. 

Over the last 18 months, we’ve helped clients raise over $100M, land deals with companies such as Sony, Nvidia and Virgin, had 100 million eyeballs on clients’ content and generate meaningful inbound opportunities by building executive-led brands that people trust.

--

We've generated 1,000,000+ views in the first 6 months with four C-Suite Execs at a 150M ARR leading B2B SaaS platform. 

We've generated 5,000,000 impressions and 40,000 engagements on a leading Harvard professor - with them becoming a LinkedIn Top Voice.

We've helped an energy leader book qualified conversations with SVP's at Walgreens, Starbucks, Mars, GSK and Lidl. 

We've helped agency owners generate organic engagement & MQLs from leaders at THG, Uber, Heineken, Estée Lauder, Samsung, Lavazza, L'Oréal, Tony's Chocolonely and more. 


www.triangle-branding.com

Founder of SOCIAL CLUB

Founder and Manager of SOCIAL CLUB - an exclusive social media community where members manage over 328 million followers. 

If you're an influencer or brand who wants to connect please get in touch. 
If you're interested in investing/sponsoring/collaborating please email on matt@mattswain.co.uk

Every marketer needs to hear this (direct intel from LinkedIn):

I sat down with Jae O., LinkedIn’s Head of Measurement & Ads, to introduce LinkedIn’s latest series - B2B Over Bevvies, sharing the latest B2B insights direct from LinkedIn! 

For the first episode, we debunked the 3 biggest myths killing your results…

Let me know what you think in the comments! 

P.S. Check out how LinkedIn’s measurement solutions can help you deliver outcomes over optics —> https://lnkd.in/measuringROI

LinkedIn for Marketing #AD

I’ve seen a lot of LinkedIn advice lately that’s frustrated me. 

The thing is – we all want LinkedIn to be a place for original thinking and interesting ideas – not AI slop and surface-level takes. 

Yet so much advice is about hooks, formatting and the latest algorithm trends, as opposed to substance, original ideas, interesting anecdotes, and genuine insights.

And from my visit to LinkedIn NYC last week, my takeaway is: LinkedIn wants more original, compelling, journalist-style content: thoughtful pieces that only you could write. Posts that add value, spark interest & conversation, and feel creatively different. This very much aligns with Triangle's approach when we're working with leading US companies on their thought leadership presence (always nice to hear!). 

Also, it was great to finally meet Luiza Cocito and Gianluca Russo in person after working on projects together and seeing each other’s content online for so long. Big thank you to the team for the warm welcome to NYC, the very cool office tour, and even a trip up the Empire State Building observation deck.

Stay tuned for a video from the visit too!

Being honest, we didn’t hit our growth goals for February. 

I hired a key growth lead at the start of 2026 – it took 4 weeks to interview & train them. They were getting ramped up – and then they suddenly quit 2 weeks in. It was a key role, and being honest, I’d overlooked some key aspects in the recruitment process. I saw what I wanted to see. We needed someone quickly and the reality was, they just weren’t a good fit. And I paid the price in the end. 

In that situation, you can do one of two things. 1) get frustrated or 2) get to work. I chose the second. And I’ve been busy searching for talent, 100s applied, interviewed 25+ people last week. And now we’ve found someone better & more aligned, who started with us this week. We’ve upgraded our onboarding process, more incentives, and more checks early on in the process. 

It set our growth back by six weeks, but we’re now in a great place as we head into March.  

And a reminder of some important lessons in the process too:

— Even when the trajectory is up, there will be weeks that test you. 

— When something unexpected happens, you just have to put the work in & take action. 

— Focus on true alignment with your team and clients – don’t try and shortcut this.

Landed in New York and went straight to The Met. I’m starting to think seriously about the kind of art I want to collect one day.

When I was younger, paintings never used to interest me, but over the past few years, I’ve become obsessed with different creative pursuits – movies, theatre, music, and art. So now, whenever I visit somewhere new, you’ll find me in different galleries. 

Thomas Merton said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” and Giorgio de Chirico said, “each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere.” When you find a good painting that speaks to you – it forces you to reflect, pause, and feel something you can’t put into words. It has a life of its own. It’s a still image and yet it has motion, tells a story, and reveals something about yourself.

I’m in exploration mode, seeing what pieces resonate & speak to me, and there is no better place than the Met to get inspired about what I’d like my future collection to be.

Someone pushed back on me last week about LinkedIn. 

"If this works, why can't you show me a %?"

"Surely it all comes down to conversion rate," they kept insisting. 

I disagreed.

LinkedIn isn't an outbound machine you can reduce to a single percentage. 

It's an ecosystem. 

There's the content building authority and trust. The profile converting cold visitors before they've replied to your initial message. The network compounding month after month as the right accounts are being added. The signals telling you who's warm and who's paying attention. 

And yes, outbound – but that's one piece. 

Some of your best prospects won't respond to your first message. They won't engage with your posts either. But four months in, after consistent exposure to your thinking, your proof, your credibility – they come inbound. Ready to book a call. 

By tracking outbound conversion rate, you're measuring one segment of a much bigger system. 

So when you're not booking enough SQLs to hit your targets, the issue isn't automatically the outreach. Across multiple B2B clients, the bottleneck is rarely conversion rate. It usually sits deeper, in how you're positioned, in the quality of accounts entering your network, in whether your content is building buyer confidence, or in whether your profile reflects the level of deal you're trying to win. 

It's worth stepping back and looking at the system as a whole. 

Happy to walk you through how we structure it.

It was 10pm and I’d just been to see Michael Jackson on Broadway, walking down 7th Avenue, I had a proud moment. It felt surreal that we’ve grown Triangle to the point of taking on NYC. 

I still remember being a solo freelancer juggling multiple projects, figuring it all out with just a couple thousand in the business bank account. We’ve come a long way since then! 

It’s one of the things you have to experience to understand - but the buzz, energy, ambition, pace, drive, is infectious here. You feel it walking down the street, in every conversation, it lives in the air. 

Yes, it was a productive time with clients on shoots, coffee conversations and strategy pitches. But my big takeaway from the trip is thinking bigger and moving quicker. Taking the NYC mindset into everything we do.

Founders who post 10+ times per year generate 33% more leads.

LinkedIn shared this stat with me directly during a meeting with their team in LA last October.

Ten posts per year.

That’s the bar for a measurable lift in lead generation. They also shared that founders who post consistently see higher deal size and shorter sales cycles.

Yet many still use LinkedIn for company updates instead of using it to generate revenue.

Company updates don’t build pipelines. 

You need strategic content that moves someone from never having heard your name before to having the level of trust needed to sign high-value contracts.

And this content already exists. You just need a system to extract it. 

Think of the last sales call you closed. You handled the objections, built trust, proved you could deliver, and you created the moment that made them sign.

That is validated messaging — now you just paste the transcript into Stanley.

Stanley already knows your existing LinkedIn content, your voice, how you think, what you've posted about. It extracts the strongest ideas and structures them into posts built from insights that have already converted.

Because if you said it on a sales call that closed, it works. 

If you've been wanting to post more consistently and generate more leads, but don’t want to add hours to your week, this is the system that makes it happen.

Stanley turns conversations you’re already having into content that supports your pipeline.

Try Stanley free → https://lnkd.in/ecEBMT-r

#Ad

Turn sales calls into original content in minutes...

If you want to start conversations with senior decision-makers on LinkedIn – you need to pattern-disrupt with a human-first approach. 

Everyone is getting 10+ salesy messages a day. So you need to make yours cut through and be the one they actually respond to.

Most companies know who they want to reach to influence pipeline.

But they end up creating content for the algorithm instead.

If you care more about ROI than impressions, this one is for you...

A few years ago I was experimenting with LinkedIn after seeing the impact of content while working alongside Steven Bartlett.

I had a sense the platform was underutilized. Within a couple of months of posting, I had my first truly viral post with over 20 million impressions, and following that, an inbox full of enquiries. It’s fair to say, I’d proven my point – LinkedIn was powerful.  

Over time, a pattern started to emerge. While I was freelancing across startups – consulting, writing, podcasting, and working on influencer marketing campaigns – the same question kept coming up in conversations with founders and operators: “How does your LinkedIn content do well – could you do the same for me?” I leaned in. LinkedIn stopped being just one part of the work and became the center of it. That focus eventually evolved into Triangle.

In the early days, I was interviewing clients, writing the content, scheduling posts, creating assets, doing admin, and everything in between. In the trenches – figuring things out, working out how to craft content that captured the client's tone, insights, ideas, what drove results, and immersing myself in different industries. This is now the operating knowledge that’s embedded in how Triangle runs.

60+ clients later, and things are very different now. We operate with a full team building LinkedIn ecosystems for companies, all designed around commercial outcomes. Our average client has 20+ years of experience in their industry, so the work is about authentically capturing their ideas and insights – then turning that into the right positioning, buying signals, outbound activity, and content that helps generate 6-figure conversations and contracts through LinkedIn.

I still think back to that first post and where it all led.

I'm proud of what Triangle has become – and very excited about where we’re heading too!

630,000 impressions in the first month.

That's what we generated for a Harvard professor who came to us with no LinkedIn presence and a book launching in March with Penguin.

Here's exactly how we structured the work across three deliberate phases.

Phase 1: Authority building (foundation)

In the first month alone we generated 630,000 impressions.

Her posts quickly started attracting long, thoughtful comments from senior executives at large organizations – Chief People Officers, Heads of HR, L&D Directors, and Org Development leaders.

By now we're well over 1 million impressions total. That rapid visibility positioned her as the go-to voice in her domain and created the trust layer senior buyers need before they even consider a conversation.

Phase 2: Strategic integration (connective tissue)

Most agencies would stop at impressions. That’s where the real work started. 

We’re now coordinating across Harvard Kennedy School, Penguin Publishing, and her PR agency to align every moving part of the launch. 

Content, messaging, and partnerships are being stitched together into a full launch strategy. This includes planning a LinkedIn webinar, developing launch assets, and ensuring targeted visibility to influential leaders who can amplify her reach. The professor trusts us to lead this because we think beyond posts – we think in systems, partners, and decision timelines so the March launch hits maximum impact. 

We’ve since expanded the scope to include newsletter & email list content. 

Phase 3: Revenue activation (where real ROI lives)

The end goal was never “visibility.” Every action we take serves a business objective. 

As the content compounds, we’re actively tracking engagement from heads of people, heads of learning & development, and other senior decision-makers at major companies. We're building the pipeline for $30,000 workshop facilitations and keynote speaking gigs.

Post-launch, we'll leverage the book success and her strengthened public profile to convert that engagement into booked conversations. 

This is the difference between content creation and a LinkedIn ecosystem.

Last week, we ran a launch for a client that reminded us of something simple: senior buyers assess leadership before they assess product. 

Their company's page update reached 853 people, with 10 reactions and 5 reposts.

Not that impactful. 

But across the 4 leaders (COO, CPO, CRO, CMO) we work with to build their authentic content on their personal pages, the reach and engagement looked like this:

→ 88,305 total impressions
→ 1,040 total reactions
→ 59 comments
→ 47 reposts
→ 47 saves
→ 126 sends

100x the the reach & engagement. 

While data proves time-after-time that reach is significantly higher coming from leadership, it's not the only upside. 

When brands post from company pages, people see this as promotion. But when executives speak consistently, it signals internal alignment and conviction that reduces perceived risk for buying committees evaluating long-term partners. Meaning greater trust, market authority and in turn impactful commercial outcomes. 

- - -
If you want to turn your Execs into thought leaders to build visibility, trust, authority & MQLs – happy to share our learnings.

The content you need to generate a million dollars for an eight-figure budget holder is structurally different to the content most agencies provide.

Here is what I mean.

Right now, the entire marketing conversation is dominated by: Should we use AI? Should it be story-based? What format cuts through? What tool wins?

These questions completely miss the point.

The actual question is: what is the outcome you are trying to achieve – and does your content move you closer or further away from it?

When your end outcome is a seven-figure deal with five decision makers across a complex buying committee, the strategy looks nothing like a typical content playbook.

The focus shifts to progression:

1) How do you move a buyer from awareness, to recognition, to credibility, to commercial trust?

2) How do you build a deliberate sequence of touchpoints that supports long evaluation cycles and high-stakes decisions?

The real value of a content partner at this level is not creative execution, but the ability to design a journey that moves a defined buyer through stages of conviction – from cold, to curious, to confident enough to commit.

AI or human? Funny or serious? Story-led or data-led? These are tactical choices.

At Triangle, we are not interested in debating tactics. 

We are interested in whether the content works for your commercial goals.

Everyone talks about winning clients. Nobody talks about retaining them. 

We've just hit 24 months with one of our clients. 

And no – that wasn’t driven by a long-term contract.

We want to work with clients on a long-term basis, but we don’t force that commitment at the beginning. We invest early, we focus on delivering tangible results, and we prove our value as we go. Retention, for us, is a byproduct of performance.

This client came to us with 800 connections. Over two years, we've helped him generate 30M+ views, grow to over 10,000 followers, and position himself as a credible voice in a complex, regulated industry. And driven real commercial outcomes, including recently signing a seven-figure government contract that came directly through our work on LinkedIn. 

These metrics tell part of the story. 

But honestly, retention comes from becoming a true strategic partner inside the business.

Over two years, we learned how he speaks, how he thinks, what he's aiming to achieve. And as his business evolved – new strategy, bigger team, higher stakes, more scrutiny – we adapted alongside him. 

We're now so aligned that most of the work happens without calls. That's what a good long-term partnership looks like in practice. 

At Triangle, long-term partnerships are everything. We pride ourselves on delivering results, building deep relationships, and growing with our clients – and that's why we’re able to retain clients for 2+ years. 

–
If you’re looking for a partner who will embed into your business, adapt as you grow, and focus on commercial outcomes, book a call to see how we’d approach your LinkedIn.

Last week, M&S announced Gillian Anderson as its Chief Compliments Officer on LinkedIn. Here are 4 reasons why you should pay attention: 

1. LinkedIn was used as the main stage for a mainstream celebrity partnership – even though Gillian had no real platform here beforehand. She had only a few hundred connections and had never really posted before. She wasn’t a LinkedIn creator or influencer, which makes it all the more interesting that M&S still made LinkedIn a core part of the campaign and used her popularity & mainstream profile to drive attention here.

2. The campaign was built for LinkedIn, not just distributed on it. This wasn’t just a brand reposting campaign assets onto LinkedIn, after the fact. The platform itself became part of the idea, execution, and storytelling – with Gillian updating her profile with the new title. And stemming from LinkedIn at the core – the partnership was leveraged into commercial ads, and a bigger PR conversation. 

3. It shows a more imaginative, brand-led use of LinkedIn – a sign LinkedIn is evolving from a corporate distribution channel into a creative brand channel. Campaigns like this show how much more LinkedIn can be, and the direction it’s moving in. (Interestingly, over the last few weeks, we’ve had 3 multi-billion-dollar companies reach out to have conversations about creative ways they can be using LinkedIn).

4. It highlights the compounding value of senior leaders building on LinkedIn over time. Because when they've spent years becoming trusted voices on the platform, as M&S leaders have, moments like this become much more powerful. They are not just extra distribution channels; they bring credibility, context, and attention that help the brand own the conversation, deepen the association between talent and company, and make the whole campaign feel bigger than a one-off activation.

Main takeaway: There are so many opportunities to use LinkedIn creatively and cut through. Exciting times ahead for the platform! 

What did you think of the campaign?

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The Battle

Evan Patterson

Matt Swain

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Performance ScoreEvan Patterson's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Evan Patterson

Matt Swain

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Evan Patterson's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreMatt Swain's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreEvan Patterson's LinkedIn Performance