Todd Clouser 🧙‍♂️💜

Aligned

Sales content creators ➡️ shoot me a connection request to partner.

Head of Social and Partnerships

Clay

Content Creator

Easy Mode

Consulting for B2B SaaS marketing teams that want to create a media engine through in-house creators. 

Framework Overview: https://audienceplus.com/discover/easy-mode-framework

Co-founder

AudiencePlus

Head of Audience Marketing

Advisor

Everlast Welders

- Built and managed team of 15+ influencers
- Grew YouTube channel to 50,000 subscribers
- Organic and paid content creation

Fractional Head of Content

Lavender

Marketing

HockeyStack (YC S23)

I create a terrible (but original) series for The Flow, A Streaming Platform by HockeyStack.

Cognism

Helped Cognism transform their content strategy by implementing the Easy Mode Framework.

The Worst eBook in the World
https://info.cognism.com/the-worst-marketer-in-the-world

Content Consultant

Refine Labs

Product Manager: Community

Lead Brand Marketing Manager

Senior Brand Marketing Manager

CustomerGauge

Global Growth Marketing Manager

I learned content growing a YouTube channel from 0 - 10M+ monthly views.
I learned social by building an audience of over 1M followers across channels.
I learned community growing two Facebook groups to 12k+ monthly active users.
I learned influencer marketing building a team of 15+ creators that drove millions in DTC revenue.


Now I help B2B companies incorporate those strategies and tactics to build their own marketing machine.

DM me to chat.

Party Wizard

https://qrco.de/be1MOp

Todd Clouser

Working at a 🚀 tech startup living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh is way different than doing it in NYC or SF.

But some things are the same no matter where you go.

I still find great coffee.
I still meet up with friends for lunch at hidden gems #localsonly
I still go heads down and build rocket ships!! 
YEAAH! *fist pump*

---

HI! I'm Todd!🚶‍♂️ And I make super educational videos like this one!

Follow me and hit the bell for more tips and tricks on how to be good at your job and other stuff too!

Head of Marketing

Lewin Investments, LLC

Managing Partner: Derick Lewin
Partner: Ashley Lewin

- Managing and growing an investment portfolio of properties in the Omaha, NE area
- 6 single-family residential units 100% owned
- 10 additional residential units owned jointly in partnerships 
- 8 commercial buildings totaling over 130,000 SF of office & retail space

Partner

Wix Studio

Advisory Board Member

‣ Revenue Performance Strategy: Designed and led Revenue Performance Assessments for enterprise clients, auditing $1 billion+ in pipeline across eight companies and creating actionable plans to optimize revenue sources for efficient growth. Delivered tailored GTM execution roadmaps that drove profitable funnel improvements for clients, including Recorded Future, Criteo, Workiva, Checkr, Amperity, Cylindo, Beamery, New Store, and Axonius.

‣ Demand Generation Consulting: Partnered as a strategic advisor to VP+ executives at 20+ organizations, transforming demand generation strategies through in-depth GTM analysis, marketing operations optimization, ABM frameworks, digital advertising, and lead handoff audits. Key outcomes include a 46% increase in hand-raisers and 59% growth in qualified pipeline for one of the clients within one year. Additional clients include Blackline, Syndio, Algolia, Cognism, Canva, Hopin, IBM Instana, Typeform, and Braze.

‣ Helped develop and launch a new offering: The Vault. Contributed to ICP refinement, messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Played a key role in product development, marketing, and customer advisory for the product. Today, The Vault supports 5,000+ B2B marketers by delivering essential resources, playbooks, and templates to streamline growth and reduce customer acquisition costs.

‣ People Management & Team Mentoring: Led, coached, and fostered growth within a team of high-performing performance marketing managers. Focused on developing strategic thinking and executional skills through hands-on coaching in demand gen best practices, data-driven decision-making, and campaign optimization. Built a collaborative and growth-oriented environment, enabling team members to exceed performance targets while aligning with organizational goals.

Sr. Director of Demand Generation

Director of Demand Generation

Consult with small businesses on how their marketing strategies, specifically technical paid media management, are being managed to increase leads/conversions, reduce CAC, and gain more revenue

Marketing Advisor

WP Engine

Demand Generation Manager

Flywheel

Growth Lead

- Built and implemented a digital advertising program that heavily impacted all revenue streams
- Owned Flywheel’s website optimization, marketing automation, lead generation program, and digital advertising efforts
- Continuously brainstormed, tested, and executed optimization experiments to improve channel performance and drive profitable growth 
- Worked with the sales team to create lead generation strategies and support the sales pipeline with marketing resources
- Analyzed marketing campaign data and ran A/B tests to regularly assess ongoing value of acquisition efforts
- Helped the content and design teams create targeted campaigns.

Marketing Strategist

Social Media Specialist

SKAR Advertising

•	Strategized retail, government and healthcare clients' social media accounts
•	Project managed all digital projects, such as website and mobile applications, from start to completion

Digital Content Manager

Scooter's Coffee

Held a variety of roles including public relations, social media, advertising, copywriting, project management, web strategy, and print design to help grow a national franchise and distribution company go from seven states and under 100 stores to 40 states with 150+ stores

Social Media Specialist & Graphic Design Coordinator

Marketing Intern

Demand Generation Leader | Marketing | Growth | SaaS | B2B

Modern growth marketer with a proven track record of growing inbound revenue through proper demand generation for SaaS and B2B models. Constantly challenging traditional marketing tactics, and is data-inspired, not data-driven. Experienced with helping to build revenue, go-to-market, marketing, and digital advertising plans that drive real results.

Ashley Lewin

~80% of our paid LI budget goes to Thought Leadership ads. & they drive insane PLG signups (with a tiny CTA at the end of LENGTHY posts!). This still breaks my brain after nearly a decade of running B2B ad programs.

Here are 7 lessons from what’s working, & 3 improvements I want to roll out next.

1. Pick the right kind of content
→ I see a lot of TL ads promoted that are more fluffy than strategic.
→ A viralEngagement objective.
 → We’ve run several experiments with Engagement vs Reach.
 → I was humbled when Engagement consistently outperformed Reach.
 → Don’t pick based on “best practices.” Test and verify what actually drives results. post ≠ a strong ad
→ Treat it like any other paid asset: it needs to be tightly tied to your message or narrative

2. Always edit before promoting
→ We never boost as-is
→ Every post gets a second pass for clear CTAs and proper UTM tracking
→ If the original post didn’t have a CTA, we add one
→ Even if it’s meant for awareness, always give the reader a next step

3. Objective experimentation 
→ We’ve run several experiments with Engagement vs Reach
 → I was humbled when Engagement consistently outperformed Reach
 → Don’t pick based on “best practices.” Test and verify what actually drives results

4. Diversify the voices
→ Founder-led content got us early traction, but frequency fatigue hits fast
→ We now blend in influencers, employees, and even customer advocates
→ New faces = new reach + pattern interruption in the feed to combat fatigue

5. Build a creator engine
→ Our influencer program is critical for TL ads
→ It’s a flywheel: organic → paid
→ We embed ad usage rights in contracts so both sides benefit from extra reach
→ It helps creators grow their brand while fueling ours

6. Segmentation & retargeting
→ TL ads don’t just live in cold campaigns
→ We also run them for retargeting, mapped to personas: AEs, Sales Leaders, CS, Enterprise, etc.
→ The content has to match the audience’s stage and pain

7. Rotate constantly
→ TL ads fatigue FAST
→ Need to rotate new creative every few weeks

3 areas I want to improve/text next 

1. Balancing text with visuals.
→ Most of our TL ads are text-only. Great for performance, Not as great for brand recall. We’re building creator recall (faces, tone), not brand recall (logo, colors, imagery).
→ Next: co-create visual-first variants to test branded recall without losing authenticity

2. Persona-specific creative
→ We do this, but not nearly as well as we could
→ Deeper segmentation so content truly speaks to each persona’s workflow and challenges

3. Thinking outside the creator box.
→ ClickUp’s ad library is a masterclass. They use employees (with small followings!) to make relatable, ad-first content
→ I want to lean more into that: micro-influencers, customers, and internal voices

I think about LinkedIn ads as a content distribution channel — not a lead gen channel. Thought Leadership is how you scale trust at speed. Because right now, people drive the most impact.

My dad worked for Nucor for 40 years before retiring. A $40B company with ~70 people at HQ, and zero layoffs in 60+ years. 

I was having coffee on vacation with him this week when this story popped up in my IG feed. I read it out loud to get his take. Getting him to talk about himself or work is typically a big challenge. 

I was curious what some of the takeaways were that I or others could learn from their company structure, especially with the fear tech has created with never ending layoff and firing culture. 

(He’s still getting use to me switching companies at nearly 6 and 4 year stints, which is long in tech!) 

1. Pay for performance 
He really emphasized this one. Pay on results, and you get results. They worked off productivity and safety bonuses. 

2. 90% of life is showing up on time 
If you were late, you lost your eligibility for point 1 for the day. Simple accountability. 

3. The CEO is critical
He also really stressed this one with minimal hierarchy. He said you need someone who has worked in the industry and gets it, and are “professional managers.” Meaning, they’re really, really good at people management. Too many CEOs don’t even address the company in all-hands regularly anymore with tech or think about internal comms. It’s more than just hitting targets. But they set the culture of the company. 

4. Most orgs are bloated 
He didn’t quite understand the concept of managers that didn’t execute. (Phew! I’m a manager, but I’ve never executed more in my life lately) 

5. Loyalty goes both ways
When times got tough, they cut hours and salaries - but never jobs. He said 82 and 08 were especially hard. I remember shut downs growing up, but to me, it meant more time with my dad. Nothing more. 

Fun coffee chat either way! I adore my dad for so many reasons. since becoming a parent in the workforce, I’m especially impressed how someone who did night shifts (when he had 3 kids 7 and under) to an impressive role as the sole working parent kept work at work. His mood didn’t change, and he didn’t talk about it. I think the stability and loyalty the company provided played a big role in this.

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When performance dips, most teams hit the gas. The best ones hit pause.

(This is especially true in Q4 where everyone wants to sprint to the finish line. So this is for those marketers out there feelin' it.)

When results slip, there’s a reflex to do more.
Add another channel. Launch another ad. Spin another campaign.
But that’s usually the exact moment you need to do less.

Slowing down feels uncomfortable — especially in Q4.
But focus, not volume, is what creates momentum.

Here’s what “slowing down” actually looks like:

1. Think before you act
→ Diagnose before you deploy. Do you know the root cause? The strategy?

2. Go deep, not wide 
→ Double down on the 1-2 levers/initiatives/channels that matter. More channels/activities doesn't mean more results. If you go wide on too many, you won't get the performance you could on 1-2. This is a *major* common misconception outside of marketing. X channel isn't working? Go to Y channel instead. Vs., X channel isn't working because we need to refresh the creative/messaging/targeting. Y channel has never been vetted, and will take X amount of time to ramp and resource.

3. Let your team think 
→ There's a reason your best thoughts happen when you're in the shower, walking, driving, etc. The critical thinking is what moves the needle, not busy work for motion sake

4. Evaluate, don't just execute
→ The pause *is* the work. This goes to 1 & 3. You need to be strategic to move performance, which comes with evaluation not just execution

When you stretch a marketing team too thin, performance suffers. 
Not because they lack ideas – but because they lack focus. They can't think. Marketing has (possibly?) the most domains to cover. 

The fix for underperformance isn't more activity. 
It's more clarity. 

Focus isn't doing less. It's doing the right thing long enough to see it work.

Most GTM teams try to improve everything at once. The best ones create (what I call) Focus Cycles™️*.

You hear about product sprints to ship faster:  small teams, short timeframes, tight focus. They work because they force clarity.

GTM teams need the same thing, just on a bigger scale.

If you’re in GTM, you know the drill:
→ “We need to triple.”
→ Then come the growth spreadsheets: new biz sales targets, PLG twegets, expansion, churn, ACVs, pipeline, win rates, conversion rates, etc. It’s a mile+ long of inputs
→ All important. Most owned by different people.

But here’s the truth → those are just inputs to the same number.

And what I rarely see teams do is stop and ask:
→ Which metrics are we actually choosing to improve right now?
→ Not all of them. Not eventually.
→ Right now.

Most companies expect you to increase conversion rates, ACVs, win rates, and reduce churn… all at the same time. That’s exhausting. And nearly impossible.

Each of those levers takes a different kind of work to move. And even if one department technically “owns” a metric, they usually can’t move it alone.
→ Marketing needs sales to follow up faster.
→ Sales needs marketing to help with better sales enablement.
→ CS needs customer marketing help to reduce churn.
It’s all connected.

That’s where impact slows down: when everyone’s rowing hard, but not together.

Focus Cycles fix that.

Here’s how I think about it. I like to break growth into 4 views 👇

1. Realistic forecast
If nothing changes, where do we land?

2. Growth plan
What’s the target we need to hit?

3. The delta
The stomach-drop moment between the two.

4. Strategic bets
The 1–3 levers we’re going to focus on (and hold the rest steady)

That last one’s the key: that’s your Focus Cycle.

Let’s say the GTM leadership team aligns on the bet based on what the needs/timeline/areas of opportunity for impact:
→ Focus on expansion to offset slower new biz
→ Reduce churn to protect revenue
→ Improve lead→op conversion
→ Lift new biz win rates
→ Increase opps

Then everyone rallies behind it — sales, marketing, CS, even product. 

You create strategic campaign plans on the demand/marketing side. 

You go from a bunch of disconnected efforts…
to a crew rowing the same direction, fast.

And when you do that, the work feels clearer.
The wins come faster. 
& the execution teams feel part of something bigger.

If you ran a GTM Focus Cycle next quarter, what lever would you pick? Are you doing this within your org already with goal planning? 

** Not actually ™️’d, I’m just a sucker for frameworks and branding things into packages to explain concepts 😜

Your A/B tests might be costing you growth. I know, I know… they’re supposed to help you figure out what works so you can scale it, right?

Here’s the catch:

Even if you isolate the exact reason something worked, that insight expires.

Markets shift.
Seasons shift.
Your product evolves.
Buyer priorities change.
Platforms rewrite themselves overnight.

What worked in June might do nothing in September.

And the bigger issue is time.

Clean, single-variant experiments slow you down. While you wait for one test to finish, you miss five other opportunities that could have moved the metric faster.

By the time the data is clean, the window might have closed.

I had someone ask me how to engineer a the best ad ever so they could replicate it forever. Test elements of it it to know best graphic, headline, CTA, etc. 

But a top performer in summer might flop in winter. Or next quarter. Or the moment your ICP’s world tilts slightly.

Chasing a static answer in a dynamic environment is how growth stalls.

Here’s where teams actually get stuck:

1. Sequential tests create sequential learning while the market moves in parallel

2. Time is the variable no one budgets for and the one you lose the fastest

3. Real GTM data is never as clean as you think it is

4. Insights decay faster than teams admit

5. Many optimize for explanation instead of actual impact

The purpose of experimentation is to drive growth. 

I’m not anti-experimentarion. 
I’m anti stagnation and rigid mindset. 

You win by building a system that keeps discovering what works next at a high speed and velocity, not by trying to freeze the thing that worked once.

(P.S. I saw a company run A/B landing tests for years on something so simple because they hadn’t reached statistical significance yet. Or, teams unable to touch high-impact onboarding flows that could result in a lot of self-serve revenue for similar reasons.)

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The Battle

Todd Clouser

Ashley Lewin

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taplio

The Battle

Todd Clouser

Ashley Lewin

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);}Todd Clouser's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAshley Lewin's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreTodd Clouser's LinkedIn Performance