Content Marketing Playbook for Sales Teams to Get Followers, Leads, and Build Relationships on Social Media

Cold outreach is excellent for filling your sales pipeline and closing more deals.

But it has one problem – you’re selling to a cold audience that doesn’t know about you.

In B2B sales (especially if you’re selling high-ticket deals), the prospect must trust you for the deal to happen.

Unfortunately, a cold audience still doesn’t trust you, and building that trust just through cold outreach is hard (that’s why even the best salespeople have an email-to-lead ratio of at least 600:1, if not even more).

You need to increase trust and affinity towards you to improve your conversions and reply rates (i.e., to close one deal out of every 100 people you contact).

The best way to do that is with an active presence on social media.

Once prospects consume your content regularly, they’re more likely to reply to your cold outreach messages, and eventually sign the deal.

In this article, we’ll see:

• What’s the difference between cold outreach and content marketing when it comes to getting sales
• How to find your voice and Content-Market-Fit (CMF)
• How to create a narrative around your personality and brand
• LinkedIn and Twitter strategies for positioning you as a thought leader (get followers, build relationships, and get more leads)
• How to leverage LinkedIn and Twitter to get a massive influx of leads each month

Let’s get started.

How do Cold Outreach and Content Marketing work together?

First, let’s see the main differences (pros and cons) between cold outreach and content marketing:

The main benefit of cold outreach is that sometimes you get the first results and clients quickly.

Especially if you have something in common with the prospects (i.e., you’re going to one event, and then you scrape all attendees from the LinkedIn Event page and reach out to them on LinkedIn through Expandi).

Content Marketing, on the other hand, requires time. Be prepared to avoid seeing any results in the first three to six months.

However, once it starts having an effect, content marketing empowers cold outreach with a few things:

• It reduces your sales cycles (people trust you, hence they need less time to decide)
• You will close more high-ticket and premium deals compared to only doing cold outreach (since people have more trust in you).
• New prospects will come to you on their own. They’ll now be inbound leads, meaning that after some time, you’ll need to put less effort into chasing clients and have more time to just focus on closing deals, which is the action that brings the most money.
• Good relationships with other influential people in your industry will open many doors, such as mutual content collaborations that will give you access to other engaged and warmed lead lists, partnerships, acquisitions, and other things.

As you can see, cold outreach can only get you so far. However, cold outreach and an effective content marketing strategy can help you build an empire.

You can see the proof of that in many examples.

For example, thousands of smaller marketing agencies do a good job for clients, but you probably don’t know about them (and they struggle to get new clients).

On the other hand, many people know about Refine Labs, one of the leading marketing agencies for B2B companies in the world.

Reason?

Because its’ founder, Chris Walker, produces a lot of content on LinkedIn:

Just look at that organic engagement. The best part? All of it comes from B2B executives.

This approach alone brings Refine Labs dozens of six-figure potential deals a month.

Refine Labs’ sales team only needs to qualify prospects and close deals.

That’s the power of content marketing.

Imagine having a significant influence in your market and sending outreach campaigns.

Your reply rates will be at least 3x bigger, and you’ll see more results.

Why?

When people see that you sent them a cold email, they’ll be eager to hear what you have to say and ready to take your offer because they already trust you.

Now that you know the value of content marketing in sales, let’s start building your personal strategy by finding your voice and a content-market-fit.

Finding your voice and content-market-fit

As much as you need a product-market fit (PMF) for a successful business, you also need a content-market fit (CMF) for great social media content.

CMF is a perfect balance of your unique expertise, the market’s needs, the customer’s problems, and attractive/trendy topics.

If you want to position yourself as a thought leader in the niche and have hundreds of dream customers as your raging fans, you need to identify your CMF and find your voice at the beginning (to avoid trial and error later on).

In other words, you need to write content that:

• It is a mix of your unique knowledge (expertise) and the market’s needs
• Solves customer’s problems
• Told in your unique voice
• And occasionally follows popular/attractive topics and trends (for a bigger reach)

Your Expertise & Customer’s Problems

Take a piece of paper, sit down, and write one huge vertical line across the entire sheet. On the left side, write Problems; on the right, write Secret Knowledge:

Then, under the Problems section, write down the main problems your audience encounters.

Behind each problem, write down the secret knowledge you possess that helps people solve this problem.

Repeat this for 4-6 problems. Now you know precisely your secret knowledge and how it helps your audience solve specific problems.

Popular & Attractive Topics

We can divide this part into three categories:

• Trendy topics in your industry or the world that you can use
• Trendy post types on specific platforms (i.e., reels, carousels, and others – whatever is trendy at that moment)
• Strong opinions that will drive people crazy

Each of them is effective. In the first category, you can find popular memes, trendy pictures from current world events (such as the Olympics), or even some hot news from your industry.

For the second category, every platform has periods where one post type is superior over others. Twitter threads exploded a few years back, as did long-form posts on LinkedIn or even Carousels.

For the third category, you need to have a strong opinion that many people in your industry don’t approve of. This will give you a lot of reach, engagement, and, most importantly, attention.

After some time, after consuming other content and writing a lot, you’ll find it easier to spot trendy topics and write posts that get a lot of attention due to foreign factors.

However, it’s art knowing how to put everything together into the context of your audience, their problems, and your secret knowledge.

We’ll see more examples of this later in the article.

Cheatsheet for finding your Content-Market-Fit and Voice

To make everything easier, I created a cheatsheet to help you find your voice and CMF.

Below are the main questions you need to answer, as well as the explanations for each question:

Here’s the URL to access the CMF sheet.

Creating your narrative

By filling out the sheet above, you’re basically creating your narrative. It allows you to put everything together into a cohesive narrative that should follow you on every platform and every post you make.

Without a clear narrative, your audience might get confused.

Narrative helps:

• You to identify stories worth telling
• Your audience to better connect with you
• With building trust and affinity with you

It allows you to understand:

• Your origins
• Who you are and what are you fighting for
• Who are your enemies
• What are you standing for
• What’s your expertise
• What change do you bring to the world

By focusing your content on these six things, your audience will better connect with you, position you as a thought leader, and finally come to you when they need solutions to their problems.

What channels to focus on?

The best answer to this question is whatever channel your audience is using.

However, if you’re in B2B sales, then the answer to this question is pretty much straightforward – Twitter (X), LinkedIn and YouTube for video content.

You can also use other platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and others, but from our experience, Twitter and LinkedIn bring the best results and are easiest to build a long-lasting brand that compounds over time (not to mention that there are great LinkedIn tactics you can use to boost your growth that we’ll speak about later on).

There are two types of social media channels that you can use:

• Owned social media (your own accounts)
• Borrowed social media (other people’s accounts).

Sometimes, especially if you’re just growing your audience, you can borrow the audience of other creators (such as reaching out to the people who commented on influencer’s posts, but more about that in the following article).

No matter what channel you choose at the end, there are two rules that are important for all channels:

• Be consistent and show up – posting today and then again in a week is worth nothing. You need to be active every day. To post every day, and to engage with other people.
• Repurpose your content – you don’t need to reinvent new content constantly. Recycle old posts, take one longer post, and break it into a few smaller pieces, etc.

Long-term strategy for LinkedIn and Twitter

Chances are 90% that your target audience is hanging out on both or one of these two platforms. So, in the next chapters, we’ll focus only on these platforms. In one of the future articles, we may also cover YouTube as a separate channel.

But for now, let’s focus on only LinkedIn and Twitter.

In the next chapters, we’ll see:

• Different content types to break through the noise, get followers & leads
• How to write engaging content
• How to get more leads & deals

Different content types & categories for LinkedIn and Twitter

Let’s first break down two terms:

• Content Categories – type of information that you’re trying to share
• Content Types – how you’re going to share this information

In other words, there are multiple content categories that can be delivered through different content types.

It’s only a matter of your preference, goals, and platform’s trends & algorithm.

Content Categories

Any content you write can either be:

• Actionable
• Novelty
• Inspiring
• Case Study
• Lead Magnet

Let’s break them down one by one.

• Actionable content shows people exactly how to perform a specific task or solve a specific problem. It is​​ usually step-by-step guides and posts (e.g., “Here’s how to reduce your churn rate by 5% with in-app notifications.”).
  
  Actionable content is important for the MOFU and BOFU stages. It’s also the most versatile content that will get you attention, engagement, followers, and leads.
  
• Inspiring content serves as the TOFU content on the platform, with the pain purpose of getting you a lot of eyeballs and followers. It can also bring you a ton of newsletter subscribers.
  
  Examples might be “​​A Story of Apple – how Steve Jobs built a trillion dollar empire, or even “Here are five cold email templates that closed us 60+ clients this year,” “10+ ad examples from last month,” etc. You get the point. As its name says, inspiring content should inspire your followers.
  
• Novelty content is something new and evergreen that’s written exclusively with your secret knowledge. Novelty content brings something new to the world – your specific thoughts, expertise, etc.
  
  It will position you as a thought leader, make people trust you, and make them consider you an expert.
  
• Case studies are pretty straightforward – it’s the moment you brag about how amazing your product or services are, but in a less annoying way.
  
  Showing examples and results of your work will get you leads. But don’t overdo this.
  
• Lead magnets such as MOFU and BOFU content are excellent. The idea is to create something new that solves a specific problem for free. You make a gated landing page, distribute it through social media, and people give you their emails. We’ll speak more about this later on.

Experimenting with and diversifying each content category is the right way to go.

For example, you’ll quickly become boring if you just write inspirational content.

I follow the usual content plan or ratio of content categories. It balances different outcomes (getting followers, positioning me as a thought leader, and getting leads).

You can replicate the same calendar:

As you can see, it’s primarily value-based content. I’m a huge believer that you need to give a lot before you can ask for something.

I make one ask on every 10-15 give-posts. If you’re just trying to get leads, that will look poorly in your audience’s eyes.

You can also choose to publish one post a day. Or, if you want faster and bigger growth, you can also publish twice a day. No matter what you choose, just stick to it and be consistent.

In the first few months, you’ll see zero progress and reactions, but keep faith. Content marketing (especially on social media) is a long-term game that compounds over time.

If this amount of content scares you, don’t worry. I’ve created a simple content idea generator to share with you in a few moments.

Content types

You can use the following content types for any content category:

• Short-form LinkedIn posts & tweets
• Longer LinkedIn & Twitter posts
• Twitter threads
• Carousels
• Videos
• Comment & Get posts.

Many of them are self-explanatory.

Comment & Get posts are great for distributing your lead magnets. They gamify the platform’s algorithm (force people to engage with your post in order to get something), giving you a big reach and a lot of potential leads. Here’s one example where we got over 1000 leads from a single Twitter post:

So, what content type should you use?

I suggest going with all of them in a systematic approach.

I like to pick one topic and write it as a long-form post or Twitter thread—that’s how I get my first piece of content.

Then, I use that bigger content to create 4-6 smaller content pieces or videos. I’m just repurposing what I already have.

This way, with some extra effort, I got content for the entire week.

How to write content that gets attention and shares

First, let me tell you the two immutable laws of writing your content. Every piece of content you write follows the two essential copywriting principles:

• All posts must have a goal and solve a specific problem for your audience. In other words, every post you write must bring your ideal customers closer to their dreams.
• The first sentence must GRAB the attention. The second sentence and every other sentence must HOLD the attention. Each sentence must motivate people to read the following sentence, then the next, and the next until they reach the end and take action.

Now, let’s talk about the hooks.

Hooks

We use hooks to make people stop scrolling and to get their attention. With that in mind, a hook has two goals:

• To grab the attention
• Hold the reader’s attention well enough to make them read the following sentence of your post (or click on “See more”).

The hook is an offer that needs to sell your post. The more unbelievable it is, the better.

Here are some hook examples if your posts are “sales-related”:

• I’ll share the EXACT cold email template I used to close four 6-figure clients in the last 30 days
• Deal close rate is NOT the most critical metric in sales

As you can see, there are two “templates” you can use to write great hooks:

• The mind-blowing punch line (like in the first example), or:
• Unpopular opinion that will trigger other people (like in the second example).

You can use many “copywriting techniques” to write great hooks, but the two above are the most common and effective.

If you, however, wanna share a personal story, you can start with a “past and present” statement, like our co-founder Glenn did:

Before we continue writing your post’s body, keep in mind that on LinkedIn and Twitter, media (images, gifs, videos, memes, etc) also serve as a hook.

A good media file will also grab the attention.

In the example below, Glenn used a personal image of him and our other co-founder, Stefan, to grab the attention and the excellent hook (first line). These two things combined got him a lot of engagement on the post:

Another example is my post, where I distributed one lead magnet a few years back.

I recorded my screen, where I quickly scrolled through a massive database. Then, I turned that recording into a gif. It captivated my attention and got me over 120+ leads:

Writing the body of your post

When writing the body of your posts, there’s one golden rule you need to keep in your mind all the time:

Every sentence must prompt people to read the next one.

There’s a writing (or story-writing) technique called open loop – or, in our case – open loop sentences.

You’re seeing this technique in practice every single day without even realizing it. For example, think about your favorite TV show.

Every episode (or season) ends a way that doesn’t give you answers to your questions. So you’re forced to wait (or watch immediately) the next episode in order to get your answers.

When writing social media posts, we aim to achieve the same effect.

Unlike a closed loop, the open loop leaves your prospects with unanswered questions.

So, basically, every sentence you write (even the last one or a CTA) must be an open-loop sentence.

Here’s one stupid story I just invented to explain this concept better:

Your posts shouldn’t be cringe like this one, but you get the point (of course, I didn’t publish this anywhere, no worries).

Here’s one real-life example from our co-founder Stefan Smulders that performed well:

As you can see from the example above, I like to use these small attention boosters to break the monotony and regain people’s attention.

I always put them after some longer sentences to keep the motivation going.

So, to recap everything, as a rule of thumb:

• After every sentence, ask yourself, will this sentence make me read the next sentence?
• Keep your paragraphs short
• Make spaces between sentences
• Don’t overcomplicate with emojis. The simpler, the better. You don’t work in a circus, and you’re not selling to kids.
• Have a clear CTA at the end (when appropriate – if you’re not trying to sell anything, a CTA can be “share this with friends” or “retweet so more people can see this”)

My Content Operating System (COS) for getting dozens of content ideas to write about in less than 5 minutes

As I promised, at the end of the chapter on how to write your posts, I’ll give you my cheat sheet for getting dozens of content ideas to write about.

I used to struggle to find new topics to write about on LinkedIn and Twitter.

But after months of struggle and iteration, I came up with this COS.

It allows me to brainstorm different content ideas quickly:

Let’s break it down:

• On the left side, you should write the “general” topics you’re expert at (i.e. cold email outreach, demo calls, finding leads, etc) – Note: these topics should solve specific pain points your audience has (from your content market fit).
• The purple columns are content categories.
• The blue columns are content types (short-form, long-form, etc)
• On the far right, we have a Notes section. Usually, the best content ideas come when you’re not thinking about them – in situations such as taking a shower, walking at night, in a restaurant, whatever.

The way this COS works is that first, I pick a topic I want to write about. Then, I close my eyes and pick one category and one content type. 

And that’s it. 

Simple as that.

Pro tip: Look at content published by the influencers in your space. You’ll likely notice that they follow similar patterns from post to post. Try to understand the templates they’re using and use them for your own posts.

If they’re using some templates constantly, it means it works.

Building relationships on social media

So far, we have learned how to find your content-market fit and how to write social media posts that grab attention, hold attention, and engage people.

But, to grow your following (especially if you’re starting from scratch) and to get leads, we need to learn how to build relationships.

Nothing is possible without relationships and interaction with other people. That’s why they’re called social networks, after all.

By constantly engaging with other people, you’ll:

• Get more followers/subscribers
• Get more eyeballs on your content (and better engagement)
• Build relationships with other people in your niche. These relationships can later result in closed deals, partnerships, opportunities, etc.

What I like to do on Twitter, for example, is to build different “lists” of the people I wanna build relationships with:

You can do the same with LinkedIn, Taplio, or some sheet/CRM.

Although I advocate for at least 15-20 minutes of personal, daily engagement with other people through their posts and direct messages, you can also automate relationship building on LinkedIn.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a sheet with the LinkedIn URLs of the people you want to build relationships with (this should be potential partners, influencers in your niche, and dream clients)
2. Create an account in Expandi – the safest LinkedIn Outreach & Automation tool
3. Create a campaign

With Expandi, you can create various campaigns.

For example, if you just wanna be on top of someone’s mind, you can create a campaign that every few days:

• Visits prospect’s profile
• Likes the recent post

This way, you automate the majority of the relationship-building, and the only thing you need to do manually is occasionally comment on other people’s posts (but only when you can add value—don’t write general comments, please).

Or, you can build a campaign that engages with your prospects, sends the connection request, and, if the request is accepted, automatically sends a message to the prospect (but not immediately, so it won’t look fake). If the prospect doesn’t accept the connection request, the campaign will continue engaging with his profile:

This campaign can be set up in minutes.

1. Click on the “Campaigns” section on the left

2. Click on the “Add new campaign” in the upper right corner

3. From the predefined templates, select the template called “Express interest before connection”

And Voila! Add your lead list with LinkedIn URLs, and you’ll be ready to go!

That is how you build relationships on a scale while still maintaining a human touch—a perfect balance between automation and manual engagement.

The Bottom Line

So this is how you grow your following on social media, write posts that grab and hold attention and build relationships with other people.

But, all of this will be in vain if you don’t know how to get leads from LinkedIn and Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong—all of this is necessary so we can reach a wider audience, but the next step is getting leads.

We’re exploring that in our next article – Actionable Tactics and Playbooks for Sales Teams to Get Leads from Social Media [Without Paid Ads].

Give it a 10-minute read to complete the circle, and finally, start making money from social.