--- title: "Grow Your Influence, Audience, and Pipeline: A  Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Posts with Holly Melvin" description: "B2B tech companies' guide to getting started with sponsored LinkedIn posts: sketch the funnel, segment, post and engage, track and nurture, CTA." image: https://blog.propllr.com/hubfs/PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-52.jpg --- [![](https://blog.propllr.com/hubfs/raw_assets/public/Propllr_2025/images/2024/logo.svg)](https://propllr.com/) - What We Do - [Public Relations](https://propllr.com/pr-for-startups/) - [Content Marketing](https://propllr.com/content-marketing/) - What We’ve Done - [Case Studies](https://propllr.com/case-studies/) - [Client News](https://propllr.com/client-news/) - What We Think - [Blog](https://blog.propllr.com/) - About - [About](https://propllr.com/about/) - [Life at Propllr](https://propllr.com/life-at-propllr/) - [Contact](https://propllr.com/contact/) - What We Do - [Public Relations](https://propllr.com/pr-for-startups/) - [Content Marketing](https://propllr.com/content-marketing/) - What We’ve Done - [Case Studies](https://propllr.com/case-studies/) - [Client News](https://propllr.com/client-news/) - What We Think - [Blog](https://blog.propllr.com/) - About - [About](https://propllr.com/about/) - [Life at Propllr](https://propllr.com/life-at-propllr/) - [Contact](https://propllr.com/contact/) # Grow Your Influence, Audience, and Pipeline: A  Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Posts with Holly Melvin By [Brenna Lemieux](https://blog.propllr.com/author/brenna-lemieux) | October 27, 2026 ![](https://blog.propllr.com/hs-fs/hubfs/PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-52.jpg?width=730&height=500&name=PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-52.jpg) By now, you probably know that getting your SMEs active on LinkedIn is a great way to build trust and affinity for your brand. But what if you want to grow faster? If you’ve got some budget to play with, it may be time to dabble in sponsored posts. In her most recent role, [Holly Melvin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollymelvin/), a B2B marketer who works with SaaS and technology brands, launched and managed a sponsored LinkedIn program that grew her CEO’s audience and influence while nurturing the organization’s pipeline. For this piece, I asked her to spill everything. Read on for her insights on how to spin up a paid LinkedIn program for both short-term conversions and long-term nurture. ## Background: Promote People’s Posts, Not Brand Posts Even if you’ve never promoted a post on LinkedIn before, you’re probably aware that posts from people perform better than posts from brands. Because of that, it almost always makes more sense to put money behind posts from the accounts of real people within your organization vs. posts from your brand account – at least for top-of-funnel prospects. “Even if the brand itself was talking about very thought leadership driven things,” Holly said, “Lights out, the individual person always performs better.” Holly ran a program to promote the posts of her organization’s CEO and those of two other SMEs. The CEO’s performed best – but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect. I’ll get to why below. ## Step 1: Sketch the Funnel: Give Lots of Value Before Any CTA Holly emphasized over and over that the strategy she built was not about selling right away. “Our goal was to create awareness, credibility, and engagement,” she said, “Not an immediate conversion.” The idea was that, as the CEO’s visibility and reputation in the industry grew, the brands she was associated with would benefit from the trust halo she built up. In practice, that meant leading with [thought leadership](https://blog.propllr.com/how-to-measure-performance-thought-leadership-content), following up with educational materials, and only when someone expressed further interest presenting them with a call to action. At each funnel stage, the prospect’s own behaviors determine what they see next. “If they interacted with the thought leadership piece,” she said, “Then they would fall into that midfunnel engagement.” So a prospect might see five or six sponsored thought leadership posts before saving, liking, or commenting. And it’s only after that explicit show of interest that Holly would start showing them mid-funnel content, typically from the brand’s account. I’ll get into more detail in a minute, but first we need to talk about how she handled segmentation. ![Illustration of a hand moving figurines of humans into three groups on a desktop. Two groups are loosely highlighted with purple cone shapes. A stack of books and a cup full of writing implements are in the background.](https://blog.propllr.com/hs-fs/hubfs/PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-53.jpg?width=1521&height=854&name=PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-53.jpg) ## Step 2: Segment Like Crazy I will confess that I went into this call thinking “Maybe we should try promoting a post here and there,” and then Holly started talking about her approach to segmentation and I realized that I was a fool! The key to making this strategy work and being able to measure and refine it is careful segmenting of your audiences. Here’s how Holly handled it: First, create a dedicated list of existing customers so you can avoid trying to “sell” them (she marketed to this list separately). Holly highlighted one challenge B2B brands are likely to face here: The way you create lists on LinkedIn is via email addresses, but the email customers use for their LinkedIn account may not be the one they use for their account with your brand. Her advice: do your best. “Our match rate was between 60 and 75 percent,” she said. “Which, honestly, is better than nothing.” Second, segment in as much detail as you can. Holly created segments based on the following characteristics: - Portfolio brand - Company size - Persona / audience type - Customer status - Funnel stage The last item on the list is one Holly handled and updated manually. More on that in Step 5. Once you have your segments, Holly explained, you can map out what content to promote to whom. Which means, of course, you need content. ## Step 3: Create the Content Holly explained that she used two types of content to nurture prospects via sponsored LinkedIn posts: - For top-of-funnel prospects, pure thought leadership. - For those who interacted with thought leadership content, educational resources (which she promoted via brand pages). Let’s take a closer look at both. ### Thought Leadership Posts We actually helped Holly and her team develop some of this content. To do it, we set up regular calls with the company’s CEO and asked her questions about the current state of the business and the industry, what she and the team were working on, what she’d heard from customers lately, and what kinds of conversations were happening at live events. We then used the transcripts from these calls to draft LinkedIn posts that captured the CEO’s ideas and perspectives. ### Educational Resources The educational resources Holly and her team created were typically longer-form, ranging from blog posts to ebooks and in-depth market analyses. For example: a quarterly analysis of the industry, based on both macroeconomic data and anonymized data from their customers. This resource was an excellent mid-funnel piece because it provided helpful insight about what was currently working for businesses in the space and established the brand as the authoritative source of that information. In both cases, the high-level purpose of the content was the same: deliver real value to the person who sees the content. In the case of the thought leadership posts, that value came in the form of the CEO’s expert analysis of and unique insight into the market. In the case of the reports, the value was a data-backed overview of what was working for other professionals in the space. It was only *after* a prospect interacted with a promoted post featuring educational content that Holly and her team would promote a post featuring a call to action (more on that below). ## Step 4: Post and Engage You’ve got your funnel map, you’ve got your segments, you’ve got your content. Now it’s time to post! Holly said that the SMEs she worked with used LinkedIn’s native post scheduling feature, though a third-party tool like Buffer can work as well. Once the posts were live, Holly would promote them to a specific segment, based on relevance. One early discovery: the CEO’s posts consistently outperformed the other two SMEs’. Here’s what made the difference: instead of “posting and ghosting,” the CEO consistently engaged with other people on LinkedIn. “That’s where our CEO was really strong,” said Holly. “And it showed. Her engagement, conversions – basically any metric you wanted to track – far outperformed our subject matter experts, who weren’t really engaging with other posts.” Even when Holly and her team would flag a post in the wild that mentioned one of the brands for the SMEs and encourage them to engage with it, she said it was “a coin flip” whether that engagement happened. This is really common, of course. People are busy. Many people who aren’t explicitly in marketing roles simply don’t have time to scroll LinkedIn and comment and like posts. But commenting on and liking other people’s posts is the only “hack” I’ve seen that actually helps improve organic performance on LinkedIn. And here’s the kicker, in Holly’s words: “The sponsored posts that performed the best were the ones that got the best organic traction within the first 24 hours.” ![Illustration of a chicken beside a hatched egg with LinkedIn's logo coming out. Yellow splotch background.](https://blog.propllr.com/hs-fs/hubfs/PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-51.jpg?width=1521&height=854&name=PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-51.jpg) I think this is a bit of a chicken-*and*-the-egg situation: - If a post gets strong organic engagement, there's a good chance it struck a nerve with its target audience. That means if you pay for more people in that audience to see it, it will likely also resonate with them and so they’re likely to engage with it. - When a post earns engagement, people are more inclined to engage with it. It’s a whole social proof thing. Being the first one to engage with something requires a lot of cognitive load: is this good? Do I want to make a public declaration about whether I think this is good? Etc. But once other people have validated it, it’s easy to hop on the bandwagon, whether you’re seeing it because it’s been promoted or not. - When a post does well, the poster’s audience grows. This makes it more likely that future posts will perform well organically, which means you can spend less money to get reach. The big takeaway here: Engaging with other people’s posts will help your posts perform better, both organically and when you promote them. ## Step 5: Track and Nurture Holly used LinkedIn’s built-in retargeting capabilities to create audiences based on engagement with previous campaigns. When someone interacted with a thought leadership post (by clicking “read more,” liking, commenting, saving, or sharing), they would move to a mid-funnel list. The challenge was getting enough people into each audience group to run a targeting campaign (LinkedIn’s minimum audience size is 300 people). In some cases, it took a while to grow a target audience big enough to run a campaign. One thing I found interesting was Holly’s explanation of the philosophy behind the way she moved people from one group to the next: “People move naturally from engaging with an individual’s expertise to engaging more deeply with the company,” she said. So after someone engaged with the CEO’s post or the post of another SME, Holly moved them to the mid-funnel list and showed them promoted posts from the most relevant brand. And only after they also expressed interest in those branded posts did Holly and her team show them a CTA. ## Step 6: Invite Action Holly and her team introduced a strong call to action only after a prospect had shown clear interest in both thought leadership content and branded educational content. Depending on the messages a person had seen so far, that CTA might be “book a demo,” “talk to sales,” “explore the product,” etc. Holly describes the progression like this: “Rather than asking a completely cold audience for a demo, we earned the right to make that ask.” At a high level, the prospect journey went like this: See our expertise → Engage with thought leadership → Consume deeper content → Receive a sales CTA. ## What Not to Do Holly got her organization’s sponsored LinkedIn posts down to a science. But she also tried things that didn’t work: - **Be strategic about amplifying posts from non-employees**. In a few instances, Holly and her team promoted posts from happy customers who happened to post something positive about one of the brands. The best performance came when the person already had an established audience and / or engaged with people regularly on LinkedIn. If that baseline activity wasn’t there, performance was much poorer. - **Don’t start with video posts**. “Nothing eats budget faster on LinkedIn than video content,” Holly said. This isn’t to say promoting video posts can’t work. But she recommends learning the ropes with text-only posts first, then experimenting with video. When you do start experimenting, Holly recommends setting a clear budget cap so you can evaluate performance without spending too much too quickly. - **Don’t post and ghost**. To get the most bang for your bucks, sponsor posts by SMEs who can engage with other people on LinkedIn. - **Don’t measure by SEM’s standards**. Holly noted that, on a cost-per-click basis, LinkedIn promoted posts are more expensive than SEM ads. But she also added that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. LinkedIn promoted posts give you an opportunity to build trust and nurture audiences rather than being purely transactional. If you’re experimenting with promoted posts, be realistic about your goals. ![Illustration of a happy ghost typing on a laptop](https://blog.propllr.com/hs-fs/hubfs/PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-52.jpg?width=1521&height=854&name=PR%20Blog%20-%20LI%20sponsored%20posts-52.jpg) ## Results: A Foundation for Further Growth Holly and her team helped accelerate the CEO’s follower growth, increase engagement, and grow retargeting audiences month over month, all indicators that the program met (and is meeting) its goals of building awareness, credibility, and engaged audiences that the brand can continue nurturing over time. The growing retargeting audiences are particularly valuable because they let Holly and her team reach more people with relevant mid- and bottom-funnel content – in other words, create a flywheel. This is the power of promoted posts on LinkedIn: the more followers you earn, the more people see your posts. The more people see your posts, the more [trust you earn](https://blog.propllr.com/build-trust-not-buzz). The more trusted you become, the shorter your sales cycle is. And so on. When Holly left that role, the LinkedIn sponsored posts program was still very much a work in progress as they continued to experiment, fine-tune, and adapt. ## Pay for Relevant Audiences to See Your SMEs as Experts If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: use sponsored posts on LinkedIn not to sell to your audience but to help more members of your target audience to see your SMEs as experts in their field. In the world of B2B tech, you can’t force someone to be ready to buy your product, no matter how good your messaging or how smart your SMEs. What you can do is win their attention, win their respect, and win their trust. Only after they’ve shown signs of interest in what your people have to say and what your company has to offer does it make sense to ask for action. There was even more to our conversation than what I captured in this post. 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