Thinking on B2B marketing, brand and growth.

Here's what I see consistently with B2B businesses that aren't making LinkedIn work.

They're treating it like a broadcast channel. Post content. Hope people see it. Measure impressions. Report to the board. Repeat. And then wonder why the pipeline isn't moving.

LinkedIn was never a broadcast channel. The businesses generating real commercial outcomes from it are using it in a fundamentally different way. They treat it like a room full of people they want to know. Not sell to. Know.

That distinction changes everything about how you use the platform.

When LinkedIn is a broadcast channel the questions you ask are: what should we post, how often, what format, what do the analytics say. When it's a room full of people you want to know the questions become: who specifically do I want to be in front of, what do I know that they'd find genuinely useful, how do I start real conversations rather than accumulate impressions.

The first set of questions produces content. The second produces pipeline.

Three things move the needle consistently, in my experience. The first is the one most businesses skip entirely.

Personal profiles generate more than five times the organic reach of equivalent content posted on a company page. Which means your company page is doing a fraction of the work it could be doing if the people inside your business were active alongside it.

The best LinkedIn programmes don't start with the company page. They start with identifying two or three people inside the business whose voice and expertise could build real authority, and building a strategy around them. That multiplies reach without spending a pound on ads. It also builds the kind of trust that a logo never can.

The second thing is specificity. Most B2B LinkedIn content fails not because it's bad but because it's trying to appeal to everyone. The content that performs - the posts that generate real engagement and real inbound - is specific enough to feel like it was written for someone. A specific challenge. A specific sector. A specific observation that only someone who actually does this work would know.

Broad content gets a like from a colleague. Specific content gets a reply from a prospect.

The third is consistency. A business that posts three times a week for a year will outperform a business that runs a brilliant campaign for three months, every time. LinkedIn's algorithm rewards consistency. More importantly, buyers reward familiarity. They buy from people they feel they know. And they feel they know you when they've seen your thinking regularly over time.

None of this is complicated. It's just patient. And patience is the thing most B2B marketing budgets don't allow for.

Craig Hares is the Founding Partner of Fox + Hare, a B2B specialist creative and marketing agency based in London. foxandhare.co