Clay generated more than six million LinkedIn impressions in a single quarter with no paid budget by turning its own people into its media channel. It matched each buyer persona to an employee who could speak to that buyer, paid one person to keep everyone posting consistently, and ran each person's feed like a portfolio of promotional, personal, thought leadership and experimental posts. Most teams can adapt the model with the people they already have.
Clay’s LinkedIn broke 200,000 followers this week!
What have I seen from the outside?
Clay's momentum has been hard to miss. Over the past year, my LinkedIn feed has filled up with Clay voices: founders, growth leaders, GTM engineers and marketers, each talking to a slightly different reader. It never felt like a brand account repeating itself. It felt like a group of practitioners who happened to work at the same company.
Alex Lindahl is a good example. His GTM Engineering newsletter and posts have become regular reading for me, and he brings a sharp point of view to GTM engineering, from how people break into the field to research like Clay's speed-to-lead benchmark, which I wrote about here. Clay bringing him in as its creator in residence looks like the same strategy at work: give credible people a platform and let them teach.
I've built audiences for brands before, including doubling C4 Belts' social following to 71K. Getting a group of busy executives to show up consistently, each in their own voice, is a harder and more impressive thing. So when I came across a breakdown of exactly how Clay did it, I watched closely.
How did Clay build its executive content engine?
Matt Huang, who runs the B2B content agency Forj Media and previously worked in B2B marketing at Google, walks through the playbook in the video above. He bases it on a playbook Clay's head of marketing, Bruno Estrella, published publicly. Here's the shape of it.
Map buyer personas to people
Clay sells to sales and marketing teams, but those teams hold several distinct buyers. Clay matched each one to an employee who could speak to them credibly. Co-founders Varun Anand and Kareem Amin wrote for founders and executives. Davide Grieco, head of growth, wrote for other growth leaders. Everett Berry, head of GTM engineering, wrote for people building lists and workflows every day. Bruno Estrella, head of marketing, wrote for marketers. Huang counts close to ten people, each staying in their lane.
Pay one person to keep everyone consistent
Huang's phrasing is blunter: pay one person to nag everyone else. Sarah Khasrovi ran executive branding at Clay. She tracked the calendar, prompted busy leaders on what to post and kept the whole group on schedule. Consistency is a full-time job, and executives in back-to-back meetings rarely have the headspace to plan their own posts.
This is the step I'd guard most closely. Paying someone to hold the group accountable costs less than most ad budgets, yet it's often the first line to get cut. And when nobody owns the calendar, feeds drift toward promotion within weeks. Company pages show the same pattern.
Run each feed like a portfolio
Each person's feed followed a rough mix. Huang shares Davide Grieco's version: about 20% promotional, 25 to 40% personal, about 40% thought leadership and up to 15% experimental. These are ranges from one person's feed, so treat them as a guide. The useful rule underneath is simple: ask for action in roughly one of every five posts.
One point from the discussion under Huang's LinkedIn post stuck with me. The mix only works when each feed reaches a different audience. Ten people posting the same company message in their own voices add up to what one commenter called "one message with ten bylines." The lanes create the portfolio and the percentages follow.
Huang is careful to define "personal" as lived professional experience: lessons learned, mistakes made and frameworks you've developed. No family photos required.
Bring in help to scale
Clay also used contractors to scale production once the strategy was clear. Worth knowing: Forj Media sells this kind of help, so this part of the video is also a pitch. The sequence still makes sense though. Strategy first, then outside help.
Why does personal content beat company pages?
Huang says company LinkedIn pages almost never outperform personal ones, because people come to LinkedIn to hear from people. That matches what I've seen, and it lines up with the shift I described in my post on where B2B trust moved. Buyers spend months researching before they ever talk to sales. Much of that time goes to people they already follow.
How would I adapt this for a smaller team?
You don't need ten posters to start. Here's how I'd scale it down:
Start with two or three voices. The founder plus one or two people who talk to customers every week.
Give one person ownership of consistency. It can be part of someone's role at first. What matters is that someone owns it.
Write a one-line lane for each voice. Who they write for and what they know better than anyone else in the building.
Mine your own data and conversations. Huang points to Ramp's spend data as an example of proprietary insight nobody else can copy. Smaller teams have their own version: customer questions, project lessons and patterns from sales calls.
Before copying any of it, Huang suggests three honest checks:
Is your buyer active on LinkedIn?
Does your product have clear traction?
Is leadership bought in? A "no" to this last one means you start by showing leadership the value.
I'd weigh the leadership question most heavily. A strong plan stalls fast when leaders don't see the point of showing up, especially when you're asking them to share real opinions rather than repost company news.
Where does a playbook like this need care?
Impressions are a starting signal. I'd measure the program the way I described in my post on the dark funnel: branded search, direct visits to key pages, and what new customers say when you ask how they heard about you. Clay's results speak to reach. Each team still has to connect reach to revenue in its own way.
Two more checks came out of the conversation around Huang's post, and I'd adopt both.
First, look at whether each person's feed reaches buyers the other feeds miss. That shows up in who engages and who converts, well before it shows up in total impressions.
Second, run Huang's closing warning every quarter: are the executive feeds still reaching new buyers, or mostly entertaining the audience the company page already had?
I'd also love to see how much of Clay's attention turned into qualified pipeline and revenue. That number would turn an impressive playbook into a proven one.
FAQ
How many people need to post for executive content to work?
Clay had close to ten. A smaller company can start with two or three consistent voices, each focused on one type of buyer.
Do executives have to write their own posts?
The ideas and experiences need to be theirs. Many teams have a strategist or writer interview the executive and draft from their words, then let the executive edit.
How much executive content should be promotional?
In Clay's example, about 20%, or roughly one post in five. The rest builds trust through lessons, opinions and useful insight.
Sources
Matt Huang, Forj Media, video breakdown of Clay's executive content playbook on YouTube and accompanying LinkedIn post
Bruno Estrella, head of marketing at Clay, who published the original executive content playbook on LinkedIn
Alex Lindahl, Clay, LinkedIn posts and GTM Engineering newsletter
Building your own team of voices?
If you're trying to get your experts posting consistently, I'd be glad to help you map who should speak to which buyer and what each person's lane should be. I'm still learning from teams like Clay's, and I'm happy to share what I've seen work. Find me on LinkedIn or read more about my background on my About page. Let's talk.