Your prospects will look you up on LinkedIn before they decide to return your call or reply to your email. What they find there will influence how they feel about you or your company—one way or the other. Your LinkedIn posts, your profile, and how you talk about the mailing industry makes an impression. You don’t want to leave that to chance.
I am not a LinkedIn consultant or a “social media” guru. I am a small business owner with limited time and resources, trying to use LinkedIn to stay visible, earn trust, and support the sales pipeline. I thought I’d use the In the Trenches column this month to share some personal thoughts and observations about the business-oriented social network and how it applies to professionals who read the column.
I’m in the business of helping small and medium size B2B companies stay top-of-mind during long sales cycles. I assist with nurturing leads and creating a reputation as industry thought-leaders. Every one of my clients uses LinkedIn, some more effectively than others. My experience gives me a perspective from both a personal angle and from that of a service provider.
Buyers Look You Up
Before potential customers engage with you as a new print/mail partner, they look for clues that you understand their business. They want to know that you have the knowledge, experience, and background necessary for them to entrust you with their mailed communications.
Do you understand communication strategy? Do you talk about details like response rates, customer experience, and data quality? Have you kept up with industry trends? Your website helps in this regard, but LinkedIn offers a more unfiltered view.
A half-complete profile, a handful of random posts, and no commentary on the issues your customers care about will not build confidence. Leaders who share practical observations about customer journeys, postal trends, and real campaign results send a different signal.
A Smarter Content Mix
You do not need to post every day, but your LinkedIn posts should be constructed to be relevant to your audience. Don’t waste your valuable time on things that won’t matter.
Educational posts are a good place to start. Short, plain-language observations about postage, address quality, personalization, triggered mail, channel integration, or customer experience show that you understand the strategy behind the work. You can add mini case stories that briefly describe a “before and after” situation. Keep client details vague or anonymized. Those stories are proof that the claims made on your website work in the real world.
Photos and short notes about operators solving problems, the staff learning new technology, or the crew pulling off something difficult under pressure help prospects see the people behind the projects.
Finally, curated articles are an easy way to stay active on LinkedIn without creating content from scratch. When you share postal news, customer journey articles, or marketing research, for instance, include a sentence or two explaining why the item matters to organizations like those you serve. Even though you didn’t write the article, you demonstrate that you are paying attention to the wider context.
Borrowing Reach from Bigger Networks
Some of the best‑performing posts I have published did not work because I crafted the perfect hook. They worked because I mentioned people with larger audiences who chose to engage with the post.
When you tag someone to whom you genuinely owe credit, you can trigger a chain reaction. They comment or share, and suddenly your ideas appear in front of their larger network. Used respectfully, tagging is a practical “force multiplier” for LinkedIn members with a smaller number of connections. Share a useful idea, not a sales pitch. You might reference a conference, article, or conversation and tag the speaker, publisher, or partner. Their engagement exposes you to people who never would have seen your content otherwise.
Thanking someone for a useful resource comes across as professional. This pairs nicely with curated content. Sharing a postal report or an article posted by a customer or prospect, adds your point of view. Tagging the source expands your audience and opens a door to a broader, higher‑visibility conversation.
Drip Campaigns
People in the print and mail world already understand drip campaigns. You know that it takes multiple “touches” before the recipient decides to act. LinkedIn can work the same way, especially when you want to promote longer-form content.
I am a big believer in using LinkedIn to drip out ideas from an article, white paper, or webinar over weeks or even a year. It is so useful that I rarely use posts that aren’t part of a planned campaign. Break the content into smaller quotes and snippets and publish them at a steady pace. That extends the useful life of evergreen content and gives more people a chance to see it when the topic is relevant for them, not just that one day it showed up in their feed.
We run year‑long LinkedIn drip campaigns to promote client blog articles. Each post in the series highlights a single idea, includes an eye‑catching image tied to that theme, and links back to the original article on the client’s website. The LinkedIn algorithm has more chances to share the article with your network, and the unique article snippets appear repeatedly in people’s feeds. Our analytics show that those posts still generate clickthroughs months after the article was published.
A Realistic Pace and Better Engagement
You may be wondering how often you should post. Plenty of LinkedIn experts have their opinions and guidelines about posting frequency but an effective presence does not require you to live on the platform. If I can manage one or two original posts per week and a few thoughtful comments on posts from customers or industry voices, I consider it a success. Some weeks I get busy with other things and neglect LinkedIn, but it doesn’t worry me. I don’t think anyone is paying such close attention that they will notice. I just pick up my activity again the following week.
As part of my preparation to talk to a new prospective content marketing client, I research their LinkedIn activity and I often see patterns like sporadic bursts of activity, such as after a conference, followed by silence. This approach could teach your network and the algorithm to ignore you. Small, consistent actions would be better, but there are no rules. The drip campaigns I mentioned earlier will help you maintain a presence on the platform. Augment those programs with some additional well-thought posts and comments and you should be good.
Light engagement is better than nothing, but some habits are not doing you many favors. A long trail of “Congrats on the new position!” and “Happy birthday!” comments is fine for relationship maintenance, but I doubt it tells LinkedIn you are a reliable source worth featuring. If you are already clicking into a post, spend ten extra seconds. React to the idea, offer an example from your experience, or ask a relevant question. The author sees that you understand their topic, their network sees your name attached to substance, and the platform sees engagement that keeps people reading. Over time, that pattern does more for your authority than generic greetings.
Avoid automated platforms that use AI to comment on other’s posts. Most people can recognize these messages as impersonal and generic. From what I’ve read on LinkedIn, most people view AI comments as annoying and they disfavor anyone who is using these techniques.
Positioning Your Profile for Buyers
When I joined LinkedIn in 2005 the network was mainly used to connect job seekers with hiring companies. The employment aspect is still there, but if you are looking to LinkedIn as tool to help with sales and marketing for your company, your profile shouldn’t read like a resume. You are better served by writing your profile for the people with budgets and targets—individuals you want to influence. This would include people such as marketing managers and executive decision-makers.
Your headline is the one part of your profile that follows you everywhere on LinkedIn. Consider changing your headline to something more descriptive than a job title. Something like “Print/Mail operations leader focused on compliant, data-driven communications” may be more aligned with the image you wish to portray.
Use other parts of the profile like the About section to tell a short story about how your organization solves specific problems for your customers and what makes your company different from the competition.
The Featured section can point people to your best material like articles, webinars, or posts that are educational, informative, and relevant to the people you want to impress.
For more profile optimization tips, I suggest you do your own research. You can find lots of free advice via LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, and Google search.
A Straightforward Way to Start
If you have been mostly absent from LinkedIn, you do not need a complicated strategy, just make a few adjustments and settle on a plan that you can follow consistently.
Refresh your profile and pick a couple of themes you want to cover in posts over the next three months or so. Post something short on one of those themes each week and comment thoughtfully on a few relevant posts per week. That is enough to start shifting how buyers see you. Review content on your website like blogs, white papers, or case studies and plan long-term drip campaigns to breathe new life into them through scheduled posts on LinkedIn.
You can, of course, expand your efforts if you have the time. Adding longer articles, starting a LinkedIn newsletter, or posting more often are all options. LinkedIn has been good for my business, and I only put forth a modest amount of effort. You may be able to do the same.
Mike Porter at Print/Mail Consultants and PMC Content Services creates content that helps attract and retain customers for companies in the mailing and document industry and he assists companies as they integrate new technology. He welcomes questions from Mailing Systems Technology readers. Reach out to him at www.pmccontentservices.com. Follow @PMCmike on X, or send him a connection request on LinkedIn.
