#22 - Jimmy Burt

This week I sat down with Good Content’s own Jimmy Burt, our new VP of Content.

Before joining us full-time, Jimmy helped run content and brand marketing at 360Learning, where he turned one executive into the face of an entire marketing motion that earned over 2M impressions in its first 18 months.

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At 360Learning, Jimmy worked one-on-one with David James, the company’s resident L&D expert. Prior to 2024, David was already hosting a podcast and posting intermittently on LinkedIn, but Jimmy and the 360Learning team saw the potential for more impact.

In early 2024, Jimmy and David got to work on a more strategic approach.

“We started by devising a content strategy, identifying some themes and pillars to speak on. We talked a lot about the perceptions we wanted to drive in the audience. And then I started interviewing him and working off of notes he would send me.”

Over time, they shifted their process. David began drafting, and Jimmy coached and edited.

In just 18 months, the program cleared 2 million impressions on Linkedin, with posts regularly drawing hundreds of engagements, thoughtful comments, and tags between colleagues.

The executive content flywheel

David’s posts on LinkedIn were building a deeply engaged audience. When Jimmy and his team realized that 360Learning could leverage this audience far beyond LinkedIn, the content motion expanded.

The team positioned David as the voice of key research reports, and later, he led the launch of 360Learning’s L&D Maturity Model. Then they introduced monthly office hours with David, a lightweight meeting that doubled as a nurture channel and deal accelerator.

Finally, he became central to the company’s nurture campaign.

“We funneled leads who weren’t ready to buy into an email campaign, and David became the face of it. The emails we sent were entirely repurposed from high-performing LinkedIn posts.”

All of these content types work together cohesively:

• LinkedIn brings people to office hours
• Office hours brings people to the email nurture stream
• The email nurture stream brings people to the L&D Maturity Model/other assets
• The L&D Maturity Model & other assets are repurposed for webinar formats
• LinkedIn brings people to the webinars
• Webinars bring people to the email nurture stream

And so the cycle goes.

The misconception is that executive content begins and ends with LinkedIn, but Jimmy’s experience showed the opposite. Once an executive is publishing consistently, every post becomes raw material that can — and should — be multiplied across channels.

The execution fork

There are a lot of benefits to building out an executive content flywheel. Exec content is novel, AI-proof, and human. But just because you should be doing exec content, doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Once you have executive buy-in, the real question is whether to run the program in-house or with an external partner.

In-house can work well when:

• Your exec is fully committed and disciplined
• You have an available resource with strong writing, interviewing, and LinkedIn expertise
• Leadership will protect the program’s consistency  (not switch gears after 1 month)

An agency becomes the better option when:

• The exec is strapped for time and/or needs a lot of coaching
• The marketing team lacks bandwidth or LinkedIn/exec content expertise
• Internal dynamics make it hard to guarantee consistency

In-house worked well for 360Learning, but agencies are a good option for a lot of orgs looking for expertise, consistency, and scalability. If you want some help figuring out the best fit for you & your team, let us know.

We’re thrilled to have Jimmy on our team. To hear his full perspective on executive content, leveraging an audience, and future-proofing, check out the episode below.

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