#24 - Emily Kramer

Last week we hosted our first-ever Behind Good Content Office Hours with Emily Kramer — former Head of Marketing at Carta and Asana, and author of the MKT1 Newsletter read by more than 65,000 marketers.

Emily’s known for frameworks that bring structure to what often feels like chaos. Her latest newsletter on what she calls The LinkedIn Flywheel does exactly that for a channel where most B2B teams are busy, but not coordinated.

We spent the hour walking through what the Flywheel is, why it matters, and what’s holding most companies back from using LinkedIn to its greatest potential.

Here are some of the highlights:

Two problems behind the chaos

A lot of the companies we talk to are stuck in what Emily calls “random acts of marketing.” They’re creating content, but it isn’t connected by a strategy or rhythm that helps it build over time.

That usually boils down to one of two problems.

1. Stopping after content is made

Teams will send off a piece of content and… leave it at that. They don’t track engagement or signals, they don’t have a system for actioning that signal, and they don’t think to integrate high-performing content into their paid campaigns.

2. Siloed systems

The other common pattern Emily sees is disconnected content creation: an executive posts occasionally, the company account shares something else, paid campaigns run on a different topic, and maybe an influencer is involved somewhere. 

Disconnected content is a symptom of the way most teams are still structured — by channel instead of by narrative. Content, paid, and demand gen each run their own playbook, so even when people try to collaborate, the output gets muddy.

The LinkedIn flywheel

The LinkedIn Flywheel is a four-part system that converts disconnected activity into a coordinated growth loop.

Step 1 | Create the fuel: high-quality human posts

The Flywheel begins with people — executives, creators, or influencers — publishing thoughtful, original content that feels human. These are posts that express a clear point of view, reveal something learned, or add perspective to a conversation in the market.

Without this layer, the rest of the system collapses.

“If you try to do everything else and you don’t have really good organic posts,” Emily said, “the engagement isn’t meaningful enough to drive the rest of the flywheel.”

Emily also points to comments as an underrated part of this system.

When people within your company engage thoughtfully on posts across their broader ecosystem, it builds visibility and credibility in a way company pages can’t. Those interactions show the team is actually present in the conversation, not just broadcasting into it.

Step 2 | Boost what works: turn posts into Thought Leader Ads

LinkedIn’s Thought Leader Ad format lets companies promote an individual’s post as an ad. It looks native in the feed, keeps the author’s credibility intact, and can be targeted or retargeted to the right audiences

Emily noted that this is where many companies lose momentum. They’ll sponsor creator content or encourage executives to post, but never connect those pieces to paid campaigns. The strongest teams integrate both.

“You can put money behind the good ones, build retargeting audiences off them, and get more ROI,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s wasted effort.”

The value here is that you can hedge the algorithm. Organic performance is unpredictable, volatile, and getting harder to earn as Linkedin gets more crowded. Thought Leadership Ads provide a way to control distribution. You can make sure good content gets seen, and gets seen by the right people.

Step 3 | Track engagement as signal

Every like, comment, or share is potential data. The next step is to capture and use it.

At Good Content, we trust and use Assembly to extract engagement data on every single post we publish. We then enrich that data with company and role information to make it maximally useful. Be very careful with automation tools as they are against LinkedIn’s ToS and can harm your account reputation. If you have questions, reach out. 

There are two great benefits to tracking engagement. 1) You get to see who exactly is engaging with your content, and which posts were most impactful with your ICP. 2) You get a rich data signal that can be leveraged in demand gen, ABM, and outbound motions.

“It doesn’t mean spamming every person who commented,” Emily said. “It means knowing who’s engaging and using that signal intelligently.”

This becomes a live feedback loop for both marketing and sales: who’s paying attention, which messages resonate, and how engagement maps to your ICP.

Step 4 | Follow up thoughtfully

The last step turns engagement into a relationship. Instead of defaulting to “book a demo,” use engagement as an entry point for something useful:

• Invite participants to webinars or executive roundtables.
• Reference their comments in a future post or newsletter.
• Share a related workflow, guide, or resource.

These moments keep the conversation going while reinforcing the brand’s relevance.

“You can do so much that’s high-value and not spammy,” Emily said.

That engagement feeds new content ideas and closes the loop back to Step 1.

Putting it all together

In practice, the Flywheel runs as one coordinated motion:

1. Human content fuels awareness and credibility
2. Paid promotion amplifies proven ideas and builds retargeting audiences
3. Engagement tracking surfaces real-time intent signals
4. Personal follow-up builds relationships and informs future messaging

And the best person to run this? 

What Emily calls a Gen Marketer.

“We need marketers who can put fuel and engine together,” Emily said. “The content and the distribution. These ‘Gen Marketers’ are generalists who can connect all the dots.”

The Flywheel is one way to operationalize that: a repeatable workflow that joins organic, paid, and data-driven actions under one owner.

When this process works, organic and paid reinforce each other, data flows back into strategy, and LinkedIn stops functioning as a set of disconnected posts and becomes a compounding engine for visibility, credibility, and pipeline.

Emily Kramer was an awesome first Office Hours guest. If you missed the session, I’d highly recommend checking out the recording.

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Next Guest:
Peter Kang, Storyteller at Clay
Thursday, November 20th

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