When Sara Stella Lattanzio started posting on LinkedIn three and a half years ago, she was just looking for a creative outlet. Now, she’s a LinkedIn Top Voice with nearly 40,000 followers, and her journey is full of surprises.
I caught up with Sara to discuss how she built her following, the unexpected benefits of her LinkedIn presence, and what she’s learned in her role as Head of Marketing at Stryber, a corporate venture builder and strategic growth consultancy.
Sara candidly discusses the challenges of maintaining engagement as LinkedIn’s algorithm evolves, and how she approaches hiring. She also shares her thoughts on what it takes to reach a leadership position.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving its conversational style.
Tim: What surprising things have happened to you because of the LinkedIn following you’ve built over the past 3.5 years?
Sara: The coolest things are meeting people in the most random ways, like how I met you! You find them on Google, connect on LinkedIn, they invite you for a virtual coffee, maybe interview you on a podcast, or refer you to somebody. Some have become close friends — I met two people I now consider very close friends on LinkedIn. It’s amazing, the intertwining of real life and virtual life.
One of these two, Ashley, works at Atlassian and presented me as a case study at Inbound without telling me in advance! I got a hundred connection requests out of the blue. People were messaging me screenshots saying, “Oh, you’re at Inbound.” But I said: “I’m definitely not, I’m in Switzerland!” [Laughs]
I’m also working a lot with brands this year. Literally every week I have a sponsored post by a brand that I believe in. I got the LinkedIn Top Voice badge this year, which is very cool. And I made various top lists, landing among the Top 20 Swiss LinkedIn Influencers.
How has your follower growth developed over the three and a half years you’ve been active on LinkedIn?
It’s always bumpy, but what blew my mind is that it took one year and seven months to get from zero to 10,000 followers! Then the next 10k milestones were all in six to eight months.Â
The steepest curve was from 10k to 20k in basically six months. It’s really true that the beginning is harder because you don’t have the social proof. A lot of people don’t think twice about following somebody when they already have 20k or 30k followers.
What kept you going in that initial period from zero to 10,000 followers?
At the beginning, the main goal was just having a creative outlet and a megaphone. I knew that I had something to say, and I think that’s what will always keep me going. I have so much stuff in my mind that I feel I need to put it on paper, otherwise I would go insane. So why not share it with others as well?
A social media post is something very concise, targeted, and consolidated. If you think, “I need to write a newsletter, a blog post, do a webinar,” it’s like this major project. LinkedIn posts help me process what I’m working on in a very helpful way. I was willing to do it no matter what, and I’m still willing to do it, even though LinkedIn’s reach has plummeted.
The reach now is about one-third of what it was one year ago, especially for larger accounts. It’s crazy to think that my posts are sometimes not even seen by 10 percent of the people who follow me.
But the beauty of LinkedIn is that people talk to each other because of their role and their expertise, and that’s what makes the conversation good. It’s less about how many followers you have than on other platforms.
Do you think the drop in reach is due to algorithm changes or LinkedIn getting too busy?
Well, maybe it’s getting busier, but I also looked into the statistics to see how many people post like me: several times a week with a consistent strategy that’s not just “here’s my link, here’s my webinar, here’s my new job.” There are only a few people doing that; approximately 1% of all LinkedIn users.
I think it’s busier in the sense that everybody considers it and tries to throw spaghetti at the wall. There are a lot of people who were like, “With ChatGPT I can finally post on LinkedIn without investing time.” And then their social media posts are generic like, “Three Steps to Be a Great Leader.”
They quickly stop when most of their posts get only two likes because, obviously, nobody cares about this content. So I honestly believe the competition is still fairly low.
And I think the engagement is still pretty great. While the reach has been slashed completely, engagement has not followed the same trend at all. It’s stayed somewhat constant from what I see.
How do you structure the relationship when working with others on their LinkedIn content, like with your CEO at Stryber?
We’re trying to find the right balance, because it is a lot of work and he needs to be involved. There’s no way around it.
The content needs to touch upon the story of the company and the leadership aspect if the goal is awareness and establishing yourself as a thought leader.
I feel lucky because our co-founder and CEO, Jan, has very distinctive opinions on the business consulting industry and isn’t afraid to share them. Plus, he really recognizes the importance of good content.
We try to have at least one major piece of original research yearly that takes a lot of effort and time. But then this can be used for an entire year as the main story. You can go to events and present it. We can run campaigns of any sort. It’s always a great door opener for everything, from conversations, in presentations, to cold outreach.
But you don’t want to overdo it with educational content, because then it comes across as too salesy. Especially as a leader of a company like ours, educational posts are okay, but people want to know more about client relationships and how you do what you do — not “7 Steps to Do X.”
So even with help, doing content on LinkedIn still requires commitment and involvement from the leader, right? Otherwise, it won’t resonate.
Yeah. And also, I don’t want to necessarily push LinkedIn on someone. For our case at Stryber, other types of communities may be more valuable — CEO circles, board member circles, and so on. Those people are not super active LinkedIn users. Meeting them in person is a much better investment of time.
This is your first role as Head of Marketing. How’s it different from your previous roles?
I was already doing more or less the same thing at a startup before, just without the official title. Obviously, now I feel more like a grown-up doing it, and I have maybe 4-5 years more experience of failures. [Laughs]
What’s different is the recognition. You are the interface with all the top leadership and carry the responsibility to make things work. I know there are a lot of heads of marketing that are just marketing managers with a different title who execute stuff that’s decided.
In my case, it’s definitely not. I love how I can really feel that I’m co-shaping part of the business strategy and my input is valued. This is why I really want to hire great people so I can help more in the strategy part, because I think that’s what marketing should do — we should really be a driver of the business, not just a cost center.
Hiring is also extremely interesting to me — finding the right people, thinking what makes a good hire, how to delegate things and learning from each other. A lot of the people I’m hiring have skills that I don’t. How do you live with that and learn from them?
How do you think about hiring for your marketing team?
It was clear from the beginning that content is very important, so I hired a content marketing agency and a freelance designer, videographer, and copywriter. Now the question is who coordinates them, who makes sure they all work on the same thing.
I create part of the content, I make the briefings, I guide subject matter experts, and so on. So I definitely need somebody who can coordinate all of these people and tasks, and also think about new channels to repurpose the content, because that’s a major problem.
The distribution, especially in our industry where we’re talking about high-ticket enterprise services, is not something you can just run LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, and Google ads for and be done. It’s about thinking communities, thinking niche publications, and always coordinating with our business development team.
Once I can delegate content marketing to my new hire, I will have way more capacity to work on sales and marketing alignment. And then I think the next person I might hire will be more of a data wizard: think RevOps, Marketing Ops, something like that.
I don’t think tools are necessarily the most important thing, but they become critical when you really need to bring this all together.
How is the search for your new content hire going? What candidates stood out to you in the hiring process?
For me, it was really important to see the content marketing path in this person’s resume. A lot of people have done marketing manager here, brand thing there, everything like for a year, two years. And then now they’re like, “Oh, content marketing.”
For me, that’s a “no,” because I think [content marketing experience] cannot be improvised.Â
There were also quite a few people who had their own businesses. Maybe they tried building their own content agency for one or two years and then now they’re thinking about going back in-house. This is a plus because obviously, somebody who did that knows the processes, and knows all the steps required to create and scale content.
What would you say to anybody who’s currently not a Head of Marketing, but wants to be a CMO or Head of Marketing one day? How do you get there?
It’s very important at the beginning of your career to get your hands dirty as much as you can. But if your goal is to lead a department, it’s also important that you always stay a bit of a generalist. If you build your career only doing SEO or social media, it’s super hard to then say, “I can take care of your entire marketing strategy and hire people in different areas.”
This is something I’ve always done. It wasn’t always a conscious choice. Sometimes I thought, “Oh my God, I know a bit of everything, but not really anything super in-depth.” A lot of the roles I wanted were more specialist, but it was a blessing in disguise [not to get those roles].
But this only works if you still have a certain level of depth in all the things. It’s not that I just said, “Yeah, SEO, interesting.” I really did SEO. In my last job, the main focus was SEO and content strategy. Previous job: performance marketing. Other jobs: branding. So I dug deep in each of those things.
And of course, aspiring CMOs should build their personal brand on LinkedIn, right?
[Laughs] Yeah! That helps and it’s always a great asset.
Follow Sara Stella Lattanzio on LinkedIn and her own site to keep up with her insights on B2B marketing and personal branding. You can also learn more about her work at Stryber, where she leads all things marketing.
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