Clay: Mastering executive LinkedIn content ✍️

Case Studied
Cracking the content code

More and more companies are building out executive content programs. But what benefits are the brands seeing from it? 

For some organizations, the answer is clear. HubSpot has leaned on its co-founders and C-suite to amplify brand reach for years. Gong built a sizable following by putting its revenue leaders front and center. And recently, Clay revealed how they generated sizable outcomes from their executive content. 

This week, Case Studied explores how Clay generated 6 million LinkedIn impressions in a single quarter by building a systematic executive content program.

The Brief

Clay is a data enrichment and automation platform. It’s primarily used by go-to-market teams to build and enrich prospect lists, automate outreach workflows, and connect data across the tech stack. 

Since launching, Clay has carved out a strong position with a technical, operator-heavy user base. Think: revenue ops leads, growth engineers, and sales development leaders who want to build sophisticated outbound programs without relying entirely on engineering. But with every deal, they also have to sell to the marketing and revenue leaders that serve as executive buyers. 

These distinct audiences posed a challenge to Clay’s marketing team. They needed to speak to the technical GTM practitioners who use the product hands-on, and the marketing and revenue executives who sign off on purchasing it. Reaching both those audiences with a single brand voice proved to be an uphill battle.

So, rather than trying to create content that served everyone, Clay created a way to speak to each audience in a new way.

Sponsored
Claude for Marketers: 60+ Prompts That Do the Heavy Lifting

Streamline your marketing with 60+ Claude prompts built to save time, spark better content, and surface new growth opportunities. 

• Actionable Claude strategies to boost output across your funnel

• Faster content creation, sharper insights, and smarter dashboard builds

• Real examples from marketers using Claude to scale results

• A framework to plug Claude into your daily workflows

Don’t just keep up with AI, start making it work for you.

The Execution

Clay built a distributed content program with their internal executives. It was based on the hypothesis that people want to learn from real operators. So the team mapped out several buyer personas and matched Clay’s internal executives to each one. 

For the self-serve, technical end-user persona, Clay invested in the profiles of Everett Berry, their Head of GTM Engineering, and Davide Grieco, their Head of Growth. 

For the executive buyer audience, the program centered on Clay’s Head of Marketing Bruno Estrella and the Head of Sales Development Rob Cook. Co-founders Varun Anand and Kareem Amin were also pulled in and organically attracted the founder-to-founder persona. The program started with a core group of executives and expanded as results came in. 

The hard part of the program, according to Estrella, was getting executives to post consistently. Clay's solution involved some structural tactics. They hired Sarah Khasrovi to lead the Executive Brand and Content function. They made executive impressions a formal awareness metric with accountability attached to it. They brought in contractors to help scale content production, including Alec Paul and the agency, Good Content. And they built a weekly posting cadence that was enforced through regular meetings and ongoing Slack nudges.

Across all personas and authors, the content was held to a clear standard. As Estrella described it, the question every executive had to ask themselves was: "Am I actually learning anything from this? If the answer is no, you should not post it." 

The Results

By April 2026, monthly impressions across Clay’s leadership team had grown to roughly 2.25 million, up from under 500K the prior October. Varun Anand's profile consistently drove the largest volume, but with multiple executives posting, total reach grew meaningfully. 

The program also fed directly into Clay's product roadmap. The team's experience with managing LinkedIn audiences led them to build a native ads integration. It allows Clay to update ad audiences in real-time as new records come in, removing the need for recurring CSV handoffs.

Co-founder Varun Anand announced the product publicly, noting that customers like Slack, Anthropic, and Rippling were already hitting 90%+ match rates on LinkedIn and 60%+ on Meta. That translates to 2-4x what those brands were previously getting through manual audience uploads. 

Over the course of roughly a year, Clay's executive LinkedIn program grew monthly impressions to over 2.2 million. The team collectively added 80,000 new followers across executive profiles and the program reached a quarterly run rate of approximately 6 million impressions.

The Takeaways

1) Map content to personas, not just to a brand voice.

Clay recognized that its brand account couldn't speak to a growth engineer debugging a data enrichment workflow and a CMO evaluating a new GTM platform at the same time. So it didn’t try to. Instead, the team identified which internal executives most naturally represented each buyer persona and invested in their individual profiles accordingly.

Take a look at your own buyer personas and ask whether your current content is genuinely relevant to each of them. If you serve multiple distinct audiences, consider whether a single brand channel is the right vehicle, or whether there are people inside your organization whose experience and perspective would resonate more directly.

2) Treat exec content as a function.

One of the most candid observations Estrella shared was that getting executives to post "will always be the bottleneck" and that the person running the program needs to be "borderline annoying" to keep it moving. The brand addressed this by making impressions a formal metric, assigning ownership to a dedicated person, and building a recurring weekly cadence with accountability built in.

If you're trying to launch a similar program, treat it with the same operational rigor you'd apply to any other channel. Assign a clear owner, define the goal, set a posting cadence, and track results. Content programs that are treated as a measurable business function are more likely to compound.

3)  Let your marketing challenges inform your product.

On the road to building out their LinkedIn content program, Clay encountered the same audience management headaches their customers face every day: low match rates on ad platforms, manual CSV uploads, audiences that go stale as new contacts come in. That firsthand experience gave them the insight and conviction to build a native ads integration.

This isn't a replicable move for every marketing team, but the broader lesson is worth considering. The problems your team encounters while executing marketing may be similar to the ones your customers are dealing with. Staying close to those pain points (and being honest about where current tools fall short) can help surface real product opportunities.

Reach into the inbox: Did you know you can advertise in the Case Studied newsletter? That means having a direct line to 41,000+ senior marketers. Check out rates and availability.