INSTANTLY AI: HOW TO TAKE OVER LINKEDIN

Morning!

The Autumn sun is creeping through the window on my left, I’ve got a crisp glass of cold water on my right, and a tingling feeling in my legs after my leg session in the gym earlier.

I’m not sure Hemingway would agree, but that’s what I call the perfect conditions for a great marketing breakdown.

Here’s what you’ll learn from reading this today:

• The new way to approach B2B marketing.

• How Instantly AI took over LinkedIn.

• The importance of “omnipresence”.

You can listen to the audio version of this breakdown HERE.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION

BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY

A month ago, I logged on to LinkedIn at 08:30 AM like every Monday.

I scrolled the feed, supported some friends, and looked to see if there was any new interesting content.

But as usual, there was very little…

• A boring work announcement.

• A generic AI written “Value” piece.

• Another personal brand guru gloating about a viral post.

It seemed like not much had changed from last week.

“Well, I best get back to work then.” I thought.

But with one last scroll, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, something different, something new.

At first, it seemed just like a normal LinkedIn post.

• It was from a personal account.

• It was written like a LinkedIn post.

• It has a pretty normal video attached.

But there was one small detail that I hadn’t seen before.

Just below his headline, it said, “Promoted. Partnership with Instantly AI”

It was an ad. An ad that I barely even noticed was an ad.

“Hmm… that’s clever.” I thought. Then I logged off LinkedIn and went back to my daily schedule.

But a few hours later, I logged back onto LinkedIn and saw another post where someone talked about Instantly AI.

Then I saw another one…

Then I started to see the Co-Founder and CEO’s post popping up on my feed as well…

“Crazy. These guys are taking over LinkedIn.” I thought. But then I questioned whether maybe it was just ‘The frequency illusion’ where you feel like you see more of something because you’ve become more aware of it.

Then a day later, we hopped on a call with our advisor Dom McGregor.

2 minutes into the call, he goes, “Boys, have you seen what the team at Instantly AI are doing right now? They’re all over LinkedIn.”

“Shit.” I thought, “It wasn’t just me who was seeing this. Instantly AI are putting on a B2B marketing masterclass here.”

And I was right, they were.

So over the last 3 weeks, I’ve been studying every step of their recent LinkedIn campaign.

I’ve been:

• Saving all of their ads.

• Piecing together their strategy.

• Following all facets of their approach.

And now, I’m going to break every step of it down so you can take over the biggest B2B social media platform - LinkedIn.

Here are 3 key steps of Instantly’s LinkedIn takeover:

Step 1: Organic Employee-Led Content

Instantly’s LinkedIn takeover started with some pretty humble (yet still heavily underrated) beginnings in the shape of employee-led content across LinkedIn.

Their main focus with this was on their CEO’s account - Nils.

From what I can see, they also experimented with posting across various other team members’ accounts but were never able to pick up any traction on their accounts.

Nils on the other hand has quickly grown to 8000+ followers, which on its own isn't too spectacular - but I’d guess he’s bringing in 50-70,000 organic impressions every month.

While this isn’t the core or the main driver of their LinkedIn campaign, it’s just another essential piece to the puzzle.

You can’t take over LinkedIn without giving people key members of your company to go ahead and follow.

Nils is that person for Instantly.

But it’s in the next step where things start to get interesting.

Step 2: Find Key B2B Influencers

The next step was finding key B2B influencers that would be open to talking about/promoting Instantly AI on their LinkedIn.

There are a couple of interesting components to think about here:

• Most B2B influencers have B2C followers: Meaning that even though they have followers on LinkedIn and identify as a B2B influencer, the people following them don’t dictate buying decisions in their company.

• Most people with great B2B followings don’t identify as influencers: So they don’t even want to do influencer-style partnerships.

To solve this issue, Instantly hand-picked people on LinkedIn with 5000-15,000 followers who post heavy amounts of value in their content.

People who:

• Share deep-dive breakdowns.

• Share industry-specific information.

• Write specifically for B2B organisations.

Yet still get a reasonably good amount of engagement.

Like Liam Dunne, who posts a lot about how start-ups and SAAS companies can acquire new customers.

And Reyhan Khan, who talks a lot about the importance of AI automation when it comes to operations.

Neither of these people are “Influencers”, but they are seen as experts by 1000s of people in the B2B field.

Instantly AI then had each influencer post a breakdown that included how or why they would recommend using an Instantly AI feature to drive a specific outcome.

Liam wrote a post about how he would “Beat a conventional SDR team's cold email performance on less than a $700/mo budget.”

Which included using Instantly AI’s ‘Lead Finder’ and ‘Sending Tool’. (You can see this post at the top of the newsletter).

Then Reyhan wrote a post on the cold email tips he’d learned from his boss talking to Nils (Instanly AI CEO). Which showed people how to use Instantly AI.

Both posts weren’t written to go viral, they were written to inform.

And on their own, they probably wouldn’t have had too much impact - but this is where step 3 comes in.

Step 3: Run Thought Leader Ads

In 2023, LinkedIn introduced ‘Thought Leader Ads’.

Unlike traditional ad formats, these ads promote posts from real people – such as leaders, influencers, or industry experts – straight into the LinkedIn feed.

These ads look like normal LinkedIn posts, barring the small addition of “Promoted” underneath the headline.

But since they introduced them, no one has leveraged them too effectively - even though they have massive advantages:

• They don’t seem like ads.

• You can leverage people’s influence.

• More people will read them with the format.

All Instantly AI did was pull these great posts written by people highly respected by their target audience and then put paid spend behind them to boost them to an even more targeted audience.

It’s almost like an organic post but on steroids.

• It’s boosted to more people.

• You can use precise targeting.

• You can create that Omnipresent effect.

That omnipresent effect is something I’m going to talk about more in step 4, but it’s so key here for Instantly to find success.

Because for a campaign like this to work, you have to feel omnipresent, you have to feel everywhere.

With these mixtures of thought leader ads, Instantly can create this effect like everyone is talking about Instantly.

They’re not relying on their target audience to be following these “Influencers” or organically seeing these posts in their feed. They pay for them to flood the feeds of their target audience.

So when someone like me scrolls their feed, all they see is everyone talking about Instantly AI.

Step 4: Locking In The Omnipresent Effect

By step 4, the work is already done, all there is to now is throw everything and anything you have at the campaign to try and emphasise this “everywhere” effect.

With Instantly AI, they started posting daily on their company page as well as adding more classic explainer ads into their paid strategy.

I’m not sure if Instantly did this, but if I was them I would’ve added a community management push to this strategy.

I would’ve had someone full-time commenting on people's posts from the company page account:

• Posting memes in the comments.

• Trying to have stand-out comments.

• Commenting in a clear distinct tone.

I’d then push 2-3 people within our team to do a very similar thing and just try and be everywhere.

Beehiiv do a fantastic job of this on Twitter (See a breakdown here).

And if Instantly did add this to their approach it would just add fuel to the fire of everything Instantly AI has done.

 🌱 THE GREENHOUSE

Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:

• Chenell Basilio: Doing great work with her newsletter

• Jay Yang:

TL;DR

STEP 1: Organic Employee-Led Content
STEP 2: Find Key B2B Influencers
STEP 3: Run Thought Leader Ads
STEP 4: Locking In The Omnipresent Effect

I absolutely love this strategy from Instantly AI, it’s very similar to the campaigns we are planning to run for clients in 2025 - but it’s safe to Instantly led the way with this.

If you’re able to get your company noticed by the right people, there is a very good chance you’ll have a highly effective campaign.

And when you see a company everywhere, it’s impossible not to notice them.

If you found this useful, why not share it with a friend?

Until next Sunday.

— Niall

WAIT… BEFORE YOU GO

If you’ve read this far, why not see how else I can help you:

• Follow me on Twitter for more marketing stuff.

• Connect with me on LinkedIn to follow my business journey.

• Want to work with me? Start HERE.

THAT’S ALL!

This has been a breakdown of Instantly AI’s marketing strategy. I hope you have learned something and can implement a similar strategy in your business!

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