Sophie Steffen, co-founder and CEO of the Barcelona-based agency Kunoichi, has watched plenty of LinkedIn experiments fail. In her experience, the failures almost never come from bad writing or wrong cadence. They come from a foundational miss: the creator never decided who they were talking to or what they wanted that person to do. In this segment of her conversation with Patrycja Radwanska on the Let’s Talk Marketing series, she walks through the strategic groundwork that has to come before any post is written.
The Goal Comes First, Not the Content
The first question Steffen asks anyone starting a LinkedIn presence is not what they want to post about. It is what they want to achieve. The answers vary more than people expect. Someone in sales wants warm inbound. Someone in marketing leadership wants to position themselves for their next role even while their current company benefits from the visibility. An entrepreneur wants direct client acquisition. A specialist wants to be known in their niche so that conference invitations and consulting requests start showing up unsolicited.
None of those goals are wrong. But they imply different content, different tone, and different success metrics. The salesperson chasing inbound demos cares about the specific industry titles in their CRM. The marketing leader chasing positioning cares about the breadth and seniority of their network. Treating those two goals identically produces content that serves neither.
“Be clear on what is it that you actually want to achieve. And it might be different if you work in a company, you’re in sales, you’re in marketing – your goal might be different than if you are an entrepreneur.”
The discipline of writing the goal down - one sentence, specific enough to be falsifiable - is what separates the creators who eventually quit from the ones who do not. Without it, every post is judged by the wrong scoreboard, and the scoreboard is what makes the practice survivable.
Name the Person, Not the Demographic
Once the goal is articulated, the next step is the ICP - the ideal customer profile. Steffen is emphatic that “marketing managers at mid-size SaaS companies” is not an ICP. It is a category. An ICP is a person. Picture the name. Picture the company they work at. Picture the title on their LinkedIn profile. Picture what their week looks like, what their boss is pressuring them about, what the slide they are presenting on Friday is going to contain.
The reason for that level of specificity is that vague targeting produces vague posts. A post written for “marketing managers” is general enough that any actual marketing manager reading it will recognize the genericness and scroll past. A post written for a specific marketing manager - the one whose company just got acquired and is now being asked to consolidate three different attribution tools into one - speaks to that person, and to the several thousand other marketing managers in the same situation, in a way that the generic post cannot.
The practical exercise Steffen recommends is to write down the name of one actual prospect, real or composite, and to write every post as if it were a DM to that single person. The posts get sharper, the language gets more specific, and the comments that come back are from people who recognize themselves in the description.
Pain Points Are Gold - and They Have to Be Earned
The third layer is the pain points. What is the ICP actually struggling with on a Tuesday morning? What are they confused about? What are they trying to improve but cannot? What did their boss complain about in the most recent quarterly review? What workflow do they hate but cannot replace because the alternative is worse?
“Once you know who you’re actually talking to, understand their pain points. That’s gold. That’s where you actually want to get into the nitty-gritty stuff.”
The honest answer is that you cannot mine pain points from a desk. You mine them from conversations - sales calls, customer interviews, podcast guests, the prospect who agreed to a coffee even though they did not become a client. Every one of those conversations is a deposit into the pain-point inventory, and every post that draws from that inventory lands harder than a post that came from a content brainstorm.
The corollary is that the best LinkedIn creators tend to be the people who talk to customers most often. Not the cleverest writers. Not the most prolific posters. The ones whose calendars are full of conversations with the audience they are writing for. The content is downstream of those conversations. Without them, the posts drift toward abstraction, and abstraction is the death of B2B engagement.
Solutions, Not Slogans - and Definitely Not Guru Energy
The final move is to connect each pain point to a solution - which, conveniently, tends to be related to what you sell. This is where many creators slip into the trap Steffen describes as the guru post. Every piece of content becomes a thinly veiled humblebrag. The implicit message is “look how good I am at this,” and audiences detect that pattern within milliseconds.
The fix is the same as the fix for everything else in the framework: lead with experience rather than expertise. A post that says “here is a mistake I made and what I learned from it” outperforms a post that says “here are five tips for avoiding the mistake I am about to describe.” Both posts contain the same information. The first one feels like a peer talking. The second one feels like a workshop.
Authenticity, in Steffen’s framing, is not a tone. It is a structural choice. It is what happens when you lead with the lesson rather than the credential, and when you let the credential emerge as a byproduct of the lesson rather than its headline. The audience does the inferring. The post just provides the material.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Sophie Steffen.
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