Case study

How Speakers Corner booked meetings with WWF, Formula 1, Just Eat, Thomson Reuters, and The Economist through LinkedIn outreach

Speakers Corner partnered with noticed. on a targeted LinkedIn outreach and content strategy to reach corporate decision-makers with event budgets.

Headline figures

36

Leads per month, on average, from outreach and content

6

Enterprise brands booked, including Formula 1 and WWF

About Speakers Corner

What they do

Speaker consultation and booking service

Industry

Events and speaker management

Engagement

Outreach, Content

TL;DR

Speakers Corner helps connect speakers with organisations, offering professional advice on what will work best for an event. It partnered with noticed. to build a steady pipeline for the bureau through LinkedIn, with a bespoke strategy covering ICP research, decision-maker targeting, personalised outreach and organic content.

• Pipeline: an average of 36 leads a month from LinkedIn outreach and content.
• Enterprise meetings: meetings booked with WWF, Thomson Reuters, Just Eat Takeaway, The Economist, Eventbrite and Formula 1.
• Method: intent-led list building, messages written to one person and one problem, and content from named people holding the ground underneath.

Challenge

Speakers Corner needed a direct route to buyers with large, complex event budgets.

The people who sign off event spend sit inside large organisations. They are reachable on LinkedIn and almost nowhere else at that scale, but they are not reachable by volume: a generic list of job titles returns the people whose title sounds right rather than the people who are actually buying.

Speakers Corner wanted more of exactly those people, not more reach. That meant identifying who holds the budget, starting conversations with them, and turning those conversations into meetings.

The operating model

Outreach is layer three. It only works when the two layers underneath it are in place.

We run LinkedIn as four layers in a fixed order, which we call the LinkedIn Pyramid: positioning, content, outreach, then ads. Most programmes fail because they skip to layer two and start posting, or layer four and start buying, without doing the ones underneath.

Speakers Corner covered layers one to three, run together rather than in sequence. Positioning decided who the bureau was for. Content gave named people something to say. Outreach went to the people who control the budget. We do not run ads, so layer four was never on the table.

The layers are not separate campaigns. The content is what a prospect finds when they check the profile behind a message, which is why it ran alongside the outreach rather than before it.

Building the list

The list is built from signals of intent, not from job titles.

At any moment roughly 95% of a market is not buying and 5% is. That split is published research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute rather than anything of ours; what matters is the decision it forces. Most outreach spends its effort trying to convert the 95%. It is far easier to find the 5% already in market and talk to them.

1. Start from the budget, not the org chart. Work out who actually controls event spend inside a large organisation, which is frequently not the person whose title suggests it.
2. Go where intent has already been shown. People engaging with a competitor's content have signalled they are in the market. That is a far better qualifier than a job title.
3. Build around themes, not segments. We identified the key themes that resonated with these buyers at each stage of their journey, and targeted against those.
4. Keep the list small enough to personalise. A researched list of the right people beats a larger list of the wrong ones, because the message only works if it was written for one person.

For Speakers Corner this produced a really specific focus on the ideal customer profile rather than a broad events audience.

The message

Your job isn't to sell. It's to have a sales conversation. They're very different things.

Opening someone's inbox is a transaction: you are taking twenty or thirty seconds of their day, and you have to pay for it with something useful. The full method is published as the LinkedIn DM playbook. Five of those principles carried this campaign.

1. Never show up empty-handed. Every opening message carried something worth having, offered as upfront value rather than held back behind a call.
2. Lead with one person and one problem. Rather than high-volume messaging, each message was built around the prospect's role and a specific pain point they were facing.
3. Talk in their language. Use the buyer's vocabulary rather than the seller's. A message written in the prospect's own terms reads as someone who understands the job, not someone working a list.
4. Offer two routes, never a yes or no. A binary CTA splits the path instead of putting a gate across it, which makes declining a third option rather than the default.
5. Follow up like a person. Where a first message got no reply, an embedded flow tried again in a conversational, natural way rather than chasing.

The asset offered in that first message is chosen by a filter we call the 60-minute test: list every pain point your prospects have, then cross off every one you could not solve in under an hour. What survives is what the asset should be. It is the difference between something a buyer uses this week and something that sits in a downloads folder.

The content behind the message

The profile is the second message.

Speakers Corner shared organic content from key accounts across LinkedIn to support the outreach. The goal was building familiarity and demonstrating expertise as a leader in the industry, so that the name in the inbox was not a cold one.

Prospects who checked the profile behind a message found a clear, authoritative point of view rather than an empty page. That warmed up cold conversations, and brought in inbound interest of its own from people who were never messaged at all.

How we measured it

Likes don't pay salaries.

Impressions are the easiest number to move and the least useful to report, so the programme was judged on conversations and meetings instead. If you want viral content, go and post on TikTok; the value of LinkedIn is the volume of decision-makers.

• Leads per month, counted from outreach and content together rather than attributed to one or the other.
• Meetings booked, and specifically with which organisations, because one meeting with the right account is worth more than thirty with the wrong ones.
• Who engaged, not how many. A post read by forty of the right decision-makers beats one read by four thousand of the wrong ones.

Results

Both outcomes below come from the LinkedIn outreach and content programme running together.

Pipeline

An average of 36 leads per month generated through LinkedIn outreach and content.

Enterprise meetings

Meetings booked with WWF, Thomson Reuters, Just Eat Takeaway, The Economist, Eventbrite and Formula 1.