Outperforming larger competitors on a smaller audience

The client

A Midwest-based custom software development firm and Microsoft partner. The team builds custom applications and works in legacy modernization, Azure cloud, and AI and data services. They sell to technical and executive buyers, so credibility matters more than reach, and the audience they care about is small and specific.

The engagement

We ran the company’s LinkedIn presence as their outside content partner for 18 months. The goal was straightforward: build a content program that sounded human, earned engagement from the right people, and represented the firm’s work accurately without overclaiming. The figures below cover a continuous 12-month window where complete analytics were available.

The program ran at a near-daily cadence and leaned on the firm’s own engineers and architects as named subject-matter experts. The mix included:

• Thought-leadership posts drawn from the team’s technical writing on AI strategy, cloud, modernization, and Microsoft platform work
• Short video clips of engineers explaining a single idea in plain language
• Client testimonial and case study posts
• Microsoft partnership and recognition announcements
• Peer-level commenting on Microsoft and partner posts to stay visible in the right conversations

The results

Engagement well above the benchmark. Across roughly 275 posts, the median per-post engagement rate was 7.9%, with an average of 9.3%. For context, Hootsuite’s January 2025 data puts the average LinkedIn engagement rate for the technology sector at 3.6%. That places the program at roughly double the technology benchmark on a typical post. Seventy-six posts cleared 10% engagement and 29 cleared 15%.

Punching above its weight against competitors. In LinkedIn’s competitor export covering nine firms over the same year, the client generated more than 7,700 total post engagements, the second-highest total in the group. It did that on a base of roughly 5,800 followers, one of the smallest audiences on the list. Measured as engagement relative to audience size, the client ranked first of the nine, ahead of competitors with ten to forty times the follower count.

Steady, organic audience growth. The page added about 1,250 net new followers over the year, roughly 27% growth, and 98% of that came organically rather than through paid follower campaigns.

The right audience, not a vanity one. Followers concentrated in the firm’s home metro and skewed toward engineering, IT, and business development functions at senior levels. That is the buyer profile the firm sells into, which makes the engagement commercially useful rather than cosmetic.

Reach to owned content. Organic posts drove roughly 191,600 impressions and about 10,800 clicks through to the firm’s own articles and pages over the year.

Why it worked

The program treated the audience’s size as a feature, not a limit. With a small, specific following, every post was written to be useful to a technical reader rather than optimized for the widest possible reach. The firm’s own experts were named and quoted, claims were kept to what could be verified, and the cadence was consistent enough to compound. The result was a page that a much larger competitor could not match on engagement, even with a far bigger audience and budget.