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Benjamin (00:00)
If you really want to make your marketing more effective, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, you've got to get your executives involved. People are looking for genuine insight from executives.
The biggest companies in the world do this.
there's so much built in social capital with being the CEO of a company Just automatically your voice and your perspectives have more value than a random bumpkin up in Canada like me.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:25)
Welcome to the Science Marketer podcast. Today on the show, Benjamin McLeod is joining me to talk about ghost writing in biotech, why using a LinkedIn company page might be a bad strategy and how your personal branding can help you attract partners at conferences. Benjamin is an expert in the field of cell and gene therapy, but also a strong voice on LinkedIn where he's followed by over 21,000 people.
Benjamin recently decided to start his own company, Convey Bio, which provides LinkedIn ghost writing for busy biotech CEOs.
Hey Benjamin, welcome to the Science Marketer Podcast.
Benjamin (01:03)
Thank you for having me, an honor to be here.
Joachim Eeckhout (01:04)
So before we talk about ghost writing and your new company, I want to set the scene and explain a bit your background. So could you start there? Like where are you coming from? What's your expertise and what's leading you to found this company now?
Benjamin (01:18)
Yeah, for sure. So my background is in molecular and cellular biology. When I was a teenager, I had grand aspirations of becoming an optometrist. But then I got into university and I realized very quickly that I wasn't smart enough to get into that very competitive program. But at the same time, I was still fascinated by cell biology and had been since I was a teenager. And so upon graduating from the University of Ottawa with a a bachelor's in molecular and cellular biology, I was
in a bit of a crisis about what I would be doing next and came across this program called the Master of Biotechnology at the University of Guelph, also based in Canada. And it kind of opened my eyes with regards to what you could do with biology. Usually when you're in high school, you think of studying biology and it's like, okay, well, you can be a professor or you can try to apply for med school or some sort of other medical profession and that's about it. But this Master's of Biotechnology
program really kind of gave me the understanding of just how large and expansive the biotech space was and all of the really exciting science that was occurring inside of it. And kind of gave me some business skills to accompany my more technical skills. And so upon finishing that master's program, I actually started working
inside of a gene therapy production lab where I was helping produce adeno-associated viral vectors for gene therapy applications inside of some different lung disorders. That was really, really cool. Learned a lot about how the gene therapy process works, did everything from cell culture all the way down to purification and final formulations.
While I enjoyed my time in the lab, I could definitely see that this wasn't something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And when that position came to an end, I was fortunate enough to start working for a company called Virica Biotech that focuses on these little small molecule enhancers that help increase the yields of viral vaccines and different viral vectors inside of the gene therapy space. And for the first time, I became basically the lab guy who understands the science.
who helps out the business development and marketing people who may not have the same background in that area of biotech and really enjoyed it. For the first time, I was basically able to talk about the science, teach others about the science, get them excited about the science. I wasn't doing the science in a lab it was just something fascinating. It was a brand new experience for me and it was really, really cool. And while I was there,
I started posting on LinkedIn with the goal of just educating other people inside of this space of cell and gene therapy, trying to keep myself up to date on what was going on and LinkedIn kind of being a way to force myself on keeping up to date. And it really took off. There's not a lot of people inside of the cell and gene therapy space that post on LinkedIn, but there's lots of people inside of the space that are there. so looking back on it, it basically became a
a potent way to become a loud voice in a quiet room where not a lot of people were talking. And if you're willing to kind of put yourself out there and provide some useful information to other folks, you could generate an audience pretty quickly. And while I was there with Virica Biotech, was just kind of hoping that by producing some content, maybe one day, way off in the future, it wasn't part of my job description or anything, you
maybe some deals or some leads would come in from my work on LinkedIn. And fast forward to kind of my final months with Virica, the lead generation efforts that we had across the company, had basically all of the conferences that we were going to, and that provided the largest amount of leads for the company. And the number two slot was Ben McLeod's work on LinkedIn.
And so it was really cool to see that you could basically gain people's trust, start to provide a lot of useful information to other people inside of the space. But then every once in a while, you could just talk about the problems that people were going through and how the company was in a position to help them with those problems. And so it's really become a very powerful way to generate
quality leads is to post on LinkedIn. And so a good chunk of my career since then has basically been in that space of helping communicate the science, helping people understand what's going on. And then every once in a while, just talking about the issues and how the company that I happen to be representing at the time can help you. So that's a long winded way of coming around to the last month or so where I launched my own company that's designed to help
biotech executives build those personal brands that have a lot of meaning and impact and that can ultimately help to convert leads to the organization.
Joachim Eeckhout (05:54)
So we'll talk about your process a bit later, but can you first answer why are you launching now? Is there some sort of timing or is it more personal?
Benjamin (06:04)
Yeah, it's something I've been thinking about for some time and I was in a position to start my own company back in September. And after doing a little bit of analysis, I'd gotten some early people that I was working with and they were seeing some pretty tremendous results using my process. And so it was kind of the confirmation I needed to kind of jump out into the deep end and start my own company. It's definitely a bit of a
of a scary process. You some days you're just on top of the world and like, this is the best idea ever. And then sometimes just hours later, you're like, this is the worst idea ever. Why would I ever do this? But overall, it's been, it's been pretty exciting. So.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:42)
Yeah, I know the feeling. So let's talk about your process because I think that's what's really important to understand. So how do work with your clients LinkedIn?
Benjamin (06:54)
Yeah, it ultimately varies somewhat by the individual that I'm working with. But the main goal is to identify the key pain points that the company can solve for their potential clients. To identify the key pain points and then to identify the key aspirations as well that the customers are
seeking to get and how that somewhat ties in with your company. And then the goal basically is just from there, 90 % of the time, provide as much value as possible, provide useful information, provide your own insights without pitching your company around those pain points and around those aspirations. And so if you're a cell therapy company that's trying, that is designing a bioreactor for cell therapies,
You know, one of the big pain points inside of the inside of that field would be the yields that are coming out of the system or making sure that your batches are consistent or reducing the amount of time that the cells actually have to spend in the bioreactor before they can go back into the patients. And so the goal would just be, can you provide useful information around those different challenges that they're experiencing? Can you find a recent paper that talks about how to reduce
batch variability and kind of just find that paper. Ideally it's open access. You can post the PDF on LinkedIn, provide some of the key takeaways, from the paper, kind of some of the new things that they've uncovered and provide that to everyone else inside of your industry. You're not, you're not pitching anything. You're not trying to, you know, sell, sell your bioreactor per se. Your goal is just to be as useful as possible.
And so there's all sorts of different ways that you can do that. I do a combination of papers, text posts, text plus images, little diagrams as well that kind of help simplify different problems or different components of the industry. And by doing that without pitching, the goal is just for 90 % of the time to generate useful information for other people to gain their trust.
to showcase that you know what you're talking about. And when you do that consistently, you'll have permission in that last 10 % of the time to basically use some of that social capital that you've accrued and talk about the problems that people are experiencing and how you can help them solve.
If you really want to make your marketing more effective, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, you've got to get your executives involved. People are looking for genuine insight from executives.
The biggest companies in the world do this. Microsoft does it. Virgin does it. SpaceX and Tesla do it. You don't know the companies so much as you know the people who running them. And as a result of that, does drive a lot of trust, especially inside of smaller industries, where instead of just trying to build a corporate showcase page,
build the executive up, build the founding executive up, get them posting on LinkedIn because there's just so many opportunities that can come their way because they are the executive and because they are active on LinkedIn. With some of the clients I've worked with already, they've, been approached by some of the biggest companies inside of biotech in the world because they posted on LinkedIn. They wouldn't have gotten the same engagement if they were posting on their company page.
It needs to be the executive. If the executive is posting, there's so much built in social capital with being the CEO of a company or being the founder of a company. Just automatically your voice and your perspectives have more value than a random bumpkin up in Canada like me. And so as a result, there's just so much more opportunity to get
important people looking at your company and what it can do
Joachim Eeckhout (10:46)
And so if I understand the idea behind ConveyBio is also to do ghost writing. So write this content for the CEO, for instance, of a gene therapy company or some sort of executives. So how do you go with this process in particular? How do you write for them? Like use their tone of voice
Benjamin (11:06)
Yeah, obviously a really important part of that is analyzing any material that they currently have that they've written, any presentations that they've done. And ultimately, one of the biggest components is a large part of my process is meeting with them once per week to discuss the different topics that will be done in the week to follow.
And by doing that, you do start to get a better idea of, kind of how do they intonate? What is, what is their, what is their unique voice? What do they care about? What's important to them? And then the goal honestly is not for it just to be, you know, Ben MacLeod's posts that are getting written by them, but to gather all of their insights on these different topics, on these different problems that can be solved inside of the industry. and then take their insights, their thoughts, their perspectives, and then just.
translate those into a format of posts that are designed to get a lot of engagement and stimulate some good
conversations.
Joachim Eeckhout (12:03)
Do you have any training in writing
Benjamin (12:05)
I've learned on my own. It's interesting. LinkedIn is a great teacher though, because over the past, guess, two and a half years at this point that I've been doing it, you get immediate feedback about what works and what doesn't. And so it involves putting yourself out there and sometimes your post just getting crickets and no one really responds and you're like, okay, that doesn't work. And then other times you'll...
Joachim Eeckhout (12:08)
Yeah.
Benjamin (12:28)
You'll have a post that takes off and you kind of do a little bit of a triage on it and you figure out, okay, what is it that worked on this post? What are the key components that make this a banger compared to some other posts that I've done that haven't? And then just kind of that iterative process over time over and over again, will lead to a point where you learn the keys that make for a good LinkedIn post.
Joachim Eeckhout (12:52)
Yeah, I think it's a very particular type of writing. So yeah, I think your experience doing it for yourself is very, very valuable because not everyone can spend years going through this process, which is not so easy, as you say, like you have to put yourself out there and it's not easy. But you have the experience and that's great. Now you basically want to reuse it for other people. And I think it's a really, really smart idea.
So let's stay on LinkedIn because I think one of the interesting aspects of this type of ghost writing, so we said there is this kind of particular style going with LinkedIn, but also it's social media, so it's short form writing. Do you think or do you plan to go into longer form of writing, maybe on other...
other channels, other types of media in the future with ConveyBio or do you want to stick to LinkedIn?
Benjamin (13:46)
probably stick to LinkedIn for now. anticipate over the probably in 2025, I'll experiment with some different formats as well. Just kind of to decentralize a little bit beyond, beyond LinkedIn, just because you never know LinkedIn could blow up tomorrow and then it's, and then your entire following is gone. But yeah, I would say the advantage, especially right now in terms of just
reaching the most amount of people possible is to have well constructed short format posts that are packed with value. Just because in terms of generating as much attention as possible, you kind of need to have something that's a little bit shorter. The longer your posts get or the longer that your format is, you might end up going a little bit deeper with some key people, but
your ability to reach as many people as possible, it goes down. Obviously there can be an advantage if you happen to find a format by which you can reach a lot of your key customers in a really narrowed down way. If they're interested in that long form content, fantastic. But I think honestly the challenge is just that in terms of getting in front of potential customers, short form content on LinkedIn is just
a better way to capture them at the top of the funnel and then maybe eventually there's a way to kind of bring them to a different format that's longer that would be useful to them.
Joachim Eeckhout (15:14)
So let's talk about your own account on LinkedIn. So as we said, like you're, I think you have over 21,000 followers, maybe more now. And your focus has been on cell and gene therapy until now. So I think you're really sharing kind of valuable information about the science, about the industry. Can you explain your strategy behind it? Because I think you're...
putting yourself in a niche, right? And now with ConveyBio, maybe you would like to expand a bit your horizon. So what's your strategy behind the choice of this topic and how you imagine it in the future?
Benjamin (15:54)
That's a good question. Cell and gene therapy is just kind of where I've worked my entire career. And so I anticipate that most, and this has kind of been true so far, most of my clients will be inside of the cell and gene therapy space. And the reason for that is in order to be effective at developing content that resonates with your target audience, especially inside of science, you've got to know it pretty well.
and this is honestly probably one of the reasons why, I'm quite excited by convey bio just because a lot of people that are really, really good at LinkedIn, don't necessarily have a deep technical background in this niche of the industry. And anybody who's got a really deep niche in, this part of the industry doesn't necessarily know a lot about LinkedIn. So this is kind of where, this is kind of where I see my niche being.
for right now anyway, eventually kind of probably expanding a little bit wider beyond into different parts of biotechnology. But specifically with science and when you're writing content for science, you just got to know it really, really well because you're dealing with some of the most skeptical and intelligent people in the world. And if you don't know your stuff and you're just kind of talking about vague generalities all the time, people pick up on that pretty quickly. So you've
you've got a showcase that you know what you're talking about. You've got to have your ducks in a row. so, yeah, that's just kind of where my technical background comes from. And I anticipate that being one of the primary places I stay just because I know it very well. But obviously with time, I'll seek to learn more about other components of biotech as well.
Joachim Eeckhout (17:27)
And do you plan on using the same kind of formula? you said earlier, like you can talk 90 % of the time about valuable information and then 10 % of the time promote your brand basically. do you plan to use the same model for yourself? 90 % is cell and gene therapy, 10 % is Convey Bio services.
Benjamin (17:46)
Yeah, pretty much. Again, my primary goal on LinkedIn is just to be as useful as possible. And that applies across any industry that you're inside of. And so if I were the CEO of a concrete pouring company, it would be the same strategy of 90 % of the time, just be as useful as possible to your key audience about the ins and outs of concrete pouring.
What are the things that you shouldn't do? What are the things that you should do? What are some valuable resources about how to properly calculate the hardness of concrete you need or something like that? And then from that position by having been as useful as possible in that last 10%, that's when you can actually sell the implementation. Here's the knowledge that I've connected you with, but in terms of now being able to help you replicate the results, you're gonna need my help
Joachim Eeckhout (18:39)
I've seen you speak out a few times against the low return on investment of biotech conferences, right? So why do you think this form of marketing is so inefficient?
Benjamin (18:50)
Well, let me back up a little bit, I guess I would say. Biotech conferences, I would say, can be very efficient and can be really useful if you've got a good strategy for them. I don't want to be bashing conferences. A lot of really good stuff happens there. Instead, it's really the behavior that you engage in kind of before and during and after conferences that can make them not as useful.
and so if I were to back up a little bit, one of the major problems I see is that, people will, especially inside of biotech, they think of marketing on LinkedIn as only ever coming through a company showcase page. And the, the, the challenge being there is that there that LinkedIn, first of all, represses company page posts, because they're trying to get you to buy ads for that company page. and secondly.
there's kind of the psychology of it as well, in that people don't relate on an emotional level or on a human connection level with a font scheme and color palette. And so therefore, what people will often do when it comes to promoting conferences is they'll post on the company page a couple weeks before the event saying, hey, we're gonna be there. Eight people from inside the company like it. And...
you might end up sending some emails trying to get some meetings set up and that's about it. And so therefore you get to the conference and you're mostly just kind of hoping on foot traffic to come by and be interested in your booth. But there's 250 other booths that look just like yours that have the same color palette of dark blues. And so it's really hard to stand out. And so instead kind of coming back to my
my personal advocacy in terms of, of developing personal brands, it's much more effective to have been talking to your target audience for months previous, being as useful as possible, providing insights about the pain points and the aspirations that your customers have. And then, you know, not beating them over the head with sales pitches all the time, just trying to be useful. And then when conference time does come, you are now in a position to say, Hey,
I'm gonna be at this conference. I'm gonna be there with my company. Let's meet. Come past our booth. And what I've seen happen over and over again is like the results are just incredible because you're not leading with an ask through a channel that no one relates with. You've developed a personal brand ideally for one of your executives who has showcased their value and usefulness and has become a voice who is well known inside of the industry.
And therefore, when they say they're gonna be at a conference, it's a chance for you to meet this person, this person from whom you've derived so much value and benefit over the last couple of months. conferences in that way can be this really, really powerful way to kind of close that loop of human relations where you've met the person online almost to some extent, and now you're actually getting to kind of meet them in person and give them a handshake and learn more about what their company can do for you. So that would be the caveat.
Conferences themselves are still very, powerful, but the way that you use them and the way that you prepare for them is key.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:01)
And
when you post on LinkedIn, people start to recognize you at events without having to do anything, right? Like this is really powerful. Like people coming to you and telling you like just, you know, they saw your post on LinkedIn, they know you and you have no idea who they are. I think this is, yeah, like this is really interesting. And...
Benjamin (22:17)
Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:21)
This can be really powerful for, let's say, a CEO in the company. How often do you recommend an executive to publish on LinkedIn, let's say, week?
Benjamin (22:35)
It varies. I've had, I've seen people who post once per week and they, and it does great. The challenge there is obviously you've got, really have some, some good ideas for one post per week. It only gives you one opportunity per week to kind of interact with everybody. And, and, and so they're therefore I kind of recommend going a little bit on the higher end, like three to six times per week.
The reason being, it gives you opportunities to kind of test out different messaging and provide different types of posts to people across the different demographics or client types that you might have, where honestly, the challenge that people always worry about is, well, if I post too many times per week, people are gonna get tired of seeing posts and.
That has never been something that happens to me because the key thing is just to be as useful as possible to your key customers. And if you're finding papers that are relevant to them, if you're making images or infographics that help them explain their industry a little bit better or understand their industry a little bit better, you're gonna do great because you're not trying to sell to people six times a week. You're just trying to be useful to people six times per week.
and so that's kind of the key is how often can you be useful to other people inside of your industry? and secondly, the key there is how many posts can you come up with in a, in a, in a week that are going to actually be that genuine usefulness and value. And so if you only have one or two posts per week that you can think of that would be useful to other people,
and then your other four posts are fluff. Well, yeah, that's gonna, that's gonna damage your brand. The much better solution is to start slow with valuable insight and then slowly scale as you learn about what other types of valuable insight you can provide
Joachim Eeckhout (24:32)
another part of LinkedIn are the comments. So I think one of the most well-known advice you will read on the web is that you need to post, but you also need to comment to kind of trigger the algorithm in your favor. Are you also helping your clients with comments? what's your take on this?
Benjamin (24:55)
comments are interesting.
I think it's important. If you find other people inside of your industry that are providing useful insight to you, if you want to train your personal algorithm to see more valuable posts like that, then you should be reacting to the post and you should be commenting on it. Because from a purely selfish perspective, that's just going to make your feed better and it's going to be more curated towards the stuff you actually want to see and not this random stuff that's like, you
I, you know, I, I'm an HR and I rejected a candidate three times and the fourth time we accepted them. And now he's the CEO of the company. If you want to see fewer of those junk random posts on LinkedIn, start liking and engaging with posts that provide you with, with genuine value. And so that's kind of my philosophy towards it. I'm not commenting just for the sake of, you know, making the algorithm work in my favor, but instead just
to provide some better activity in my feed and also to engage with people that I enjoy learning about.
Joachim Eeckhout (26:05)
Yeah, I think that's the right approach, especially as we see more and more of those AI comments that don't mean anything, So yeah, I think you have the right approach. So what's the future for ConveyBio?
Benjamin (26:21)
Yeah, so at this point, it's a one man operation. I'm quite excited by the ability to kind of stay home with my kids and watch them grow. So that's one of the major perks I think it's gonna be. It'll be interesting to see how we might be able to expand beyond just LinkedIn into other areas as well. It might be interesting to...
to explore some of these other social platforms and see how they can also benefit clients. LinkedIn honestly just is the main place right now in terms of professional network and people who are interested in learning about their industry and that sort of thing. There are some other social media platforms that might start challenging that dominance a little bit, but
LinkedIn's definitely the biggest player for right now. And so at this point, I anticipate it running a tight ship, working with a key small group of executives who can really provide a lot of value inside of their space.
Joachim Eeckhout (27:17)
What advice would you give to someone who's just starting on LinkedIn?
Benjamin (27:23)
most people don't have the stamina. They don't have the endurance. And the reason that that happens, and I've seen it happen over and over again, is people will be like, okay, great, I need to start posting on LinkedIn. I see it as being really, really important. I've got six ideas and I'm gonna start doing three posts per week.
They run out of ideas by the end of week two. And since they're not very good at it to start, they don't get a lot of, they don't get a lot of reaction and they run out of ideas really quickly. And so they burn out. The key component to long-term success on LinkedIn,
is to understand that for the first couple months, if you're just designing your own posts from scratch, you're not gonna be very good. And the other thing to remember as well is that it's far more important to be consistent than it is to get a bunch of content ideas out there. So if you come up with 10 or 12 different ideas of stuff that you could post about, I highly encourage that you post
once per week. Get into the cadence of developing the habit of one post per week. Maybe it's something that you do on Saturday morning and you just kind of design your post and then you schedule it for Tuesday morning. Get into that cadence, get comfortable with that rhythm. once you're kind of confident with that and you've got that habit developed, think about adding in another post. And now maybe you're planning your
You're gonna plan on writing two posts on Saturday morning and you're gonna schedule them going on Tuesday and Thursday. So the consistency is really the key piece that separates most people from actually being successful on LinkedIn. The other thing that's really important along with that is to realize that your posts that you're working on, especially early on, aren't gonna be that good. How can you make them better?
You can experiment with different formats. You can kind of do triages on past posts to see, okay, what works, what doesn't double down on that. And again, really focus on what is important to the people that you want to talk to. If you are a scientist who is interested in talking to other scientists who are inside of the antibody development space, you shouldn't be,
posting this random LinkedIn fluff about, you it's so important that everybody has remote work and what Amazon or whatever company is doing is terrible. You're just never going to, you're never going to connect with scientists. You need to be providing value that is specific and useful for them.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:58)
yes, this brings me to my last question. Is there a book you would recommend for someone who is working in marketing or communication?
Benjamin (30:07)
Yeah, there's a really good book. the book is called influence. I'm going through it right now. Another really key component that a lot of people miss is that There's not just the, the making of the post and making sure that your value is good inside of the post, but there's a whole component of the psychology.
of what makes a good post. There's a whole component of utilizing the way that we as human beings think in order to make a good post. And so there's lots of thoughts about how to make a good hook on the very beginning of your post, how you talk about different issues or different challenges in a way that resonates with other people inside of the industry.
on the author. It's by a guy called Robert B. Cialedini, Really, really good book.
Joachim Eeckhout (30:53)
I will link
Well, that brings us to the end of today's episode. A huge thank you to you, Benjamin, for joining us and sharing your insights.
Benjamin (31:01)
Glad to, thanks so much for having me.
Joachim Eeckhout (31:04)
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Thanks for listening and see you next time.