Being a biotech CEO is no walk in the park. Juggling team leadership, driving scientific breakthroughs, and keeping shareholders happy leaves little room for another key responsibility: building a public presence.
Enter ghostwriting. With the help of savvy social media pros, biotech executives can maintain a strong LinkedIn presence—the platform everyone’s watching in business—without spending endless hours perfecting their posts.
One such pro is Benjamin McLeod, founder of the newly launched Convey Bio and a LinkedIn influencer with over 21,000 followers in the cell and gene therapy space. Benjamin recently joined me on the podcast to share insights on ghostwriting for biotech leaders, why relying on a LinkedIn company page might be a misstep, and how personal branding can open doors at conferences.
🎧 Listen to this episode:
Subscribe to the podcast, or watch it on YouTube
📖 Or read the interview:
– Personal branding on LinkedIn is much more efficient than trying to promote a company page.
– CEOs should be sharing valuable content with their audience 90% of the time and only promoting themselves 10% of the time.
– Biotech conferences have a low ROI, but can be a powerful lead generation strategy when combined with LinkedIn.
The interview below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Benjamin’s journey to ghostwriting
Can you share some details about your background and what led you to become a ghostwriter on LinkedIn?
Benjamin McLeod: My background is in molecular and cellular biology. Upon finishing the Master of Biotechnology program at the University of Guelph in Canada, I started working inside a gene therapy production lab where I was helping produce adeno-associated viral vectors for gene therapy applications in lung disorders. I learned a lot about how the gene therapy process works and 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. When that position came to an end, I was fortunate enough to start working for a company called Virica Biotech that focuses on small molecule enhancers that help increase the yields of viral vaccines and different viral vectors inside of the gene therapy space.
For the first time, I became the lab guy who helps out the business development and marketing people who may not have the same background in that area of biotech, and I 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. It was a brand-new experience for me.
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. LinkedIn was a way to force myself to keep up to date, and it really took off.
There are not a lot of people inside of the cell and gene therapy space that post on LinkedIn, but there are lots of people inside of the space that are there. It basically became 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 put yourself out there and provide some useful information to other folks, you could generate an audience pretty quickly.
While I was there with Virica Biotech, I was just hoping that by producing some content, maybe one day, way off in the future, some leads would come in from my work on LinkedIn. Fast forward to my final months with Virica, the largest amount of leads generated across the company basically came from all the conferences that we were going to, and the number two slot was Ben McLeod's work on LinkedIn.
It’s really become a very powerful way to generate quality leads and 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.
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. 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. So it was the confirmation I needed to jump out into the deep end and start my own company.
Do you have any writing training?
B.M.: I've learned on my own. LinkedIn is a great teacher though, because you get immediate feedback about what works and what doesn't. Sometimes your post just gets crickets and no one really responds, and you're like, okay, that doesn't work. And then other times you'll have a post that takes off so you 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 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.
Understanding the ghostwriting process
What’s the process you use to help your ghostwriting clients on LinkedIn?
B.M.: 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 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.
Then the goal basically is just from there, 90 % of the time, provide as much value as possible, provide useful information, and provide your own insights without pitching your company around those pain points and around those aspirations.
For example, if you're a cell therapy company that's designing a bioreactor for cell therapies, the big pain points inside of that field would be the yields that are coming out of the system, making sure that your batches are consistent and 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? Can you find a recent paper that talks about how to reduce batch variability and post the PDF on LinkedIn, and then provide some of the key takeaways from the paper to everyone else inside of your industry. You're not pitching anything. You're not trying to sell your bioreactor per se. Your goal is just to be as useful as possible.
There are all sorts of ways that you can do that. I do a combination of papers, text posts, text plus images, and little diagrams that help simplify different problems or different components of the industry. And by doing that without pitching, the goal is just 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 them.
The power of LinkedIn for biotech executives
Why are you specifically targeting CEOs as a ghostwriter?
B.M.: 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 are running them. And as a result of that, it does drive a lot of trust, especially inside smaller industries.
Instead of just trying to build a corporate showcase page, build the executive’s profile up, and get them posting on LinkedIn because there are just so many opportunities. With some of the clients I've worked with already, they've been approached by some of the biggest companies inside of biotech 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. There's so much built in social capital with being the CEO of a company or being the founder of a company. Automatically, your voice and your perspectives have more value than a random bumpkin up in Canada like me. As a result, there's just so much more opportunity to get important people looking at your company and what it can do.
How do you adapt to the personality and the tone of voice of the CEOs you’re writing for?
B.M.: A really important part of that is analyzing any material that they've written, any presentations that they've done. 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. By doing that, you start to get a better idea of how they intonate, what is their unique voice, what they care about, and what's important to them.
The goal is not for it to be Ben McLeod'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 translate those into a format of posts that are designed to get a lot of engagement and stimulate some good conversations.
Building a personal brand on LinkedIn
How often do you recommend an executive to publish on LinkedIn?
B.M.: It varies. I've seen people who post once per week and it does great. The challenge there is obviously that it only gives you one opportunity per week to interact with everybody. Therefore, I recommend going a little bit on the higher end, like three to six times per week.
The reason is that it gives you opportunities to test out different messaging and provide different types of posts to people across the different demographics or client types that you might have.
The challenge that people always worry about is, that if I post too many times per week, people are gonna get tired of seeing my posts. That has never been something that happened to me because the key thing is just to be as useful as possible to your key customers. 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, 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. That's the key. How often can you be useful to other people inside of your industry?
Secondly, how many posts can you come up with within a week that are going to actually be that genuine usefulness and value? 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, 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.
What’s your take on commenting on LinkedIn? Are you also helping your clients with that?
B.M.: Comments are interesting. I think they’re 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 random stuff, that's like, “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 posts on LinkedIn, start liking and engaging with posts that provide you with genuine value. That's my philosophy towards it. I'm not commenting just for the sake of 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.
Advice for starting on LinkedIn
What advice would you give to someone who's just starting on LinkedIn?
B.M.: Most people don't have the stamina. They don't have the endurance. And the reason is that people see that posting on LinkedIn is important, they have six ideas and they start posting three posts per week. Then, 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 reaction, so they burn out.
The key component to long-term success on LinkedIn is to understand that for the first couple of 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 then you schedule it for Tuesday morning. Get into that cadence, get comfortable with that rhythm. Once you're confident with that and you've got that habit developed, think about adding in another post. The consistency is really the key piece that separates most people from actually being successful on LinkedIn.
The other thing that's really important is to realize that your posts, especially early on, aren't gonna be that good. How can you make them better? You can experiment with different formats. You can do triages on past posts to see what works and double down on that. And again, really focus on what is important to the people that you want to talk to.
Choosing your content niche on LinkedIn
Do you plan to test other types of writing formats and channels, or do you prefer to stick with LinkedIn for now?
B.M.: Probably stick to LinkedIn for now. In 2025, I'll probably experiment with some different formats as well. Just to decentralize a little bit beyond LinkedIn because you never know, LinkedIn could blow up tomorrow and then your entire following is gone.
In terms of reaching the most amount of people possible, the best is to have well constructed short format posts that are packed with value. In terms of generating as much attention as possible, you need to have something that's a little bit shorter. With longer formats you might end up going a little bit deeper with some key people, but your ability to reach as many people as possible 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 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 eventually, there's a way to bring them to a different format that's longer that would be useful to them.
Your own LinkedIn account has over 21,000 followers, and your focus has been on cell and gene therapy until now. Now that you are starting your ConveyBio, are you planning to expand the niche you cover?
B.M.: Cell and gene therapy is just where I've worked my entire career. And so I anticipate that 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.
This is honestly one of the reasons why I'm quite excited by Convey bio because a lot of people that are 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 where I see my niche being.
Eventually, I will probably expand a little bit wider beyond into different parts of biotechnology. But 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 talking about vague generalities all the time, people pick up on that pretty quickly.
And do you plan on using the same kind of 90/10 formula for your own business?
B.M.: 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. 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, in that last 10%, that's when you can actually sell the implementation.
Maximizing ROI from biotech conferences
You’ve spoken out a few times against the low return on investment of biotech conferences. So why do you think this form of marketing is so inefficient?
B.M.: Biotech conferences 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 before, during and after conferences that can make them not as useful.
One of the major problems I see is that, especially inside of biotech, people think of marketing on LinkedIn as only ever coming through a company showcase page. The first challenge is that LinkedIn represses company page posts because they're trying to get you to buy ads for that company page. Secondly, there's 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.
What people will often do when it comes to promoting conferences is they'll post on the company page a couple of weeks before the event saying, hey, we're gonna be there. Eight people from inside the company like it…. Therefore, you get to the conference and you're mostly just hoping for foot traffic to come by and be interested in your booth. But there are 250 other booths that look just like yours and have the same color palette of dark blues. So it's really hard to stand out.
Instead, it's much more effective to have been talking to your target audience for months on LinkedIn, being as useful as possible, providing insights about the pain points and the aspirations that your customers have. And then, when conference time does come, you are now in a position to say, hey, I'm gonna be at this conference, let's meet!
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 can be a really powerful way to close that loop of human relations where you've met the person online to some extent, and now you're actually getting to meet them in person and give them a handshake and learn more about what their company can do for you. Conferences themselves are still very powerful, but the way that you use them and the way that you prepare for them is key.
Recommended reading for science marketers
Is there a book you would recommend for someone who is working in science marketing or communication?
B.M.: There's a really good book called Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. Another really key component that a lot of people miss is that there's a whole component of utilizing the way that we as human beings think in order to make a good post. In the book, there are lots of thoughts about how to make a good hook at 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.
That wraps up my interview with Benjamin. One of the most surprising takeaways for me was his connection between personal branding and boosting ROI from conferences.
Too often, companies rely on their LinkedIn page for event announcements, with CEOs occasionally resharing them—a strategy that’s usually too passive to drive real results.
Instead, a proactive approach, like publishing one thoughtful post per week, can build engagement and attention long before it’s time to announce your event participation. When the big moment comes, you’re already on people’s radar. Definitely food for thought!
