992 reactions · 148 comments · 1.9x the author's average
Oana Labes · Financiario founder · 422k followers
View the post ↗Frontal · Ramp
A LinkedIn content and ads plan built on Ramp's own niche data
We researched Ramp's market and buyers, mined how finance leaders talk about spend and close, scored 16 creators in the niche, hand-verified the CFOs and controllers engaging with that content, and reviewed 482 US-targeted LinkedIn ads across Ramp and five competitors. Every recommendation below links to the research that earned it.
01 · Company and niche research
What Ramp sells, who buys it, and the keywords that define the niche
We read ramp.com (home, product and customers pages) and Ramp's LinkedIn presence, then resolved the niche into the keywords and the competitive set that drive the rest of this research.
What you sell
All-in-one spend management
Corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel and accounting automation in one platform, plus Ramp Intelligence AI agents. ramp.com cites 70,000+ businesses and positions on saving finance teams time and money.
Who buys
CFOs, VPs of Finance and Controllers
The testimonial authors on ramp.com/customers carry the exact titles: CEO (Eventbrite), VP of Finance (Poshmark), VP Controller (Zola), plus heads of procurement and finance operations at US companies from startups through mid-market and enterprise.
The keywords
10 topics that define the niche
Spend management, corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable automation, procurement, finance automation, travel and expense, month-end close, accounting automation, CFO and finance operations. These drove the creator discovery and content research below.
The competitive set
Brex, Navan, Expensify, BILL and SAP Concur
We resolved each advertiser's LinkedIn company ID and pulled their live Ad Library sets: 382 US-targeted competitor ads kept after dropping foreign-market campaigns (Paris, DACH, Benelux, Nordics, Japan).
02 · LinkedIn content research
Your finance buyers already engage with content in this niche, and we can name them
We searched the 10 niche keywords, scored 16 creators on topic, audience, reach and engagement, pulled their last 6 months of posts, and identified the standouts: posts that beat the author's own average by the biggest multiple. Then we classified 410 comments on those posts, one by one, to verify who is engaging.
16
creators scored in the spend-management and CFO content niche, on topic, audience, reach and engagement
410
comments on their recent posts classified one by one to see who actually engages
138
commenters held finance decision-maker titles: CFO, VP of Finance, Controller, Head of Procurement
40
ICP-fit prospects kept after hand review: current decision-makers at companies that could buy Ramp
Three standout posts from the research (each shown with reactions, comments, and the multiple of the author's own average post)
1,049 reactions · 150 comments · 2.7x the author's average
Tom Mills · Procurement newsletter · 141k followers
View the post ↗185 reactions · 1,358 comments · 9.3x the author's average
Nicolas Boucher · AI Finance Club · 1.3M followers
View the post ↗ICP-fit prospects who commented on this content (7 of the 40 we verified; each row carries the evidence)
| ICP-fit prospect | Job title | Company | The comment they left | Post they commented on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mayank Srivastava ↗ | CFO / VP Finance, enterprise transformation | Starbucks | "The tech debt concern feels right, but what worries me more is the accountability gap when something breaks and nobody in the room actually understands what the tool is doing" | View ↗ |
| Saul Mateos ↗ | CFO | Gain | "The 'build it ourselves' conversation is missing one cost: ownership. Building the tool may be cheap, but maintaining it, validating the outputs, and fixing it when something breaks during close" | View ↗ |
| Sibaranjan Patnaik ↗ | Director of Finance | TriNet | "The traceability point is the real cost, not the build time. Auditability isn't optional in finance, and that's what vendors have already solved." | View ↗ |
| Shane Branigan ↗ | CFO | Biortica Agrimed | "I've never been a huge fan of ebitda, and especially adjusted ebitda. The purpose of accounting standards is to create a level playing field for comparisons of companies" | View ↗ |
| Carl Rushbridge ↗ | CFO | Data Airflow | "Time savings that walk out the door with a person aren't a productivity gain, they're a dependency." | View ↗ |
| Nidhin Thomas ↗ | Head of Finance and Portfolio Analytics | JLL | "Ownership matters because of what the owner learns by cycle four. By then they know which 3 outputs need a hard sanity-check and which 30 are reliable." | View ↗ |
| Ashwani Baweja ↗ | Global CFO | Export Trading Group | "Simplifying planning workflows often delivers bigger results than adding more reporting layers." | View ↗ |
03 · Your ads and your competitors'
Ramp runs one ad format; the category runs five
Computed on the US-targeted sets only: Ramp's 100 ads are 99% single image with no identifiable Thought Leader Ads, while SAP Concur runs personalized dynamic and document ads at scale, Brex runs heavy video plus co-branded editorial, and BILL runs the only Thought Leader Ad we found in the category. Four ads below tell the story.
Voice: Customer-savings headlines and logo walls (Shopify, Notion, Figma, CBRE), a heavy construction-vertical push (10 of 16 unique creatives), and a Blackstone Grill demo offer. Every ad runs from the company page: no person-fronted ads in the pull.
Ramp
Promoted · Single image · 40 flights
Join 70,000 of the world's most ambitious companies growing 3.2x faster than the average American business.
Cards, expenses, bill payments, and banking* - in the blink of AI.
Ramp
Promoted · Video
5,500+ construction companies run expenses through Ramp.
See why contractors are replacing manual expense workflows with software built for construction.
Six job sites. One dashboard.
Voice: BILL runs the only Thought Leader Ad we found across 382 kept competitor ads: its incoming CTO promoting his own article from his personal profile. The format Ramp's executives are best placed to win is already being tested in the category.
Eric Chan
Chief Technology Officer, BILL
Promoted by BILL
I'm stepping into the role of CTO at BILL. Here's what I'm most excited about!
Voice: Concur is attacking Ramp by name with switch-story ads, and stacks third-party proof Ramp's ads don't carry: an IDC customer study, FT-partnered research and 7,000+ G2 reviewers appear in 22 of its 81 kept ads.
SAP Concur
Promoted · Personalized (dynamic)
Companies switch from Ramp, Navan, and Emburse when promises fall short. Here are 10 real stories and what they found with SAP Concur instead.
10 Reasons Companies Switch to SAP Concur
04 · A high-value segment
An example segment to aim the first campaigns at: high-growth software and fintech
This is the method, not a claim about your pipeline: we clustered the 30 customers showcased on ramp.com, picked the densest cluster (17 of 30 are high-growth software, SaaS and fintech companies), and built a sample list of look-alikes that fit LinkedIn targeting: software industry, US geography, finance-function titles. Employee counts are approximate figures from public filings and directories, checked on this run. With real close-won data the same steps might point somewhere else.
| Company | Industry | Size | HQ | Why it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Klaviyo | Marketing automation SaaS | ~2,370 employees | Boston, MA | Public marketing-tech company with the growth profile of showcased customers like Shopify and Eventbrite, and a large distributed workforce carrying card and SaaS spend |
| Braze | Customer engagement SaaS | ~1,700 to 2,200 employees | New York, NY | NYC public SaaS company growing headcount fast, the expansion pattern that drives expense and AP pain in this cluster |
| Amplitude | Product analytics SaaS | ~780 employees | San Francisco, CA | Serves the same product-led software world as Ramp customers Notion, Linear and Webflow, with a mid-market finance team |
| Calendly | Scheduling software | ~500 to 550 employees | Atlanta, GA (remote-first) | At the size where finance moves off spreadsheets and manual cards, matching the mid-size cohort on Ramp's customers page |
| Zapier | Workflow automation SaaS | ~1,200 employees | San Francisco, CA (fully remote) | Fully remote company where every employee spends on a card and reimbursements are constant |
| Lattice | HR performance SaaS | ~450 to 600 employees | San Francisco, CA | Same stage as showcased customers Vanta and Clay: lean finance team, heavy per-seat SaaS vendor spend |
| Attentive | SMS and email marketing SaaS | 1,000+ employees | New York, NY | Late-stage NYC marketing platform with offices in four cities, the multi-office distributed-spend profile of this cluster |
| Postman | API development platform | 500 to 1,000 employees | San Francisco, CA | Developer-tools company in the same lane as Ramp customers Linear and Webflow, with US finance leadership reachable on LinkedIn |
| ClickUp | Work management SaaS | ~1,000 to 1,500 employees | San Diego, CA | Competes for the same buyers as Ramp customer Notion; a cost-cutting phase is exactly when a savings-positioned spend platform lands |
| Benchling | Life sciences R&D software | ~650 to 800 employees | San Francisco, CA | Vertical SaaS scale-up with lab-adjacent procurement plus normal software spend; the finance titles are identical |
05 · The content plan
Turn the posts that already win into ads aimed at the buyers already engaging
The plan follows directly from the findings above: the niche is alive on LinkedIn, 40 verified finance decision-makers are engaging with it, your executives' own posts outperform (Eric Glyman averages 1,252 reactions and comments per post; Will Petrie's July post on AI spend did 754 reactions against his 244 average), and the Thought Leader Ad format is nearly untouched in your category.
TOF
Thought Leader Ads + document ads
Amplify Eric Glyman's and Will Petrie's posts, rebuilt on the standout templates from the creator research and targeted at finance decision-makers like the 40 we verified engaging. Add document ads built from close checklists and policy templates: SAP Concur runs the format at 20% of its US set and Ramp runs none.
MOF
Customer proof with a face
Turn the named-executive quotes on ramp.com/customers (Eventbrite's CEO, Poshmark's VP of Finance, Zola's VP Controller) into person-fronted testimonial ads, and run the Concur-switcher customer video already on your LinkedIn page as paid media.
BOF
Demo offers you already run, retargeted
Keep the Blackstone Grill demo ads, but point them at people who engaged with the TOF and MOF layers instead of cold audiences only.
The lead Thought Leader Ad concept (the full set of three is on the concepts page)
01
Real-time finance vs the 30-day-old P&L
Template extracted from the referenceHook is a conditional that mirrors itself ('If your P&L is 30 days old, your decisions are 30 days late') -> names the disease in two words ('static finance') -> plays the delay out step by step (books close, reports trickle out weeks later, leadership meets on outdated numbers) -> brands the failure mode with one vivid image ('rear-view-mirror driving') -> the why-it-matters beat: the world does not wait for month-end (liquidity gaps, opportunities, risks) -> flips to what real-time operators can do (anticipate cash crunches, reallocate in hours, run what-ifs live) -> closes on the gap between executives who operate this way and those managing optics.
Reference (live) · outlier 1.9x the author's average
Oana Labes (Financiario, 422k followers) · 992 reactions, 148 comments, 1.9x her average post. The most on-niche standout in the pool: real-time finance is exactly Ramp's story.
Ramp post (same template)
If your spend data is 30 days old, every decision it feeds is 30 days late.
Most companies still find out what they spent when the books close.
Cards get swiped all month and invoices arrive all month, but finance sees the full picture weeks later, so leadership meets on numbers that describe last month. That is rear-view-mirror driving.
And the quarter does not wait for month-end close. A vendor contract will auto-renew mid-cycle, or an AI bill will spike without warning; our own token spend once hit $1.5M in a single week in May. By the time a monthly close surfaces something like that, the money is already gone.
That gap is why we built Ramp to keep the ledger live: a transaction is coded the moment the card is swiped, and a bill is visible the day it arrives, with the policy check happening before the money moves.
A finance team that sees spend in real time can stop a bad renewal before it bills and reallocate budget in hours instead of weeks. It also changes the leadership meeting: the numbers on the table are from this morning, not from whenever the books last closed.
The executives who operate this way are separating from the ones still managing last month's story.
Visual to be created
Three opportunities the research points to
Thought Leader Ads are nearly untouched in your category
Exactly 1 of 382 kept competitor ads is a Thought Leader Ad (BILL's incoming CTO), and none of Ramp's 100 US ads are identifiable as one. Meanwhile the topic is alive: 16 creators pull outlier engagement on spend, close and procurement content, and we hand-verified 40 ICP-fit finance decision-makers commenting on it. Eric Glyman already averages 1,252 reactions and comments per post; that content is an unused ad asset.
Your customer proof has names and faces, but your ads don't
ramp.com/customers quotes Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz, Poshmark VP of Finance Kaustubh Khandelwal and Zola VP Controller Joe Horn, yet every ad in your pull runs from the company page with logo walls and savings headlines. SAP Concur is meanwhile running switch-story ads that name Ramp. A person-fronted testimonial answers that with a face a CFO recognizes.
Document ads are a format gap at your top of funnel
Your US set is 99% single image. SAP Concur runs 20% document ads and BILL gates surveys and guides behind downloads, a strong signal that gated finance content earns engagement in this category. Ramp already has the material to fill the format: close checklists, policy templates, and the spend benchmarks your team publishes.
Frontal · linkedin content plan & ads strategy for Ramp · July 2026