How To Build Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn

The Personal Branding Revolution

These days so much of our lives have migrated online that it’s easy to get lost in all the noise.

As marketers, we need to understand how we can cut through all that to get our message heard.

I’m a big believer in organic growth and the idea that people buy from other people that they know, like, and trust.

This is where personal branding comes into play in a big way. If people in your industry can grow to associate you with high value and specific marketing message, all tied to an image of you, then you’ll be in position to scale.

You’ll be able to convey that know, like, and trust level over a larger range of social connections.

I’ve used these tactics myself and it’s been a great strategy for my own agency.

All the various social media platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, but LinkedIn is often low hanging fruit for entrepreneurs.  

 

A LinkedIn connecting strategy

If you want to be omnipresent and magnetic on social media, the majority of the content you put out needs to be relevant to the audience that you’re putting it to.  
This means you will have to write content. You can’t just post others work – you need to put something of yourself into what you’re putting out there. The second part is to curate your audience so you’re reaching the right people.  
On LinkedIn you may need to weed out some connections. There’ a lot of LinkedIn users who are incredibly untargeted with how they’re building out their professional networks and they will literally try to connect with anyone regardless of industry.

In the earlier days of the platform I was guilty of accepting a lot of these requests, and this weakened my overall audience, so I had to go through my connections and decide who was worth keeping.

This can be time-consuming, but if your audience is muddled by these low-value connections you’ll need to set aside the time to do it.

The tools that’ll take you to the next level

For me, I’m aiming to have an audience of marketers, CEOs, founders and innovation managers.

The next step is using the built-in tools (on the premium version of the site.) I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the Recruiter tool and the general advanced search tool.

Once I was organizing a conference and I needed to do a search for innovation managers.

Using the Sales Navigator I was able to visit these target profiles. What you also can do is to start auto connecting via LinkedIn Helper.

This tool allows you to send multiple connection invites at once, along with a personal note. I’ve done this to give a massive boost to my network very quickly.

Here’s a huge secret to this stuff: Every webpage you have online or on social media – treat it as a landing page. You want people to land on your page and then want to follow you back.  
In order to create this situation you need a lot of endorsements (especially from notable people), a great headshot, a header, as well as a powerful tagline.

The tagline is so important because it follows your name around onto every post you send out.

Once you’re releasing content and it’s getting some post interaction, you should interact with those people and bring them deeper into your network to start build great relationships.

 

Action Steps

1. Go through your LinkedIn network and weed out old contacts that are not relevant.
2. Write your own content and publish it, focus on being vulnerable and honest in your posts.
3. Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Recruit to send invitations to members of your target audience.
4. Add new contacts who interact with your content into your professional network and start interacting with them.

 

Result You Will Achieve

A stronger personal brand on LinkedIn that will boost your profile within your industry and get you in front of new, targeted prospects.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.