How Business Owners Can Use Their LinkedIn Profile To Start More Conversations with Prospective Customers

Over the past 10+ years, LinkedIn has grown into an unparalleled platform for connecting with business professionals. With a growth rate of more than 500% since 2010, and a new user signing up every second, the platform has built itself into a community of more than 500MM+ professionals.

This community represents an extremely valuable business opportunity for business owners and their sales teams. LinkedIn users are more educated and more affluent than any other major social network, with average incomes more than double that of Facebook or Twitter. More importantly, more than 40% of users are high level decision-makers for their companies. And their professional information - the company they work for, the company’s size, their job title, and much more, is often publicly available for you to sort through. In short, if your company sells directly to other businesses, you should be using LinkedIn to find the exact people who would make ideal customers for you.

That said, only a small percentage of LinkedIn users have been able to successfully use their network to grow their business. And a primary cause of this is that business owners aren’t crafting their profiles correctly to capitalize on the traffic (i.e., people) viewing their LinkedIn profile. The fact is, most people use their LinkedIn profile as an online version of their resume. They input their job title and responsibilities, their past experience, their education, their skills, and so forth. In short, it’s all about them. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that approach if you’re working for a large corporation with one ear to the ground for new job opportunities. But most business owners I know are not in the job market, and they don’t intend to be. If that’s you, then I’m here to tell you that your LinkedIn profile should be much less focused on you and your company, and much more focused on your prospective customers.

Think about the best marketing materials out there today. They all do several things extremely well for your company. First, they get you noticed by capturing the attention of your prospective customer. Second, they use that captured attention to showcase exactly what your company does and who you help. And finally, they work to build trust and credibility on your behalf in the mind of your prospects so they feel comfortable taking the next step on the purchase path, whether that be visiting your website, filling out a contact form, or picking up the phone to call your business. In the remainder of this article, I will give you detailed, actionable, step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile so that it achieves these exact same outcomes.

How To Optimize Your Profile

There are four crucial tactics to optimize your profile so that you attract conversations with potential customers:

1. Use Professional, Attention-Capturing Images
2. Rethink Your Profile Headline
3. Refocus Your Profile Summary
4. Utilize Social Proof and Other Credibility Indicators

Additionally, we’ll review a fifth tactic for further building your credibility and generating impressions and visits to your LinkedIn profile.

1. Use Professional Attention-Capturing Images

Whether they realize it or not, people looking at your profile use it to make an immediate judgement about you. That starts first and foremost with your profile images. There are two primary images worth optimizing on every LinkedIn profile:

• Your Profile Picture
• Your Background Image

Let’s start with the obvious one.

Profile Picture:

You want to leave your viewer with two impressions upon seeing your profile picture. First, that you’re professional. And second, that you’re approachable. Achieving this is pretty straight forward. To appear professional, simply use an individual headshot of yourself against a neutral background. That means no group photos which leave the viewer guessing who you are, and no vacation or other “social life” photos. While there’s a time and a place to show off this side of your personality, more often than not it will end up hurting your professional credibility rather than helping it. To ensure you look approachable, there’s really only one key: remember to smile. By appearing warm and friendly, you’ll be inviting your prospect to want to connect and interact with you and your company.

Also, it’s worthing noting that while paid professional headshots are great, they are far from mandatory. A simple headshot taken by a friend or family member with a smartphone will more than suffice.

Background Image:

Many folks know to use a professional LinkedIn profile picture; less commonly known is the ability to customize your LinkedIn background image. The background image is the rectangle space at the top of a profile page, just behind the profile picture. By default LinkedIn sets it to a standardized blue design, but you’re missing out on a huge opportunity if you leave it that way. Instead, think about inserting a custom image to capture your profile viewers’ attention and get them to give your profile a closer look.

Almost any image that's not the default blue background will help you stand-out from the majority of users who don't bother to customize their backgrounds. Popular choices for a customized background include company logos, images related to the person's industry (e.g., a construction company owner might use a blueprint), or aspirational, eye-popping images (e.g., think mountains, sunsets or city-scapes). Even a favorite quote set against a non-blue background works great.

If you’re unsure how to create your own background image, several options exist. For something basic, Google is a great place to start. A quick search for “free LinkedIn backgrounds” should return a ton of free (and some paid) images you can use. For something more custom, a graphic designer from a freelancer site like Fiverr should be able to easily create something for you for somewhere in the $10-30 range. And if you’re a DIY-er, the free version of the design software Canva is a great option, and even includes a pre-sized template for the LinkedIn background image.

2. Rethink Your Profile Headline

This is perhaps the most often missed opportunity of business owners when creating their profiles. Not only will your headline appear on your profile, but it will also appear (along with your profile image) next to every post, comment, and message you create on LinkedIn. It will also appear in numerous search results, both those on the LinkedIn platform and those on search engines like Google, assuming your LinkedIn profile is one of the top results when your name is searched (which, for most people, it is).

Most people use the headline space of their profile to simply list their job title and/or company name. That’s just another example of using your LinkedIn profile as a resume. Instead, you should use your headline to answer two specific questions for anyone who sees it:

• Who do you help?
• How do you help?

Here’s a few great examples:

“I help small business owners approaching retirement find ideal buyers for their businesses.”

“We help Fortune 500 companies protect their most private and sensitive data."

“We help aeronautics companies find and hire high performing engineers."

Using your headline to describe what your business does and who they help is much more helpful and attention grabbing to a prospective customer than simply listing yourself as an “Owner” or “CEO, Company X”.

3. Refocus Your Profile Summary

To optimize your Summary section, you should apply the same principles used in your headline, but in a more long-form format. Again, that means ditching the “resume” speak and focusing on talking to your ideal customers.

Many LinkedIn profiles I see start out with something like,

“Jonathon is the CEO of Company X, with 30 years experience in the software industry.”

Again, this reads like a resume. While it certainly creates some credibility for Jonathon, it doesn’t exactly give a potential customer any idea what Company X does or who they help. Others profiles I see forego any personal mention of the owner/CEO and instead use the summary to give some basic information on the company itself. Using this approach, Jonathon’s profile summary might read,

“Company X is a software platform that enables small and medium sized eCommerce businesses to more easily monitor page load times”.

This is definitely an improvement. As a profile viewer, I at least understand whether or not I’m a potential customer of Company X and have a rough idea of what they do. But a further improved version would continue to build on this approach by speaking directly to Company X’s “ideal customer”. It would empathize with the pain points of those who need their services, let them know exactly how Company X can help them and what’s unique about their services, and give some examples of the types of customers they’re best able to help. It would also include a clear “call to action” for the prospect, as well as clear and visible contact information for the company. From our example above, Jonathon could instead write something like,

“Research has proven that 30% of online shoppers will exit a website if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load. And it’s estimated for an average eCommerce site, slow page load speeds alone will cost them 18% in annual revenue.

At Company X, we provide an affordable solution for small and medium sized online businesses to monitor the page load speed for every webpage on their site. We then identify the individual components affecting load speed, and use this info to create automated, prioritized recommendations to improve the load time of each page.

Are you an eCommerce business who is:

> Frustrated with your page load times, but has no idea how to address them?

> Frustrated with low conversion rates, but doesn’t know how to improve them?

> Can’t afford to pay the $7k / month fees that other page load monitoring systems charge?

Visit us at www.CompanyX.com/solutions to learn more about how we can analyze your site for free to determine what your page load speeds might be costing you. Or call us directly at 444-555-6789."

Admittedly, the example above is wordy. And it speaks to a very specific type of person who is in this market for this type of service. If I’m not a prospective customer of Company X, I’m probably not going to bother to read through the entire summary. But if I am a potential customer of Company X, then they’ve probably got my attention. The summary starts by telling me about a problem (one I might not even have known I had!) which could be costing me nearly 1/5th of my revenue. It then explains their unique solution which will help me solve this problem, and gives some criteria of what type of companies benefit most from their service. Finally, it gives me an exact, low-risk next step to take to get more information. As a prospective buyer, this type of summary is going to be much more effective at generating interest and action than if it had focused on Jonathon’s 30 years of experience and proven leadership in his industry.

One last note: Notice how the winning example above was written. It’s specifically broken down into bite-size chunks of 3-5 lines, and also uses bullets where appropriate. This maximizes the reader’s ability to quickly skim the summary, despite the overall length.

4. Utilize Social Proof and Other Credibility Indicators

Including social proof and other credibility indicators in your LinkedIn profile isn’t specific to optimizing just one section of your profile. Rather, you should think about how you might sprinkle these into every aspect of it to build and reinforce your expertise in your space.

For example, you might try including social proof or credibility indicators atop your custom background image (note: this will take some graphic design work; see above for instructions on this). Think about industry awards your company has won, popular media outlets on which you've been featured, or even your company's star rating on Google, if applicable. Is there a relatively clean, easy way you could insert these logos or ratings into your background photo? Or what about a short soundbite from one of your most satisfied customers? That said, less is more here. Choose the best one and stick with that, lest your background image start to resemble the side of a NASCAR vehicle.

Your profile summary is another great area to incorporate social proof. Things like customer testimonials or examples of successful results you’ve achieved for past or current customers go a long way towards building your credibility in the minds of your prospective customers.

A final suggestion is to add media and content to your profile. Publishing articles on LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your expertise, but can we require a significant investment of time and energy. A lower effort option is to repurpose existing sales and marketing materials which might be appropriate to add to your LinkedIn profile. Work samples, case studies and educational videos are all great options, depending on the industry and assuming you have the proper permissions to share them.

5. Bonus Tactic: Engage With the LinkedIn Community on Topics Relevant to Your Customers

While this tactic doesn’t technically involve making edits and optimizations to your profile, your engagements nonetheless will impact both your credibility and your visibility on LinkedIn. This is because all your LinkedIn interactions - including posts, shares, and comments - are visible on your profile. Therefore, it’s valuable to share out and comment on articles that are relevant to your industry and your clients. Not only does this demonstrate that you’re active in the industry and informed on its happenings, but sharing out content has the added potential benefit of driving additional viewers to your profile.

That said, be conscious that not every post or interaction needs to be about your specific product or service and the problems it solves. Sometimes just being active in the community and showing clients and prospects that you’re aware of the challenges they face in their business, even ones you can’t solve, is enough. This is also a great opportunity to showcase your personality and interests by sharing out (a few) things which resonate with you - think inspirational stories you came across or interesting community events you support.

Conclusion

Bottom line, if you’re a business owner, then there’s a good chance you're missing out on the potential to get new customers and grow your sales because you’re treating your LinkedIn profile as an online resume. Instead, you need to rethink your profile so that it focuses on your customers rather than yourself. Following even some the steps in this article will help you to better capture the attention of those who view your LinkedIn profile, help them understand exactly what you do and who you help, and help build trust and credibility in their minds. In turn, this will maximize your ability to move these profile viewers along the path towards purchasing your product or service.

Once you're profile is properly optimized, you can then turn your attention towards increasing the number of people viewing your profile...but that's a subject for another post.