LinkedIn for Financial Professionals: How to Build Your Brand, Network with Potential Clients, and Grow Your Business

LinkedIn is often thought of as a job search platform, but it's also a powerful tool for insurance agents and retirement planners (even financial advisors) to build their brands, network with potential clients, and generate leads.

Here are 9 actionable steps, you can take to start moving your business forward on LinkedIn today:

1. Complete your profile and make sure it is up-to-date. Your LinkedIn profile is your digital business card, so make sure it is complete and up-to-date. Include all of your relevant experience, education, and credentials. Be sure to also upload a professional headshot and write a compelling summary that highlights your skills and expertise. Your headline should be "speaking" to your audience, so don't use it as a place to brag about your accolades. Make sure your cover photo has something to do with your target audience, as well. For example, a retirement planning specialist may have a cover photo of a vacation spot with their logo and contact information on it, as opposed to a picture of their dogs.

2. Join relevant LinkedIn groups and participate in discussions. Joining LinkedIn groups is a great way to connect with other insurance agents and industry professionals, sure, but if you're on LinkedIn to prospect, you want to be connecting with your audience, not your peers. Find groups with your ideal audience and join them. Participate in discussions to share your insights and expertise, and add real value to the conversation - don't post or comment for the sake of posting or commenting.

3. Share articles and insights on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Share articles, blog posts, pictures, videos and other insights into what you do, who you are, why you do what you do, etc on LinkedIn to demonstrate your personality, your knowledge, and your expertise in the insurance industry. This will help you to position yourself as a thought leader and attract new clients because they agree or like the way you think, speak, and act online.

4. Connect with potential clients on LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn's search features to find potential clients who are in need of insurance services. Send personalized connection requests and follow up with messages to introduce yourself and your services.

5. Use LinkedIn advertising to reach your target audience. LinkedIn advertising is a great way to reach a large audience of potential clients who are interested in insurance services. And while you can target your ads by demographics, interests, and even job titles, we would recommend starting with organic strategies (similar to Trained Advisor) to ensure you have your audience, offer, and messaging all in alignment with statistically relevant data. Otherwise, you will likely spend more than you thought testing different campaigns, creatives, copy, etc.

6. Create custom lists of potential clients on LinkedIn for email marketing campaigns. You can use LinkedIn's Sales Navigator tool to create custom lists of your ideal clients. These lists can then be exported to an email marketing platform for targeted email marketing campaigns. Trained Advisor uses these lists to send high-converting messages and offers to business owners and other high-net-worth professionals directly on the LinkedIn platform with the goal of starting a conversation and nurturing that relationship into a client.

7. Take LinkedIn Learning courses to upgrade your skills and stay up-to-date. LinkedIn Learning offers a variety of courses on insurance and other topics that can help you to upgrade your skills and stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends. Trained Advisor offers a coaching program specifically designed to help insurance agents, retirement planning specialists, and financial advisors to be successful with their outbound prospecting efforts online.

8. Attend LinkedIn Events to network with other professionals in your field. LinkedIn Events offer a great opportunity to network with other insurance agents and industry professionals in person to learn how others are succeeding. Attend events in your area to connect with new people and learn about new opportunities. This will help with getting your name "out there."

9. Write and publish articles on LinkedIn. Writing and publishing articles on LinkedIn is a great way to share your expertise and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. It's also a good way to attract new clients because depending on how an article is written, it can rank pretty high on Google Search Results to a question your business can answer. When writing articles for LinkedIn, be sure to choose topics that are relevant to your target audience and that will provide them with valuable information. You should also include a call to action at the end of your articles, such as inviting readers to connect with you on LinkedIn or to learn more about your services.

By following these tips, insurance agents, retirement planners, and financial advisors can use LinkedIn to move their businesses forward and achieve their goals a bit quicker than those not leveraging LinkedIn.

To learn more on How to Get New Clients Using LinkedIn and Trained Advisor, Click Here!