LinkedIn: What You MUST Do Before Creating or Revamping Your Profile

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” – Beverly Sills

First: Why is your profile so important?

In over a decade since I have been on LinkedIn, the platform has grown from 187 million to over 830 million members. What was once a place to add your online resume has now morphed into the largest professional networking platform. And to many, it’s still a mystery how to use it. The belief is that it’s still a place to add your online resume and find a job. While this is true in part, most businesses still treat it this way and not as a sales and marketing tool.

99% of all your activities on LinkedIn are tied to your personal profile. Your profile photo, your name, and your headline are typically what someone will see first.

This is your first impression and, if well done, will compel a member to visit your profile.

Below are some activities and how it's tied to your profile.

Requesting Connections

There are two ways to request a connection. Using the canned message, "I'd like to add you to my professional network," or customizing the invitation with a personal note. I suggest you do the latter, ALWAYS! Either way, many members will take the opportunity to view your profile before accepting your request. If your strategy was to be selective with whom you are targeting, you have one chance to make a great impression.

Posts (short form newsfeed)

These are the posts you see when you log in to your home page. When you post a video, a short story, a business success, or share your content or someone else’s, LinkedIn will share with a small portion of your network.

The first thing they will see is your photo, your name, and your headline (truncated). If your network engages with your content (or post), their network gets notified. It’s six degrees of separation and can make your content go viral.

I had a post that went viral in February of 2016. This post generated 5,500 profile views and over 1200 connection requests. 

Google

Ever Google yourself? We find that your profile is indexed on page one for most people when their name is searched. Usually, your LinkedIn profile will show up before your website and other social media. Google will show a bit of information from your profile.

Articles

Additionally, if your publisher posts (articles or the new newsletters) are done well, they too will be indexed by Google on page one for its keywords. When someone finds your article, they will see your information below the headline as the author.

People researching you

LinkedIn members are often looking for prospects and others to help them solve problems or fulfill ultimate desires in their businesses. When a search is done in the main LinkedIn or in Sales Navigator, members will see your name, photo, and headline.

Company pages

Currently, company pages are still limited in features; and as of late 2021, company pages' only additional functionality is being able to comment on newsfeed posts as your company page (more on this in a later article), create and share a newsletter like this one, create ads and the promoted posts designed for lead generation, and when using Sales Navigator can see all of their company page followers and their information.

So, hopefully, you can see how important it is to have a well-done profile. Your activities and engagement on LinkedIn depend on it.

You MUST Position Yourself: Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in writing your profiles and articles is to Identify Your Audience. Too often, I see profiles and articles that are written for their industry and not with their ideal client or customer in mind.

You must know your prospect intimately. To consistently attract your ideal customers, you need in-depth knowledge of who they are, their deepest fears, pain points, and what keeps them up at night. Without this knowledge, you’ll waste hours trying to figure this out. I call this Hope Marketing (I swiped that term from a master marketer Jeff Walker.) Hope marketing is when you throw something at the wall, and you hope that it sticks.

Take a moment to think through exactly who you want to target. Who is your ideal customer or client? If you answered “everybody”, “any business owner,” or “every U.S. based sales executive”, that’s NOT the right answer.

Get the picture?! If all you can come up with is the above, take a closer look at your client's right now. Think about the types of people you like working with and who are your best clients from a financial perspective.

Now it’s time to build a real prospect profile.

There are two types of data to consider: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics are statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it. Or, in other words, intelligent information about your target customer.

Some questions you might answer:

• What are your target industries?
• What geographical area are you targeting?
• Are your prospects most likely to be hanging out in certain LinkedIn Groups?
• What company size is the right fit for you? A one-man shop? Only companies with more than 50 employees?
• What types of position titles does your buyer usually hold? Come up with the top 10 to 15 positions that you target.
• What level of annual revenue do your best clients have?
• Are they married, divorced, or single? Kids?
• Men or Women?
• Age range?

HINT: You MUST subscribe to LinkedIn's Sales Navigator tool. It has over 30 filters to help you define your target demographics.

Some of the filters are above, and some others include:

• Groups
• Function
• Years in position
• Company
• Company headcount
• Years of experience
• Posted in the last 30 days (great filter to find active users that will more likely respond to your connection invitations or messages)

HINT: Think like your prospect. Your search is only as good as what someone adds to their profile. For example, if you’re prospect is a CEO, he might abbreviate his title or spell it out (chief executive officer). If your prospect is a business owner, they might have the title of owner, co-owner, president, CEO, or self-employed.

Psychographics is the classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research. Or, in other words, how people think and their current state of mind.

Some questions you might answer are:

• What are the biggest challenges your ideal client faces as it relates to [x]?
• What are the top three things that keep them up at night?
• What types of products or services [in this area] have they already tried? What did they like or dislike?
• What factors do they consider when purchasing a product or service?
• What are their top 3 goals as it relates to [x]?
• What are their profound opinions as it relates to [x]?
• Where do they stand politically or religiously?
• How do they feel about [current trends, news, etc.]
• What publications do they read and subscribe to? Online and offline.
• What’s their business language? (Hint: not your industry-speak or internal jargon)

Now, you want to take this information and build a quick cheat sheet that you can easily refer to.

There is a cool tool that I use from HubSpot. I love HubSpot. They offer great resources, like this one, for free. It's MakeMyPersona.com. You can either create it online by answering about twenty questions, or you can download it as a PowerPoint or a Keynote file. This is great if you have more than one type of buyer or prospect, you can create multiple personas.

Interviewing Your Past Clients

Having problems answering the above questions or creating a buyer persona? If you can’t understand your current customers, you won’t understand how to attract your next customers. So you won’t get leads and sales.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, a shortcut is to get on the phone. Call your past clients and interview them. Ask them the above probing questions.

TIP: Look at your top accounts from the past 3-5 years. This will give you historically which accounts have performed the best.

Keyword Research

This is the backbone of how your profile will be found organically in search. This is not to be confused with keyword research for creating articles and content. However, they do overlap some.

For those of you new to this concept, let’s define what keyword research is.

Keyword research is a practice professionals use to find and research search terms that people might enter into search engines for topics, people who provide that service, or information to help them solve a problem. Once a niche keyword is found, it can be expanded to find similar or variations of those keywords.

Google is the most common search engine used today. However, what most people don’t realize is that although it’s not as robust as Google, LinkedIn is a fantastic place to search for your target audience.

Does your LinkedIn profile show up in search results?

Think like your prospects. What search terms might they type to find a product or service you provide? You can get great intel from LinkedIn by just typing keywords into the search bar. Start by brainstorming a list of up to 50 search terms. Terms or keywords your audience would type in to find your products or services. Keywords can be broadly or narrowly defined.

You will use these key terms in your profile. Adding these keywords to your profile will improve your chances of you showing up in someone’s organic search results.

Here’s a simplified example of a keyword phrase brainstorming for marketing to dentists (this is not a complete example): 

• Defined Industries (non-franchise): pediatric dentist, pediatric orthodontist, cosmetic dentistry, endodontist, periodontist
• Title: owner, CEO, chief executive officer, partner, co-owner, founder, president, Dentist (and any of the above types of dentists)
• Pain Points: team productivity, client retention, repeat clients, referrals, performance management, customer service improvement, employee headaches, staff development, etc.
• Brainstorming Keywords: staff development, dental staff development, team building, patient attraction, business development, dental development, patient retention, dental patient retention, dental marketing, dental practice marketing.

The above is not a full brainstorming session, but hopefully, you get the idea.

TIP: Research other professionals in your space. Check their websites, LinkedIn profiles and company pages, social media, and so on. This will help you stay on top of your competitors and help you find additional keywords, pain points, and viral topics.

Recap

In this article, we discussed that your profile can be discovered by a prospect through a relevant keyword search, posts, articles, company pages, and direct outreach. The next step is to optimize your profile in a way that shares your subject matter expertise, tells a compelling story filled with benefits/outcomes for the client prospect, and encourages a prospect to engage with you, your content, or your messages.

These are "must-do" foundation activities prior to building out a client-centric profile or any LinkedIn marketing campaign. If you wish to explore how we can help you get clear on your ideal client and coach you through this and the profile creation process, or do it for you, book your complimentary business breakthrough strategy session. BookTracy

Tracy Enos is Kansas City's top LinkedIn Expert Advisor, Score.org volunteer, and single Mom of 4. In July of 2015, she sustained 3rd-degree burns, a 6-day stint in the burn unit, and 5 surgeries in 9 months. She wrote her first article the following October. It was featured in LinkedIn Pulse and generated five figures in just two hours of work. With over 21 years of skilled experience, Tracy serves a wide variety of clients, including entrepreneurs, small to mid-sized companies, start-up ventures, and Internet media organizations. A seasoned business and internet media coach, Tracy drives core business processes for the clients she serves, including LinkedIn Training, Social Media, Book & Podcast Marketing, and Public and Media Relations.

In the last 10 years, Tracy has consulted 1000's business owners, SaaS companies, coaches, authors, service professionals, sales teams, and entrepreneurs on how to use LinkedIn to generate leads, become the authority in their industry and stay top of mind with their clients.

She is known globally for her LinkedIn knowledge and training with clients in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Israel, Dubai, and the U.K. Her consulting expertise has netted her clients speaking engagements, media attention, guest articles in major publications and trade magazines, and millions of dollars in new business.

Book Tracy, to Speak: Need a dynamic speaker or want to learn how to generate consistent leads with LinkedIn? Call Tracy at (816) 607-1570 or email her [email protected]