I recently had an insightful chat with a friend who works in sales about how he was using LinkedIn to drive sales. He uses it to keep up with the competition, to know what they are doing, who they’re talking to, and what topics they are talking about. Through LinkedIn, he gets valuable information to know where the industry is moving, and he also engages in conversations with prospects and customers which allows him to build and strengthen their relationships that could impact closing more deals.
LinkedIn is indeed a powerful digital selling and research tool, but there’s more to it than that. One crucial key success factor to making or breaking it on LinkedIn is building your personal brand.
What is a personal brand? A brand is about the way you’re perceived by others, which could sometimes be based on evidence, but sometimes it may be based on assumptions. So, how do you develop your personal brand? And how can you use LinkedIn as a tool to help you achieve your goals? This article intends to respond to these questions and is the first one in a series of four articles.
I have created the following 4-Ws formula to help you set the basis for building your personal brand on LinkedIn:
1. Define who are you
If I ask you to think about yourself as a brand, some of you may feel a bit shy and afraid to be in the spotlight, but we weren’t born to be invisible. We all have something to bring to the table.
- Start by writing down on paper who you are as a person, list at least 5 of your key soft skills and 5 of your key technical skills, list your areas of expertise, and define your professional values and mission.
- In marketing, we often talk about the Unique Selling Point (USP), which is about what makes a brand unique. Think about what makes you stand out, what makes you different, your unique value proposition, and write it down.
- Define your why: What’s your purpose, that thing that makes you jump out of bed every morning?
That information would give you the basis to develop your brand. Once you know how you want to build your personal brand, it is time to optimize your LinkedIn profile, a topic that I’m going to discuss in the next post.
2. What are your objectives?
Think about what you want to achieve in the short, medium, and long term. By knowing what you want to achieve, you can develop a series of SMART (Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Timely) goals that then can be split into smaller ones.
Some examples of SMART goals to get started:
Goal 1 – Start conversations – Send a direct message to 3-5 relevant people in your network in the next 14 days. How to connect and what to write in your direct message of course depends on your personal brand and your goal, my key recommendation is find the common grounds and personalize the message as much as possible. For example:
“Hi X, we met at XY event a couple of months back and I was sitting here reflecting on Y which made me think about the conversation we had on the topic Z. Just wanted to check in and see how things were going. And how are developments in the area of XY?”
Goal 2 – Expand your network – Get 10 new connections in the upcoming month, and not all should be people you already know or have met. Send customized messages to explain why you want to connect when needed.
You can find new connections and add them to your LinkedIn network by using the search feature: e.g., people working at [specific company] on [specific job/function], located in [countries]. You can both sent connection requests to people you know and people you haven’t met yet. Be careful about NOT spamming people, and always send a note when sending connection requests, and find the common grounds as a way to engage.
Goal 3 – Produce LinkedIn Content – Share my expertise in the form of a blog, an article, and/or sharing my thoughts as a post on relevant insights, at least once per month.
LinkedIn offers a great platform for you to share your expertise by writing an article or sharing your thoughts as a post. This will allow you to build credibility and add value to your connections by sharing your expertise.
Creating content can feel like a lot of pressure, it is a blank canvas that needs to be filled. Here are some tips on how to make it easier!
SHARE EXISTING CONTENT – The internet is full of relevant resources from experts in different fields. Share an insightful article from an expert with your network and add your thoughts on the matter in the post.
CREATE AND SHARE YOUR OWN CONTENT: For those working closely with customers, who better than you to know about your customer’s pain points? For you knowing everything about a certain product and its market development, who better to write a piece on upcoming trends, for instance? One way to practice your writing is to produce content and share it on LinkedIn as an article. To produce content frequently on a certain topic, a content strategy can be of help. This is a topic I will explore more in another article in this series.
3. Who is your audience?
To be able to communicate effectively you must know your audience. I’m not only talking about the demographics, I’m also talking about the psychographics, what motivates them, and what are their aspirations. Also, what are their challenges and pain points, with that information in mind you can start thinking about where are the links between the challenges they face and your expertise. This information would be fundamental to developing a content strategy that resonates with them.
4. Why should your audience engage with you?
Think about what knowledge you have that could add value to your audience or make their life easier. Something that may look basic to you as an expert may be very valuable for your target audience, so don’t underestimate your knowledge.
Digital selling: summary & key takeaways:
- LinkedIn can be a fantastic platform for lead generation and research.
- Developing your personal brand can help you show to the world who you are as a person and professional, so it can also help you progress in your career.
- To develop your personal brand, start by defining who are you as a person and as a professional, what’s your mission and values, and your USP.
- Develop your professional SMART goals and leverage LinkedIn to achieve them.
- Define your audience from a demographic, psychographic, and challenges/pain points point of view.
To help you in the process of developing your brand and to start leveraging the power of LinkedIn, I have created a questionnaire that you can download here. It includes 15 key questions that would help you through this process.
In the next blog, I will share with you the steps to optimize your LinkedIn profile. So, watch this space!