Look no further if you’re looking for ways to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. 💥
Here are 11 ways:
First, we know that you need to sell yourself in both recruitment and sales. If you do not have a LinkedIn profile that looks like the part, you won’t be able to do this well.
Begin building your personal brand on LinkedIn with an enticing profile for yourself.
Good LinkedIn profiles include:
Will Allred, Co-Founder at Lavender, has a great example of everything a LinkedIn profile should be. The profile photo and banner image are creative, and his headline makes it easy to understand his offer. 👇
When starting on your personal brand, it would help if people could find you on LinkedIn! You need to make sure that your profile is search-friendly.
Here is what you should look at for LinkedIn SEO.
Sellers and recruiters have got to be multi-channel now. This is why engaging with your audience is important in the sales cadence.
A good place to start is to comment on relevant posts by your target personas. Anywhere you can add value. Thoughtful comments on relevant threads could lead to a new connection request.
There are many other ways to make human connections. For instance, congratulate your prospects on their recent achievements.
Morgan J Ingram, a Top Sales Voice on LinkedIn, says that having a formula for personal branding helps.
Morgan says that you should set 3-5 social media goals that you can hit every week; these could be:
In outbound, you’ve got to be value-based at every step of the selling process. Prospects will get to know who you are if you’re sharing something they can resonate with.
Even if they aren’t ready to buy right now, if people know you are someone they can go to with a particular problem, it’ll help you in the long run.
For example, David Bentham, VP of Global Sales Development at Cognism, has a strong LinkedIn personal brand. David shares useful updates for the company’s sales target persona. He shared a recent post about the progression from sales development rep to account executive (AE). 👇
When you get into a cadence for posting, the next step is experimenting with different types of content. Videos and visuals like infographics grab users’ attention while scrolling the feed.
With more content types, you’ll also be able to offer an even more personalized experience based on what your potential clients like to engage with. You can analyze content performance using tools like SHEILD (more on that later on).
There are plenty of features on LinkedIn that help you build a personal brand. One notable feature is LinkedIn Groups, where users join to interact around specific subjects. These can be a gold mine for finding suitable prospects.
In the LinkedIn Groups, you’ll easily be able to share your expertize.
Lots of events happen live on LinkedIn every week. As part of building a personal brand, you should jump at the opportunity to speak at industry events!
Speaking will connect you with more people in your target audience and help build credibility if you are on the agenda. People will likely contact you as you develop your LinkedIn personal brand.
👉 Kaspr makes it easy to get contact details from profiles, groups, events, posts and lists on LinkedIn. See more info on our LinkedIn Chrome Extension.
Content creation on LinkedIn is now incentivized with the launch of “creator mode”.
With longer-form content types and writing blog posts, it’s well worth taking advantage of LinkedIn’s article feature. LinkedIn Pulse will help to showcase your knowledge.
The articles also rank on Google, so, as well as publishing the content to a massive audience on LinkedIn, you’ll capture users of organic search.
💡 Tip: LinkedIn’s algorithm also pushes creators to add their thoughts to collaborative articles. These pop up in the feed, so it’s worth adding your two cents here, too.
To build a successful personal brand on LinkedIn, you must be generous with your knowledge. Your target audience might send you a direct message for more information. Or if you’re doing outbound sales, maybe it’s you messaging first.
Always be sure to keep an eye on your inbox. You should check and respond to your messages before you complete your daily prospecting routine.
If you’re in recruitment or sales, you’ll likely use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Recruiter Lite to help support your prospecting. Adding new connections is also a key part of building your LinkedIn personal brand.
Although you’ll get more connections as you post more, adding the people you want in your sphere of influence makes sense.
Social proof can sometimes be hard to come by. But LinkedIn’s endorsements feature makes it easy to give feedback. Ask for endorsements from people you know and have worked with.
The people you ask to endorse you could be colleagues, customers, or other professionals you’ve encountered in the industry.
Some key blockers prevent sellers and recruiters from building their personal brand. LinkedIn can be an intimidating place, and so people struggle with:
Sound familiar? No worries, we’ll go through how to overcome these next.
You can block yourself from even getting started with imposter syndrome. Here are some tips for overcoming it when beginning your personal branding journey.
Before creating content, a good place to start is to look at your profile.
Here, you can optimize for an increase in profile views and make it an interesting place to be.
Make sure you:
Alice de Courcy, CMO and Jonathan Ilett, VP of Global Sales talk through how they put in place personal branding at Cognism in the clip below. 🎬
Here’s some more advice to build a following from the ground up. There are three key things you can do to get your personal branding journey off on the right foot.
They are:
You also need to know who you’d like to target with your content.
If your audience is more niche, you might need to set your sights beyond LinkedIn. Look at other communities like Slack channels, subreddits, and Quora threads. Do some digging to find out where your people hang out. If you’re still not sure, follow people you can ask.
When you start forming your own LinkedIn posts, it can help to follow a formula. There’s one called Align, Present, Proof (APP). If you use APP, you can ensure that your content is relevant to your audience’s pain points and provide them with actionable insights they can take away.
Looking at what others in outbound sales and recruitment are doing on LinkedIn helps. With this inspiration, you can develop your unique style.
Let’s go through some good profiles now. 👇
Elric Legloire is the Global SDR Manager at Agorapulse and the SDR Game podcast host. He’s building the team at Agorapulse and has lots of valuable content to share. Personal branding has been important for Elric to build up his podcast and have guest SDRs on from Deel, Snowflake and many more.
Morgan J Ingram is another great person to follow for sales advice. Morgan was a sales trainer and now creates content around tactical outbound advice for cold calling, writing emails and much more!
Hishem Azzouz, the host of The Recruitment Rollercoaster Podcast, shares a lot of value-led content. It’s all relevant to what’s happening in the market right now. Since Hishem also mentors recruiters, he uses the insights to create posts that encourage engagement.
(Screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Hishem Azzouz)
Sophie Allen recruits SDRs for leading SaaS sales businesses. One way Sophie engages with her audience is by asking for opinions on sales subjects like cold outreach.
(Screenshot of a LinkedIn poll by Sophie Allen)
Sean Anderson is Co-Founder & CEO of Hoxo Media, a personal branding agency for recruiters. Sean’s advice also focuses on his target audience; he often uses real-life experiences as the basis for his posts.
(Screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Sean Anderson)
Before you get started, it makes sense to set yourself goals. These will work towards engagement on posts, new connections and other KPIs.
For many, building a personal brand is to be a “thought leader” in the industry. This helps the target audience see you as a “seller” or “recruiter” and as someone with valuable insights.
At a personal level, it’s also amazing to build out your community that will follow you when you move from one role to the next.
On LinkedIn, engagement and reach are key indicators of how it’s going. 👋
So, it makes sense to set your goals around these.
You could look at:
You must also set less tangible goals, like interacting with your target audience’s content. It’s not just about posting but adding value to existing updates. Set time aside each day for this activity.
Platforms like SHIELD provide more in-depth metrics for personal LinkedIn profiles. This means you can see all the numbers in one place without doing a lot of manual work (hey, only accountants like spreadsheets 😵).
(Screenshot of analytics in SHIELD)
Now you’ve got your goals in place, it’s time to start creating content. We get it; it’s daunting, so here’s what you should do.
You could focus on:
It makes sense to have a mix of content to see what works. You could try the initial post ideas below:
See how they perform as plain text and also trial adding images. There are plenty of free image editors you can use.
Jonathan Tye, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager at Cognism, says that once you get going, a few “human and non-work related posts” go a long way. If personal branding is overdone, candidates may find it a bit alienating.
It’s important to get into a routine, too. Don’t set unrealistic expectations, like posting every day when you’re just starting. 😱
Pick one or two days (morning or afternoon) and make this when you post. This will help with consistency, which is important when growing your personal brand.
Valentina Stepanoska, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition at Cognism, has recently begun building her personal brand. She says:
“I’ve started posting two times per week on LinkedIn. I’m really seeing a difference in the number of people that are noticing me. For example, I’m getting more messages with people referring candidates and comments on my posts with people giving their opinions.”
It’s easy to be guilty of building up your personal brand and then letting it slip, especially with so many other priorities.
But the only way to snowball your success is by staying consistent. 💯
Structures and routines help.
Once you’ve got going with your first few posts, you can consider a content plan. This will mean you can factor in which topics you’ll post about on certain days of the week. This rough outline also means you can weave in relevant stuff as you write the update.
You might like to try a different approach as you get further in. Bulk writing and scheduling will not only keep you consistent but also create a narrative as you’re writing a flurry of posts at the same time.
There’s also reactive posting. This is where your post is about something you’ve recently read, watched, or listened to. Since these are topical, they often encourage engagement.
💡 Tip: You might also like to learn about personal selling.
Not everyone needs to be an influencer to build a personal brand on LinkedIn.
It’s all about finding and scaling what works for you. 🤩
Let’s recap the takeaways: