How To Develop A Compelling & Targeted LinkedIn Profile

In business today your personal brand is everything. Before someone buys into your company or what you have to offer they first need to buy into you and what you stand for.

If your personal brand doesn’t connect with them, there’s a good chance you’ve lost them forever. The B2B or B2C era is well and truly over, today we’re all living in the H2H economy.

Human to human connection is what it’s all about. So much so that your website is no longer the most important asset online, it’s actually your LinkedIn profile and here’s why…

When someone searches for you online, your website is not the first result that pops up anymore, it’s actually your LinkedIn profile URL. If their first impression of you and your company is one of an outdated profile that is half complete, you’re less likely to get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Too many profiles we come across look like outdated resumes or worse yet, it’s written like a sales letter, which just turns people off. Let’s face it, no one likes to be sold to but we all like to buy.

Also potential prospects don’t care about what you do and the things you’ve achieved if you can’t properly demonstrate how that is ultimately going to help them solve their challenges and problems. When rewriting your profile put yourself in their shoes and think about what’s in it for them rather than what’s in it for you.

This will help you convert more profile views into conversations and business opportunities. To help make this happen, in this article we’re going to dive deep into a process we call the ‘Outside Inside Approach’.

A proven and structured approach to designing a profile that not only showcases your expertise but also connects with your target market on a much deeper level. Here are some of the things you need to think about and weave into your copy when rewriting the various sections of your profile.

Top 3 Challenges Your Target Market Face

First things first you need to get clear on the top three challenges your clients face and how your product or service helps them overcome those challenges. For example if you’re a business coach the biggest challenges of your clients could be that they are spending too much time working on their business, struggling to scale their company and want their freedom back. Get your pen and paper and start listing those challenges out.

Top 3 Objections You Get When Selling Your Product or Service

From here list out the top three objections you get when selling your product or service and the strategies you’ve come up to overcome them. Maybe time and money are common objections you face? If that’s the case then you need to flush out some possible solutions to those objections and then weave it into the copy of your profile.

A few ways you can do that is by recording a video interview and placing that as media within the summary section of your profile or getting a recommendation from your client addressing a specific objection. Go ahead now and list your top three objections.

What Makes You Unique In The Marketplace?

Now that you know the challenges you solve and the objections you face, let’s go ahead and look at the qualities that make you, your company or your products/services unique in the market. Perhaps you’ve built a number of successful businesses and now you’ve set up an advisory firm to help other businesses start, grow and successfully exit theirs.

Here your USP is the fact that you have experience doing it yourself, whereby most coaches don’t. It doesn’t really matter what makes you unique as long as that USP is relevant and targeted to your audience. Take a moment now and think about what makes you unique, then write it down on a piece of paper.

Industry Generalisations

Next you need to look into some of the generalisations, beliefs, convictions or views your target market have in and around the industry you operate in. For example if we asked you what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a car salesman you might say: untrustworthy or too salesy.

Now obviously this isn’t the case for everyone in that industry. Believe it or not there are good quality people out there who sell cars.

But nevertheless it is a generalisation that’s been formed based on the number of bad experiences customers have had over time. It’s important that you know what these global beliefs or generalisations are within your industry so you can best position yourself and stand out from the crowd.

One of the biggest challenges in our industry is the fact that there are a lot of people who teach how to use LinkedIn but very few have actually used it to grow their own business. Knowing this we weave it into a lot of our content as well as the copy within our founders profile through the recommendations, work experience and summary sections. Take a second now and think about your industry generalisations, then write them down.

Your Mission

Once you’ve done that the last step is to weave in your mission. Why is this important? Well over the past few months we’ve seen a big shift in personal branding.

Nowadays people are no longer interested in your story, they want to see an underlying mission or impact you want to make in your industry. This is because as humans we all like to buy from people we like or are inspired by. And nothing is more inspirational than a personal brand that has their eyes set on transforming their industry.

Have a think of your mission and write down the impact you ultimately want to make in your industry. Once you’ve done that go to your LinkedIn profile and start weaving in the answers from this article into the various sections of your profile from top to bottom. This includes your:

– Headline
– Summary
– Work Experiences
– Volunteer Experiences
– Skills And Endorsements
– Recommendations
– Interests

And any other sections you have listed on your profile. Here’s an example of our founders profile you can use for reference. Now if you want a bit of a guide in terms of what to say and how to update each section, here’s an article we wrote a few months back.

Once you’ve worked through and got all your content ready, we recommend giving this to a quality copywriter for them to write it up for you. A great place to find copywriter is Upwork where you can hire online contractors from all over the world to do great work for you. Developing a high converting profile that really resonates with your target market often requires professional help, even if you’re a seasoned marketer.