Personal Branding on LinkedIn: how to impress the audience

Personal branding is a very important aspect to take care of to be successful in professional life because it is not enough just to be good professionals or entrepreneurs, but it is also necessary to know how to communicate it to your target audience and to your professional network. To build your professional image there are a series of Personal Branding techniques that help highlight your strengths and relevant experiences to stand out from your competitors, gaining authority, credibility, and reputation.

Below, we will talk about how to do personal branding on LinkedIn, with a focus on the importance of having a well-kept profile that can attract the desired audience.

How to start on LinkedIn

Make your self-assessment and then build your self-marketing plan. To establish your winning personal branding strategies, you should include every action that is part of what you want to communicate, and to do that you need to decide what will be the content to be published and choose the right channels through which to publish it.

During this process, it is important to focus on your:

• Strengths and opportunities
• Weaknesses and threats
• Main objectives
• Target audiences
• Content marketing plan

But how can you create an effective and optimized profile on LinkedIn?

First, make sure that it is keyword-focused to attract the right audience.

The summary of your profile should include short, concise, and targeted statements to summarize your skills and experiences. A good profile should also be well-structured and have a complete section on work experiences and education.

Find out here some general guidelines on how to create a standout profile based on the 3-success factor of:

• impact,
• presentation, and
• competencies.

The first success factor of personal branding on LinkedIn: impact

To make your personal branding successful, you should concentrate on 2 aspects that have a good impact on your profile:

• Action oriented
• Specifics

Action Oriented

Your profile bullets and experiences need to showcase the work you did, using strong action verbs that inform your audience of the actions you performed. To assess the impact of your work, it must be clear what role you played through specific actions in the context of a particular project/experience.

The most common action verbs that should be used in the profile are: developed, lead, managed, analysed, created, collaborated, conducted, and performed.

Here you are few examples:

• Example 1 – Led organizational restructuring by creating new operational processes and functional frameworks to ensure accountability and clarity of outcomes across organization; reduced operating costs by $30MM annually.
• Example 2 – Developed business case on pricing strategies and revenue models for alternative product pricing; implemented new pricing policy across 3 business units resulting in 30% revenue growth.

Specifics

When you create your profile, you need to focus on “specifics”, that means that you must quantify your outcomes, the impact of your activities during your work experience or education phase. For example, you can have a positive impact on the company revenues, project costs, size of your team, or number of departments you supported. This is a way of supporting with evidence the benefits of your work and allowing your audience to assess the credibility of your professional profile.

The most quantified educational and additional experiences include awards, scholarships, and club membership. While the most common quantified outcomes and scope of work include clients, accounts, value deals, value revenue generated and team size.

Here you are few examples:

• Examples 1 – Led team of 2 analysts to present monthly revenue and variance analysis of $1MM contract to client relationship managers; recommended 3-point plan to address cost drivers over next 3 years.
• Example 2 – Managed relationship with over 30 clients; coordinated among client teams in US and over 40 offshore technical staff accounting for projects worth $1 MM.

The second success factor of personal branding on LinkedIn: presentation

The length of a personal profile is a critical formatting factor that has an impact on the overall result of your personal branding and thus is consequential enough to give due consideration. Your guiding principle when preparing your profile should be relevance. A crisp, focused profile demonstrates an ability to synthesize, prioritize, and convey the most important information about you.

Spelling errors in your profile are a major setback and can derail your chances of being well considered by employers, whoho are less concerned about your spelling and more concerned with the fact that you overlooked an error, which speaks volumes about your commitment. To dispel any doubt about your attention to detail, it is important that you proofread your profile and make it free of any spelling errors.

The third success factor of personal branding on LinkedIn: competencies

For a good result in terms of personal branding, highlight your competencies, and ensure the ones listed below are not missing:

• Analytical
• Communication
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Initiative

Analytical skills

They refer to the ability of analysing a problem, finding out the causes and identifying solutions.

An example to show your analytical skills could be the following one:

Led team of 5 to conduct competitive analysis for market expansion; provided strategic recommendations for market diversification opportunity leading to reduction in exposure to market risk.

Communication skills

They are the ability to articulate your messages effectively to achieve your set goals.

An example to show your communication skills could be the following one:

Managed 30+ client relationships, interfacing with 3 teams to ensure on-time delivery of project assignment, leading to 95% retention rate and 30% increase in client accounts.

Leadership skills

They refer to the ability to take on a role of Leading teams, projects, or any scope of work and bring it to success.

 An example to show your leadership skills could be the following one:

Led project management efforts to provide strategic direction and operational supervision; created tactical plans to direct completion of 2 large-scale restructuring projects at client site across 8 sub-divisions.

Teamwork skills

They refer to the ability of a professional to work with others in a cohesive manner to achieve a common goal.

An example to show your teamwork skills could be the following one:

Managed team of 4 Analysts to present monthly revenue and variance analysis to client relationship management; recommended 5-point plan to address cost drivers over next 3 years.

Initiative skills

They refer to the ability of finding innovative solutions through the attitude of lateral thinking and approach to problems with creativity.

An example to show your initiative skills could be the following one:

Formulated product innovation strategies and analysed opportunities to enter 2 emerging markets across 5 years; led primary research to come up with customizations for new markets.

Conclusions

Developing your own personal branding through an optimized and effective profile on LinkedIn brings you to success. A great job of personal branding on LinkedIn helps to be actively searched and achieve your goals. If you want to know more watch the video below. Good luck!

If you are interested in personal branding and LinkedIn, you can also read: Personal Branding for startup founders and LinkedIn Social Selling Index score: how to improve it

Please also read the following articles on our blog: ATS to optimize your CV: review of Vmock tool, Optimize your Resume: Vmock for candidates and Resume Builders: over 30 tools and the best 10 for us.