Optimising your LinkedIn profile to bring in more leads

Make your LinkedIn profile as eye-catching as possible by changing these two fundamental aspects of LinkedIn marketing.

Quick caveat: these tactics work well for people who are well niched. It does not work well for generalists. So, if you’re focused on a very specific vertical or a very specific service offering, you should see results.

Get your tagline sorted

The first step of your optimisation is simply your tagline. When you log into LinkedIn there’s a little blurb there, a little sentence basically right under your picture and your name. That is basically the most important part of your entire LinkedIn profile. The reason this is so important is because that’s where LinkedIn puts your description all over LinkedIn. So, if you leave a comment on someone’s article, you share something in the news feed or you appear in somebody’s messaging window, this is what they see. It shows up in the who’s viewed your profile section, it shows up anywhere people are scrolling through a search cue.

From a short browse on LinkedIn while I’m writing this, I can see that a lot of people aren’t utilising their taglines. Most people just have their job position and company name in that space. That doesn’t tell anybody anything about what they can provide.

Essentially, your tagline is the single most important thing of your profile because that’s what most people are going to see. If that tagline doesn’t hook then they’re never going to click into your profile.

Spending a lot of time thinking through what’s going to be a great tagline will pay dividends. Be very specific, very niche, and think about exactly who is being targeted.

If you don’t have the time or just can’t think of anything right now, or you just want a quick and dirty 80/20, the formula that I recommend is, “I help X do or accomplish Y.” Where X is your target market and Y is basically the benefit you bring them.

There are other ways you can do positioning but that simple framework is one you can fall back to, especially if you’ve got a vertically focused niche or a narrow target that you’re going after.

If you are struggling, look at my LinkedIn profile and notice how my tagline differs to the majority of people on the site.

Change your approach

The second part of your profile that we recommend fixing, and this is not really a specific fix but it’s more or less an entire mindset shift to change with how you approach your LinkedIn profile.

With your LinkedIn profile, you don’t want to make it a curriculum vitae, you don’t want to make it all about you. That’s a mistake that a lot of people make. When you open most profiles you, more often than not, see, “I worked for 20 years in B2B sales experience and graduated with a degree in whatever from wherever.” Instead of talking all about yourself you should make it more like a sales page. Make it more where you’re connecting with the customer and talking about the problem they have and then, how you solve that.

You can of course put a little bit in there about you, your background and your history to build a level of credibility. But again, you want it to look more like a sales page that is going to drive someone to be interested and convert and ultimately become a customer of your business.

So, it’s a little bit of a mindset shift but basically, for the way you write your copy and your profile, it becomes less about you and it becomes more about how you help your target customers.

Those are the two fundamental shifts in writing your profile. There’s obviously a ton of other stuff you can do. If you have more recommendations, if you have more endorsements, if you have links and pictures and all this other stuff, it’s going to help your profile grow. If you can sort out your tagline and adjust the tone of your profile, that’s going to be the 80/20 of fixing your profile. Everything else is basically just some icing on the cake.

This is the first of a three part LinkedIn marketing blog series. The second is about increasing traffic to your newly optimised Linkedin profile. Read it here. 

At Servon, we are experts at digital marketing and focus primarily on lead generation. Schedule a call with us if you want to discuss how your business can generate more leads.