6 Powerful LinkedIn Profile Tips to Boost Your Personal Branding

Introducing Yourself With Impact: Crafting an Optimal LinkedIn Profile

If you work in sales, have a small business, or lead a small or medium business, you need a strong LinkedIn profile. It's a crucial part of your brand. It helps you reach future clients, employees, partners, and investors. 

But far too often, profile summaries (the "about section) contain nothing more than an online resume or bland, corporate boilerplate copy (if there's any content at all). 

 To stand out, you need to create an engaging presence that positions you as an approachable industry expert.

So here are 10 tips to help you optimize your LinkedIn profile. These will help you attract your ideal prospects (or employees/partners/investors) and help them understand why they should connect and engage with you. 

1. Craft an Informative, Keyword-Rich Headline

Your LinkedIn headline is arguably the most important part of your LinkedIn profile. It sits front and center under your name, acting as a tagline to introduce yourself. 

• Your headline is the first thing people see when you send a connection request
• It’s the first section they’ll read on your profile
• It’s searchable, and helps you get found when people search for keywords
• It shows up every time you post, comment or engage on LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn headline attracts your specific target audience while also repelling those you don't want to attract. So focus it on the value your target audience can gain from you. 

Include important keywords and phrases that prospects may search for. You can reference your role, top skills, abilities, and how you help customers. This helps people quickly grasp what you offer and know whether it's relevant for them. For more on optimizing your headline, check out this article. 

2. Write an Engaging, Benefit-Focused Summary

Most LinkedIn profile summaries fall flat by simply reiterating bullet points from a resume. Instead, this should read like a letter to your ideal prospect.

It's prime real estate to share your backstory and link it to how you help your clients solve thorny problems. You can tell the story of your career journey (BRIEFLY) or explain your professional philosophy. Share why you do what you do. Discuss meaningful client engagements. Explain how you help your clients.

Use an approachable narrative style. In other words, this should not sound like a press release or a political platform. Write it in first person using a familiar tone and simple language and sentence structure. 

This section is also crucial for incorporating relevant keywords. Organically weave in terminology and concepts your audience cares about. Share the specific value and benefits you provide.

How to Structure Your LinkedIn Summary

Below are 5 suggestions for how you might structure your LinkedIn About section. Note - we don't recommend using all of these. Pick an approach that works for your and your audience. 

Incorporate the Voice of Your Customer to Make Your Content Resonate

If you incorporate your customer's voice and language in your copy, it will help future customers quickly grasp your value.

If you adopt the language, tone, and communication style your audience uses, they will find your profile more approachable.

To do this, analyze sales conversations, support tickets, and customer feedback. Look for phrases and terminology that come up, especially among your newest prospects. Work these keywords into your profile. It will make your profile easier to find when prospects are searching, AND it will feel more relevant to them.  

Mirroring the natural, conversational language your prospects use builds instant rapport and credibility. It demonstrates you truly understand them.

Incorporate Testimonials and Quotes From Customers

Directly quoting your happy customers is powerful social proof. Their own voice holds more weight than you simply stating benefits (or product features).

Ask satisfied clients if you can use a testimonial or quotation in your profile. Ensure it aligns with your target customer's mindset. This adds authenticity and demonstrates that you deliver on promises.

Address Common Pain Points and Questions

What challenges keep your prospects up at night? What questions do they need answered before purchasing?

Some of the best profile content directly addresses these pain points and questions. This shows you intimately understand customer needs. It positions your services as the ideal solution.

Share a “Day-in-the-Life” Persona Narrative

Bring your content to life by incorporating a day-in-the-life of your target customer. Show how they're using your product to accomplish specific goals. Describe how they used to do the same task and contrast how they do it now.  The more commonplace the task, the more likely it will resonate with future prospects.

This insider perspective helps prospects relate to you. It also enables you to seamlessly weave in pain points and product benefits that make their lives easier.

Highlight Goals and Pain Points of Target Customers

Expanding on the last tip, directly state the biggest goals your prospects are trying to achieve. What business outcomes do they want?

Then, explain how your offerings specifically help accomplish those goals. This content primes your audience to think of you as the ideal partner for success.

4. Feature Relevant Hashtags and Keywords

Conduct keyword research to identify the keywords and hashtags your audience uses to search for the kinds of solutions you offer. Work these into your profile content. This helps in 2 ways. 

• You're findable in LinkedIn. LinkedIn's search engine is frequently the first place buyers will look when searching for services or specific capabilities. By optimizing your profile for the search terms they're likely to use, you increase the chances that they'll find your profile. 
• You're findable on Google. Google is able to search your profile information. LinkedIn has very high domain authority, meaning that it's often one of the first results Google returns for specific keywords. So if you incorporate the keywords customers use, they're likely to find your profile in their search results.

5. Showcase Thought Leadership and Media Mentions

Have you been published or featured as a source of expertise? The Publications section allows you to highlight external credibility builders.

Adding guest articles, media mentions, conference speaking engagements, and similar thought leadership assets boosts trust.

6. Share Long-Form Perspectives Through LinkedIn Posts

Once your profile itself is optimized, actively publish new posts. Sharing your insights through long-form content positions you as an industry leader.

Start by sharing articles and perspectives relevant to your network. Then, graduate to authoring columns that broadcast your expertise to a wider audience.

Your Key LinkedIn Profile Tips for Success

In summary, optimizing your LinkedIn presence with audience-focused content is crucial for relationship building and driving qualified traffic.

The profile tips we covered, from optimizing headlines to incorporating customer voice, lay the foundation for success. They help craft a strategic profile tailored to convert prospects.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• Incorporate organic keywords and phrases your audience uses to boost relevance.
• Reflect your customers' natural language, tone, and communication style.
• Directly address target customer pain points with your solutions.
• Use authentic testimonials and quotes from happy clients.
• Share thought leadership content like articles and published works.
• Actively engage with your network by posting long-form perspectives.

Implementing these tips will transform your profile into a magnet for high-quality connections. Your content will seamlessly resonate with your ideal audience. This drives engagement, establishes trust, and positions you as an approachable expert.

The result? You build relationships with more qualified prospects. This leads to increased sales conversations and pipeline.

So, leverage customer voice, optimize with keywords, and focus on customer value. These foundational LinkedIn profile tips will elevate your personal branding and ability to monetize your network.

Want more on this topic? Here's a blog post with more info on optimizing your profile. 

About the Author: Candyce Edelen is founder of PropelGrowth, where she teaches B2B entrepreneurs and sales professionals to build authentic, human-to-human relationships on LinkedIn. Her strategies have helped clients shift from spammy automation to genuine outreach, resulting in higher-quality leads and increased sales. Candyce is passionate about helping professionals build trust and create a reliable, predictable sales pipeline. She's also a firm believer that you can't automate a relationship.