10 Innovative Steps to Boost Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

By Ray O'Donnell

If you’re searching for new professional avenues (finding a job, looking for gigs, or building your business), you need to be out there to get noticed. 

And in the age of social media, there’s no better medium than LinkedIn to build your professional image. It’s far more serious than Instagram or Twitter. And it’s still more convenient than alternatives like YouTube, which require you to stick to one type of content (i.e., videos). 

On that note, let’s dig into this piece to find the ten steps you need to follow to create and boost your personal brand on LinkedIn. 

What is personal branding, and why is it important?

Just as a thought experiment, riddle yourself with this: You’re tasked with hiring a business development consultant and down to two choices. 

• Consultant A has a thriving personal brand, thousands of followers, and multiple people are engaging with them on LinkedIn;
• Meanwhile, Consultant B has a barely made LinkedIn profile. 

Who will you hire if the other factors (e.g., experience or pricing) remain the same? 

A personal brand isn’t just a shiny profile picture and some comments on your posts. It becomes a part of your overall identity and can help establish trust, communicate unique strengths, and influence hiring decisions.

It can also help you:

• Establish yourself as a thought leader
• Stand apart from the competition 
• Build genuine connections
• Access new opportunities
• Create your own dialogue

Understanding Your Target Audience

Before we begin building a professional image on LinkedIn, let’s first find out who our audience is and what they want to see from us. 

Step 1: Identify your target audience for maximum impact

Even if you operate in the same niche as the rest of your competitors, your audiences will look different. 

For example, each creator will have a unique target demographic in terms of age, gender, lifestyle(s), interests, and pain points. 

At this stage, try to define what your target audience looks like. Consider asking yourself:

• Where are they situated, and what do they look like?
• What would make them follow me?  
• Who are their influencers? 

Step 2: Create buyer personas to better tailor your messaging and content

The next step is to niche down even further with your target audience. That’s to say, instead of thinking of them in clusters (i.e., an audience), think of them as persons (i.e., personas or ICPs). 

Image via Venngage

One neat trick to employ here is to think of them as movie characters. For example, if your target audience is lawyers — are they lawyers like Elle Woods, Harvey Specter, or Annalise Keating? 

Each character makes you think of a different (buyer) persona, which helps you identify what different personas from your target audience might look like. 

Step 3: Conduct market research to understand your audience’s needs and preferences

Once you’ve nailed down your audience and their personas, it’s time to discover their needs, pain points, and preferences. 

Since 60% of users access LinkedIn via mobile devices, mobile app analytics has become instrumental to audience research. 

You can also consider using social listening tools to determine how your audience consumes content. Or you can hang out at ‌places where they spend their time, like:

• Specific Slack channels
• Reddit communities
• Facebook groups

If you already have an established LinkedIn profile, we recommend running A/B tests to optimize these platforms and convert visitors into paying clients. 

Building Your Personal Brand

Once you’ve done your share of audience research, the next step is to build your personal brand, which requires some strategy. Templates can be helpful as a starting point for a framework. 

Building a personal brand is not unlike building a business, so creating a personal brand strategy could use something like a business plan template. 

It contains key sections, including:

• Company overview → Personal brand identity
• Industry analysis → Unique skills and selling proposition
• Customer analysis → Identify your target audience
• Marketing plan → Creating a content strategy
• Operations plan → Engaging with customers

While not an identical process, it’s important to understand that treating your personal brand like a business is more likely to result in success. 

Step 4: Define/outline your personal brand identity

Now is the stage where you want to outline your goal for building your personal brand. Think about the things you want to be known for. 

For example, your goals could include gaining an audience for your product/service, becoming a thought leader, or monetizing your platform. In the same vein, you could want to be known for your relatability, humor, expertise, storytelling, etc. 

At this stage, also consider the strengths and weaknesses that set you apart from others in the industry. 

For example, while multiple writers have great personal brands on LinkedIn, Kat Boogard is specifically known for her relatable posts.

Step 5: Identify your unique strengths and skills

Alright, we know we just discussed outlining the things that’d set you apart from the competitors, but we’re taking this section to dive again into the specifics. 

For example, while relatability, storytelling, or humor are great ways to set yourself apart, try to go one step further and analyze your unique offerings. This could mean your skills, expertise, experience, etc. — ‌these are all great ways to stand apart from a crowd. 

Experts recommend only highlighting ‌skills that closely align with the image and authority you’re trying to build. For example, you might be an expert juggler, but it might not align with the personal brand of a business guru you’re trying to build. 

Step 6: Develop a strong value proposition

Image via TechTarget

If you’re done with Step #5 (a.k.a. identifying unique strengths and skills), strategize how you can use these unique skills/strengths to build an offer for your audience. 

What would they (your audience) get in return for engaging with your posts? 

For example, engaging with your posts can provide actionable ways to solve X, Y, and Z pain points.

Step 7: Craft a compelling personal brand story

Now that you’ve identified the pain points and created a value proposition, it’s time to begin posting and creating a compelling personal brand story. 

You can consider using personal anecdotes or key achievements and tying those in to create actionable posts for your audience, which can help curb those pain points. 

For example, if you’re a salesperson, you can post summaries or key insights from top-rated sales books and show your audience how to use these strategies in their workday. 

Just a small FYI: Always use easy conversational language that makes it seem like they’re engaging with humans. 

Creating a Content Strategy for LinkedIn Personal Branding

Finally, this is where the fun comes in, and you can get your creative juices flowing. It’s time to optimize your profile and participate in community discussions.

Step 8: Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Image via LinkedIn

Optimizing your LinkedIn profile can help you increase your visibility or make you more “findable.” It also increases your chances of getting that job interview by a whopping 71%. The platform itself provides you with a few tasks you can undertake to improve your LinkedIn profile visibility. 

For example, you should: 

• Show your expertise through the job titles, experience, skills, and education
• Gather testimonials from people you’ve worked with
• Use relevant hashtags and industry-specific terms
• Write your value proposition in your headline
• Add a profile photo, bio, and summary
• Use the Open to Work banner

Some experts also recommend changing your profile's URL to include relevant keywords or your name for better searchability.

Step 9: Engage with your community

You don’t want your LinkedIn profile to look like a classic case of “published and done.” That’s why engaging with your community is a must-use strategy for building your reputation online.

Try replying to their comments, running polls, liking, and sharing posts from other creators. 

Prioritize engaging in the LinkedIn groups where your audience (or people from your niche) presently reside and actively replying to DMs to help people with their queries and doubts. 

Step 10: Build the right tech stack

Last but not least, if you’re strategic about your LinkedIn efforts, you really need to invest in the right tech stack. This can help you fast-track your results while putting in minimal effort. 

• Leverage AI text-to-speech generators to turn your thoughts into compelling voiceovers for videos. 
• Social media listening tools can help you track social media mentions and online trends. 
• Use visual content creation tools like Canva to create custom visuals for your posts.

Or, hire a full-service social media agency like Social Hire to take the reins and get results for you. 

Put Your Personal Branding Strategy Into Action

While we’ve outlined the steps required to create and build your personal brand on LinkedIn, we want to follow up with one thing: Always keep improving and building your personal brand on LinkedIn, never become irrelevant, and always stay on top of industry trends. 

A great way to do this is to invest in your education and build skills unique to your niche. 

If you’d like a helping hand through the brand-building process, book a discovery call with us today! 

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