How To Build Your Personal Brand and Get More Leads

In this webinar, Angelina Marie Hilton shared her tips on how to establish your personal brand, build momentum, measure your progress, and continually improve your positioning so you get noticed in your industry.

In the webinar, Angelina and Adam referenced a TED Talk called “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” by Leadership Expert Simon Sinek. Click here to watch the video. The LinkedIn tips that Angelina covered in the webinar are summarized below:

Five ways to instantly improve your LinkedIn profile

1. Add Photos

• Add a cover photo. Don’t just upload an image you like—make sure that image communicates something about you and/or your business.

• Add a profile picture: a high resolution, clear, headshot. Profiles with images get nearly 70% more inquiries than those without. Do not include a picture of yourself and your significant other, your dog, or one where you’ve cropped out your friend. Keep it professional.

2. Add a Headline

• This is your 120 character hook to people finding you in a LinkedIn search, and should be about what you do as opposed to what you are.

3. Write a killer summary

• This is personal. This is about you. Your audience is the person visiting your profile so make sure you tell a great story, from YOUR perspective. That means writing in the first person. This is a great opportunity to capture the attention of your audience and entice them to keep scrolling down your profile to find out more about you.

4. Add visual content & projects to your experience & summary sections

• This will invite people to stay on your page longer and also make your profile stand out from the Plain Jane profiles. This is also your chance to showcase your portfolio, what is that you can really do!?

5. Add skills

• Your profile is your resume. Let your visitors know what skills you have. What skills have you acquired over time that people may find valuable enough to reach out to you for help? This also sets you up to receive endorsements of those skills, which provides credibility.

Ten tips to help grow your LinkedIn network,
establish your credibility, and generate leads

Sales tip #1: Create an effective executive profile

1. Tell your professional story to attract opportunities
2. Build and nurture your networks to unlock future opportunities
3. Stay informed on news relevant to your professional world, and gain the skills to stay ahead in your career

How to customize your LinkedIn experience:

• Upload a professional photo: You are 11 times more likely to have your LinkedIn profile viewed if you have a picture.
• Write a compelling headline: Add your job title, current company and a tagline about how you help customers.
• Add a summary: Your summary in essence is the story of you. Share the vision you have for your role or company.
• Add rich media like videos and presentations: You’ll maximize your exposure on LinkedIn and better showcase your story.

Sales tip #2: Efficiently connect with the people that matter

• LinkedIn isn’t intended to replace face-to-face interactions, instead, it optimizes your ability to know more about people you’ve met or are about to meet. Also, inviting people to connect is a great way to follow up on an in-person meeting.

Sales tip #3: Leverage your mutual connections

• People are five times more likely to engage with you if the outreach is through a mutual connection. See who within your network is connected to your 2nd or 3rd degree connections and request an introduction.

Sales tip #4: Find your top tier customers

• Sales is about people, but nurturing relationships takes time. LinkedIn allows you to find your customers by searching by name, company, or position so you can easily connect and establish better relationships.

Sales tip #5: Follow your customers’ activity in real-time

• If you are connected with your customers, their public activity will appear in your newsfeed. Keep tabs on your contacts’ interests and updates so you can remain top of mind and provide them necessary information.

Sales tip #6 Listen to conversations and debate

• Joining and following Group discussions in your industry is an excellent way to gain customer insights about needs, interests and more.

Sales tip #7 Use LinkedIn Pulse to stay on top of industry trends

• LinkedIn curates content in real-time based on your interests and the companies and influencers you follow. Share and comment on these articles to demonstrate your insights.

Sales tip #8 Reach people directly and more credibly with InMail

• Effective sales prospecting requires communicating in a way that gets noticed. Identify something personal about the person that you can reference in the message. Then send a follow up InMail 1-2 weeks after the original - it increases the response rate by 500%.

Sales tip #9 Engage with your customers

• Today there are over 1.5 million unique publishers actively sharing content on LinkedIn. You can become a voice in your industry by sharing relevant blog posts, insights and industry news.

Sales tip #10 Publish content

Leverage LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform to share long-form posts with your network and beyond. When you publish a post on LinkedIn, your content becomes part of your profile and is shared with everyone, even those outside of your network. It’s a great medium to generate leads while positioning yourself as an expert in your field. These posts are also searchable on Google. The post should have a solid headline, attention grabbing, and keep SEO in mind.

A good idea is to state a problem your clients can relate to. Start your content with a question or a problem to draw your readers in. At Semify, when we create onsite content, we start with 300 words, so I would recommend your post be at least 300 words too. Content should be engaging and provide a solution to the problem you stated. At the end, ask your readers a question about the content, encourage them to comment and share. Make sure you always include a call to action, whether it be to invite back for more, request to connect, link to join your email list, etc. Include high resolution images and video. This helps keep visitors on the page longer. Also, include tags that best describe your content to make it easier for others to find your article when searching for topics.

Once posted and published, always return to your post and create a conversation with the people who engaged with your content. These are people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say, and may be potential leads, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to build a relationship with them.

LinkedIn enables sales lead generation success by allowing sales professionals to easily and quickly find the right prospects.

You can use LinkedIn’s advanced search and filtering system to quickly identify influencers and decision makers and save them as leads to create high quality lead lists.

Why you NEED an outstanding LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet. According to their third quarter 2015 results, unique visiting members grew 11% to an average of 100 million per month, and member page views grew 33%. This has yielded 20% year over year growth in page views per unique visiting member, continuing a pattern of accelerated growth throughout 2015. This means that their is a significant opportunity to connect with other professionals around the world, and that opportunity is growing.

LinkedIn’s value proposition is to “connect to opportunity.” This translates into three things for LinkedIn members:

• Connect to your professional world
• Stay informed through professional news and knowledge
• Get hired and build your career.

LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals to allow them to be more productive and successful.

If you have a LinkedIn profile, but are not updating it or engaging on the platform consistently, you could be missing out on growing your professional network, establishing yourself as a leader in your industry, the opportunity to be hired, or be seen by someone who is interested in hiring someone with your experience and skill sets. The first step to engaging and growing your network, and making yourself visible, is to make sure you have an outstanding LinkedIn profile.