From CV to lead magnet: 6 words to make your LinkedIn profile attract your ideal customers
Is your LinkedIn profile a lead-generation machine, working hard to bring you leads or prospective partnerships while you crack on with the rest of your day? Sounds unrealistic, I know. But LinkedIn is a crowded marketplace, and what you say about yourself on the platform should be designed to stand out from that crowd and attract those ideal customers to your door. You never know who's watching!
So, with that in mind...
If you do one thing this week, make it…. updating your LinkedIn headline
Why?
Your headline is basically a one line elevator pitch designed to attract your ideal customers. It's the only piece of information a prospective client will see of you from your LinkedIn activity other than your name, without clicking through to your page (and we'll overhaul that in another newsletter!).
If you look at the below - this is all anyone sees of me when I comment on anything on LinkedIn, so if those few words aren't speaking to my ideal customer, I'm in trouble.
If you're looking to attract your ideal customers (and who isn't), it's crucial to stop seeing your LinkedIn bio as a CV, and start looking at it as the headline that will either attract those ideal customers straight to you, or allow them to walk on by.
How?
Give yourself some tough love and be realistic about what your ideal customers aren't interested in:
how long you've been doing what you're doing
your job title, especially if it's vague or involves any kind of jargon, like being an SVP
whether you consider yourself to be any of the following things: enthusiastic, passionate, hard working, motivated to learn.
What are they interested in? How you can help them. How you can make their life easier.
To paraphrase Busted - it's all about THEM.
Tell them very clearly who you help, how you do that and the business problem you solve for your clients (or the problem you solve for your beneficiaries, if you're a non profit).
And make sure to focus on the absolute end goal. (It's all very well for me to tell you how to increase engagement on social media, for instance, but ultimately you want that to convert into money, am I right?)
Using this formula can help get you thinking: I help [who] [do what] [how].
For instance: [Agency name] helps law firms drive growth by creating branding that stands out in the market.
What now?
Now you have a headline to attract those customers, go one step further and make sure you're super searchable. Put yourself in your ideal customer's shoes and think about what they would search for on LinkedIn if they wanted to find someone with your skill set. For me, that would probably be 'social media strategy' or 'LinkedIn ads' or 'digital marketing', for example.
Add these keywords to the end of your headline. They don't need to fit within a phrase; including them as a list is fine and you can break them up with | lines | if you need to. If you need inspiration, check out what keywords others within your industry are using.
Feel free to test different variants of both headlines and keywords and see what difference it makes to the connections you grow on LinkedIn - your profile should evolve over time and reflect your own business growth.