5 LinkedIn Profile Tips To Attract Ideal Clients

by Carl Neumann

August 14, 2020

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Why are LinkedIn profile tips so important in 2020?

The reason for this is that organic reach on the platform is extremely exciting at the moment. If you create high quality content that performs well, your content can end up being seen by thousands, or even tens of thousands of people.

And getting that kind of attention can lead to a steady stream of quality inbound leads. But before you rush into posting content on your profile, you should make sure to optimize your LinkedIn profile so you can convert viewers into leads.

This step is essential, and in fact, profile optimization is an integral part of our LinkedIn lead generation services.

Once you start getting traction with your content, this will result in increased attention directed at you and your brand. People will look at your headline and photo at the top of your posts in their newsfeed, and based on what they see, they’ll decide to click through to view your profile or not.

And when someone visits your profile, the content they see there will determine whether or not they decide to reach out to you with an enquiry. So you need to make sure that your entire LinkedIn presence is optimized with the goal of converting viewers into leads for your business.

Below I’ll show you how to optimize the 5 most important parts of your LinkedIn profile. But before you can start optimizing your profile, you need to create a detailed avatar of your ideal clients, because these are the people you’ll want to attract.

Top 5 LinkedIn profile tips 2020

Step 1: Develop a detailed picture of your ideal client

If you intend to use LinkedIn to win clients, the very first thing you need to do is get very clear on who your ideal clients are. This is absolutely essential, as it lays the foundation for everything else you do on the platform. In fact, failure to do this is one of the most common LinkedIn mistakes you should avoid.

There are more than 575 million users on the platform in 2020, but your efforts need to be laser focused on a small group of people who would be a very good fit if they were to become your clients. So be as specific as possible in defining your ideal buyers.

For example, if you’re an executive coach – who do you work with? Do you work with CEOs or senior managers? Also, do you work with startup companies, or established businesses?

Here are some of the most important characteristics of your clients that need to be defined, so you can use LinkedIn boolean search to find them:

Their job title (such as CEO, Surgeon, Manager, etc.)
Their industry (such as Healthcare, Food & Beverage, etc.)
Their location (country, state, city, ZIP code)
The size of their business (small, medium, large)
The age of their business (startups vs. established businesses)

Once you’re clear on these characteristics, you can then add further details to each one, to make them even more specific.

For example, let’s say you want to focus on top executives at startup companies. But, even more specifically, you might be interested in startups that have successfully mastered their initial hurdles, and are ready to scale their business to the next level.

You might want to focus on this specific category because you specialize in helping them deal with the leadership challenges that come at that stage.

Why is it necessary to be so specific?

Because then all of your efforts will be 100% targeted at your ideal buyers, and these are the ones you want to win as new clients. If you cast a wide net instead, a lot of your efforts will be wasted on leads that aren’t a good fit for your business.

So if you’re wondering, is LinkedIn marketing effective?, it really depends on how well you put all of these steps into practice. If you do, then you’ll be in a position to leverage the power of the platform to grow your business.

Step 2: Optimize your LinkedIn presence to showcase the benefits of your service to your ideal client

Once you have developed a clear picture of who you want to win as clients, the next step is to optimize your presence to tell your ideal prospects exactly how you can help them.

If you want to win clients with social selling, your LinkedIn presence is more important than your website. This is because the first thing that anybody you’re trying to engage with on the platform will look at is your profile. And if it isn’t compelling, they’ll probably never look at your website.

In general, try to view yourself through the eyes of your ideal prospects, and tell them how they can benefit from your services.

The most important areas to focus on are:

Profile photo
Headline
Summary text
Background image
Business page

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Photo:

LinkedIn profiles without a photo get very little engagement. So make sure you put in a good headshot.

2. Headline:

The very first thing anyone on the platform will see about you is your headline, so make it as compelling as possible. Many people put their role and their company in the headline, but this is usually not very useful if you want to know how they can help you.

For example, look at this headline:

“Founder at Tom Smith Consulting LLC”

This doesn’t tell people anything about your business, nor how it might be useful to them.

So let’s go back to the example of an executive coach. A good headline might look like this:

“I help Startup Founders master leadership challenges while scaling their business | Leadership and Executive Coach”

This headline tells your ideal prospects immediately how you can help them, which greatly increases the chances they’ll want to talk to you.

3. Summary Text:

Use the summary text to explain in more detail how you help your clients. The best way to do this is to describe the challenges and problems that your clients face, and how you can help them find solutions to those problems .

Again, be as specific as possible , and put yourself in the shoes of your ideal buyers. What are the major challenges they face, that you can help them with? Many people use the summary text to describe who they are, but this isn’t very useful to your prospects, since they are more interested in how you can help them.

4. Cover image:

It’s still common to see profiles without a cover image, or with a cover photo that’s not related to their business. This is a wasted opportunity, since you’re getting all of this space to tell people about your business and your service.

It’s very easy to create a custom background image for free (for example with Canva, which provides templates for this purpose). You can use a custom background image to showcase your business in several ways. For example:

Highlight press mentions, or accomplishments (such as ‘featured in Forbes’)
List some of your prominent clients
Describe the benefits of your product or service in compelling language
Showcase your brand values
Call out the pain points of your ideal clients

5. Business page:

When people visit your profile, the first thing they see is your cover image, head shot and headline, which are right at the top. Then, underneath that is you summary text, and when they continue to scroll down, they’ll reach your Experience section.

The most important part of the Experience section is your current business, which will be listed at the top. In order to make this look professional, you need to link it to a corresponding business page. If you do that, the logo of your business will be included in your experience section (and it shows up as a clickable link that people can use to click through to your business page, and look at it in more detail).

If you don’t have a business page, your current business in the Experience section will be shown without a logo. Instead it will display a grey icon that cannot be clicked, which doesn’t look professional at all.

That’s why it’s essential to set up a business page for your business, and link it to your Experience section. Apart from looking more professional, it also makes it easy for potential inbound leads to check out your business page before deciding to contact you.

Conclusion

This concludes our LinkedIn profile tips 2020. Once you have thoroughly optimized the 5 areas described above, you’re ready for the next step, which is to post high quality content that performs well on the platform.

Interested to learn more? Check out our LinkedIn marketing course.