LinkedIn is a social media platform for business owners that isn’t yet saturated like many of the other social media platforms, which is why your LinkedIn profile optimization is key to standing out.

IE 141: LinkedIn Profile Optimization with Chrissie Wywrot

I am so excited today to dive into a topic we haven’t talked about before on the podcast, and that is LinkedIn. 

My guest today, Chrissie Wywrot, has been working for herself for about 5 years. Chrissy has marketing experience and actually worked for the Detroit Lions for 5 years, overseeing their website and social media. 

About 18 months ago, Chrissie started focusing exclusively on LinkedIn, because of its organic potential. She helps small businesses optimize their LinkedIn presence to generate visibility and business through the platform. 

Optimization and Marketing Blueprint

People go to LinkedIn for business. 

If you have a presence on LinkedIn, the people that are engaging with you have the potential to generate business. Now is the time to build an audience on LinkedIn because of the organic reach. People are actually seeing what you are sharing. 

There are two primary things that Chrissie does with everyone she works with: 

• LinkedIn profile optimization – your LinkedIn profile is your sales page. You want your profile to guide them through the sales process and let them know who you are. 
• LinkedIn marketing blueprint – this outlines how to engage with people on the platform. Chrissie calls this “the funnel” – you want to connect with relevant people and then nurture them through your content. 

 

Drawing In Your Audience 

There are different recommendations for each platform as far as what should be included in a post. 

For LinkedIn, you will find lots of different recommendations from different people. Chrissie says that what works for you depends on your audience. 

“Anything can work based on whether or not your audience likes to consume it.”

Your very first sentence really needs to draw in your audience. 

When you are scrolling through LinkedIn, all the user can see is the first 3 lines, so you need that first sentence to hook them in. Sometimes Chrissie uses a question for the first sentence.

The more you generate engagement, the more people will see your post. Having a powerful first line is really important. 

You want to be present on LinkedIn. If you are posting but not commenting, you are not going to generate as much visibility. Be present a couple of times a week, at least. 

When your headline is optimized, and you go to comment on someone else’s posts, the first 50 characters of your headline are visible to everyone looking at the comments. 

Knowing Your Target Audience 

Whenever Chrissie talks with her client, one of the first things she asks is: “Who is your target audience?” 

If I were a nutritionist who wrote a book that I wanted to get into the hands of moms, that’s going to be hard on LinkedIn, because I won’t be able to tell who is a mom and who isn’t right away. 

So, let’s say I’m a nutritionist who was wanting to speak at a conference, I would need to be looking for other higher-up nutritionists who run conferences. 

If you have LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator (which is $80/month), you can actually search for a relevant audience and know whether or not they are active on LinkedIn. If you don’t have Navigator, you can conduct a decent search organically. 

Once you find your people, Chrissy recommends sending personalized connection requests to the relevant people.

This initial connection would be your initial funnel. 

Developing a Content Strategy

Next comes your content strategy. You want to make sure you vary what you’re talking about. 

Chrissie recommends that you have 3-5 “buckets” of different types of content. 

You want to establish your knowledge and credibility, but you also need to post things that are interesting and that people want to engage with. You can post something “perfectly” and people might not want to read it. 

You can still post content to target moms, and you will attract those moms naturally because they are interested in your content. 

Working With A Company

If I were a food blogger and I really wanted to work with Ragu, LinkedIn could help me get in touch with their PR. 

This is where Sales Navigator really helps. It allows you to not only see the employees and the functions, (like PR) but also allows you to see when they were last active. 

Sometimes, if you want to get in with a specific company, you have to find someone who is active on LinkedIn to get you to the right person. Start with the company and the platform will tell you who is a part of that company on LinkedIn. 

Case Study Posts

Case studies are a great “bucket” of content. You can share your experience from working with brands as a way of promoting yourself to other brands on LinkedIn. 

One important thing when you are trying to pitch yourself as an influencer on LinkedIn is to walk the walk. You need to have a great following and be creating content that is generating a lot of engagement. 

You don’t want to tell a brand you can get their company great engagement if you only have 320 followers and no one is paying attention to you.

It’s easy to get focused on encouraging others to focus on their presence and engagement while not focusing on your own. You need to make sure you have social proof in addition to the case study you are posting. 

What Does My Profile Need? 

You need to have a good profile picture. You want to have a company page, as these pages are gaining a lot of visibility. These pages also allow your logo to be added to your profile. 

People pay to search the platform and Google crawls the platform. If you search your name on Google, unless you have a very common name or share it with a famous person, your LinkedIn will most likely come up in the top 5 results. 

If you have nothing in your LinkedIn profile, you are missing an opportunity for somebody to click on your profile and find your content. 

Keywords are very important. Is someone going to be searching for someone like you? If so, make sure your keywords throughout your profile are relevant. 

Chrissie offers a checklist to help you optimize your profile that is super helpful. It will help you dig deeper and make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized and ready to bring you more business. Download yours and get started building up your LinkedIn account today! 

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