In this episode of the Selling in Asia podcast, Tom sits down with Dr. Natalia Wiechowski to discuss how to use LinkedIn to build your brand, sharing tips from her new book, Personal Branding with LinkedIn: The Think Natalia Method.
Don’t miss out; join Tom and Natalia as they mull over topics such as:
- Why sales reps need to build a personal brand.
- How to start building a personal brand.
- Engagement vs. Public Relations for building credibility.
- How to use your LinkedIn profile to get inquiries from qualified leads.
- How to create content for LinkedIn with any budget.
- Creating the Perfect Linkedin Profile To Generate Leads
- 5 LinkedIn Outreach Tricks To Generate High-Quality B2B Leads
What Is A Personal Brand?
Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Jeff Bezos CEO Amazon
As long as you live with other human beings, it would be best to have a Personal Brand. A Personal Brand reflects your story, your values, and your work and is an ongoing development process to maintain your reputation to an individual, group, or organization. So, instead of being a past victim of your circumstances, why don’t you decide how you want to be perceived?
Why Do You Need A Personal Brand?
It doesn’t matter if you go for a date, job interview, or you’re a service provider, and people have looked for your services or your product online. They will all use some search engine and will highlight problems in two cases.
The first is if you’re undiscoverable, nobody can find you! Which is a problem in this day and age of digitally remote lifestyles. It can come across as a little bit weird. Are you awkward? Should your searcher be worried about you? Do you live a boring life? These are all of the thoughts that we have in our minds, and they don’t serve you.
On the other side, it’s problematic when people find material about you that isn’t aligned with who you are or what you do. Why don’t you stand up and say, “Okay, you know what, this is who I am. This is what I do. This is what people should know about me.”
Your LinkedIn profile will be among the first three entries on the top of that search engine results page – sometimes, even the first one.
Another crucial reason is that you’ll get paid approximately 10% to 25% more with a structured personal brand than people with an average brand if you work for somebody.
How To Start Crafting Your Personal Brand
1. What kind of problems do you solve?
Because I believe that every drop on this planet solves a problem, if you’re a dentist, you fix people’s problems with teeth. If you’re a cobbler, you fix people’s shoes. Even if you’re a serial killer, you fix certain problems.
2. For whom do you solve it?
Because you can’t be everybody’s darling, what is your niche? It doesn’t matter if you have your own business or if you work for somebody.
3. What’s the end result?
When I work with you, what do I get? Do I save money? Do I make more money? Do I lose weight? Do I feel happier? Do I save time? What is it? What is the result? Ideally, when do I get that result? Again, when you can clearly communicate that, this is a game-changer. You won’t believe how many people are not able to say that.
By actively positioning yourself and saying, “This is who I am. This is what I stand for,” automatically, you will position yourself and stand against something. Not because you want to hurt other people or because you want to be a bully, or because you want to be, whatever. It is just what it is.
Why LinkedIn Is The Best Platform To Grow Your Personal Brand
First of all, LinkedIn is for those already in a business mindset, making it easier to communicate with them. Furthermore, many people who are active on Facebook or Instagram would instead use it to speak to their friends, family, or entertainment. In comparison, people use LinkedIn to be informed.
Social media is a critical vessel for communication, information, and also as an entertainment tool. Sometimes, when you want to sell, you’re out there because you want to network. When you have this mindset approaching Facebook or Instagram, it might not be the easiest way to get your message across. While on LinkedIn, people are in the mindset, “We’re doing business here,” so it’s easier to reach them.
Furthermore, consider that Facebook is completely saturated at the moment. They have around 2.5 billion users. On LinkedIn, we have 700 million, so it makes a huge difference.
Also, when you look at the user numbers, Instagram is a teenage platform. 72% of all Instagram users are teenagers. If your product or services are not teenage-related, it doesn’t make sense to spend much time. LinkedIn, definitely the typical user is older. 41% of all millionaires use LinkedIn, so especially have a high-end product, spend more time on LinkedIn.
Join Our Social Selling Mastery
Powerful LinkedIn Profile Pictures
Because a picture shows more than 10,000 words. Especially when you have your own business. Show me, you in action, you on a stage, you with people, you with awards. You can mention your social media channels. You can show me with whom you work. Just use that as additional information, as an additional tool to show me within less than 4 seconds who you are, what you do, for whom, and what the end result is because that increases the likeliness of people spending time there
Building Your LinkedIn Profile
See your LinkedIn profile as a free advertising space that you can use to build a relationship, tell your story, add value. That’s very important. Turn your profile into a source for others so that they learn, get informed, laugh, connect with you. Through that, you get their trust and then we can talk about selling.
Maximizing Connections on LinkedIn
When somebody visits your profile, invite them to connect. It’s so easy. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve seen you’ve been on my profile. I’ve seen you’ve also been interested!” Ensure you send out a personalized contact request. Don’t just hit the connect button but tell them why they should connect with you.
Create two or three avatars that you want to connect with. Use LinkedIn’s filters. And then LinkedIn will give you a list of potential people.
Document – Don’t Create
Don’t buy a professional camera from the beginning. Take your smartphone, make sure that you respect other people’s privacy, and then post exactly that. Start with that. Start with documenting what you see because the content is all about adding value, and you either inform and educate people or entertain them and make them laugh. You decide what kind of style you want.
You also, again, don’t need to start with videos. You can start with a simple status update where you write or write and take a picture. The important thing is that you show up and that you don’t make it about yourself.
More About Natalia
Learn more about Natalia Wiechowski by picking up her book Personal Branding with LinkedIn: The Think Natalia Method and connecting with her on her website, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.