How To Position Yourself As A Marketing Authority On LinkedIn

Transcript

With that said, the number one consideration for you guys to start with when you’re thinking about strengthening, building a strong LinkedIn profile is that professional-level personal branding is really non-negotiable guys, in LinkedIn, when you are positioning yourself as an expert consultant.

I’ll give you an example. I saw a For Sale sign yesterday when I was driving past some houses out here on the waterfront. And it had the usual glossy estate agency sign right for sale the number, the picture of the estate agent, the brand. And this is like a really premium luxury house on the waterfront, guys.

And then what I noticed was taped onto the sign out the front of the house was a printed piece of paper just taped onto that they estate agent sign. It must have been it literally looks like two pieces of A4 paper stuck together and it said “26 million dollars, crossed out. Now $18 million.” 

And it literally looked like it had been printed on a home inkjet printer.

And I kind of thought, well, I’m not surprised that such a massive black discount on this house because this estate agent obviously has no clue what they’re doing in terms of marketing and in terms of positioning because, you know, they could quite easily, especially given the the luxury level of the house that they were selling, it could quite easily have afforded to get that professionally printed.

But they’d literally printed something. It looked like they printed it at home or an inkjet printer. I’m not kidding. So, you know, in a similar way, guys, if you have a poorly thrown together LinkedIn page, it’s really the same thing.

You know, no matter how valuable the underlying service that you have to
offer there is a perceived value associated with it as well as an underlying value. And you have to control, you have to maximize the perceived value.

Now, of course, you have to maximize the underlying value as well, because, you know, that’s why you’re having all these other sessions with the other guys talking about the awesome tool box that you can offer through the new agency portal and the white label services that you have access to with AGS.

But you also have to be thinking about how that’s perceived. And that starts with, you know, when you’re setting up these kind of client-facing prospect-facing landing pages.

And essentially, that’s what LinkedIn is.

It’s your prospect facing landing page. You know, you have to be controlling that perceived value in terms of what they perceive of you as well. It’s kind of like with, I always think about when you go into these art galleries and, what seems like really easy to construct pieces of art, you know, that kind of just like they look like you could have – I don’t want to under devalue some of this stuff, because I didn’t fully appreciate it. I’m not sophisticated enough to fully appreciate what some of these things probably mean to some people. Right.

But some of these are installations or artworks seems so easy to create. And yet they’re valued at like six, seven, multiple, seven figures. How do they do that?

Well, they’re controlling the perceived value. They’re putting a story behind the artwork and placing the artwork in the right kind of display cabinet in a you know, maybe in a studio where it’s the centerpiece. It’s maybe the only thing in an entire room. They have people coming to see it.

There’s obviously demand there where people are devoting their time and attention to looking at this artwork and being in this environment around this piece of work. And what they’re doing there is they’re really controlling and enhancing the perceived value of that of that piece.

And it’s the same thing that you’re trying to do here, guys. You know, when you’re selling a premium service and valuable expertise as a marketing expert, it needs to be packaged as a premium service and as valuable expertise. And what that translates to in terms of a LinkedIn profile is really that you need to have high professional level quality personal branding.

And so that starts with having the right kind of cover photo and the right kind of profile photo. And so when you’re an expert, you know, thinking about that analogy with with lots of people coming into the gallery to look at the artwork. This kind of what I call an understated authority cover photo is absolutely perfect for that, because this is a kind of photo where it’s gonna be you on stage an event or, you know, you holding a meeting, you holding a seminar with some consulting clients or, you know, just just people who’ve come to see you speak an event.

If you can have that kind of photo as your cover photo, what that does is it demonstrates that social proof that, you know, you there are people who are looking to you as an expert, as an authority in that space. And it allows you to communicate that status and that positioning as someone in that position of authority in a quiet, understated way.

And so that’s the ideal kind of cover photo. And I understand you guys can’t necessarily get access to that very easily if you don’t have it already. So if you don’t have it already, you can you can always put something else in there.

But for now, you know, like a high quality stock photo related to the niche or even something that’s more personally resonant like you you doing one of your personal hobbies where it creates that kind of sense of personal connection.

What I really urge you guys to do is just to try and get that kind of photo as soon as you can. So, you know, if you come into one of the events, we’ll probably have you guys stand up speaking, doing some a few little bits so we can, you know, get stuff like that done.

You guys really want to try and get something like that put together for your cover photo, because that’s going to really give you that sense of understated authority in your profile. 

Now, the second thing and the more easy one that you guys can do more immediately is the profile photo. And for this, you guys really need a clean professional headshot. OK, now it’s really easy to get these done. You will have to invest a little bit of money. Sometimes it’s only going to be like 50 bucks, 100 bucks if you want a proper personal branding session and you want to get some shots that you can use both for this, but also for when you’re putting out content later on down the line or when your awful pages on your Web site and other places as well.

You can also get like a personal branding kind of portrayed session with a photographer. Usually is gonna be like 300 bucks or 400 bucks or something like that. So you can Google photographers in your area and check out getting one, getting one of these sessions booked in.

Or you can even go in like LinkedIn ProFinder and and find a photographer through there. But you guys really need to, at the very minimum, have a really good headshot here that communicates that, you know, this is someone who seriously in business, not one of these amateur marketers. There’s so many of those guys out there right now.

And it’s also something that really communicates that sense of professionalism, that sense of confidence, assurance, expertise or authority. And it might seem like you can’t communicate that in a photo, but you kind of can. Guys, you know, when you get the right quality, a good photographer will be able to capture not just kind of a good quality visual image, but also the right feel, the right kind of emotion, the right kind of perspective in that in that shot as well.

People can interpret a lot from that as kind of this natural human instinct.

And so getting that head shot right is something that you guys can get handled pretty much straight away.