“There has never been a more powerful business networking tool than LinkedIn. Everything that fuels the ascent of your personal brand lives and breathes on the network.”
– Neil Patel
You will agree with the quote from Neil Patel’s blog if you’ve been building a personal brand on LinkedIn. After all, it indeed captures the very heart of the social network. The platform is the place to promote yourself as a thought leader.
So, how do you build your personal brand on LinkedIn? You put to work three keys:
- Create a solid profile that demonstrates your knowledge and experience because every LinkedIn road leads to it.
- Write and publish quality content, including long-form articles, short blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, etc. They are the most potent route to showcasing your expertise.
- Develop an extensive network by joining groups and engaging with them. The wider your network, the greater your organic reach, and the more it amplifies your personal brand.
Why Promote Your Personal Brand Through LinkedIn ads?
Building your personal brand is all well and good, but it reaps no fruit if you don’t promote it. And the best marketing strategy on LinkedIn is a blend of organic promotion and paid ads. The former lays the foundation of your personal brand, and the latter bolsters it.
Since organic efforts are the bread and butter of digital natives, such as you, we fly by them, landing directly on ads.
LinkedIn uses objective-based advertising; something uniquely fit for thought leadership promotion. You can tie every ad you display on the network to a single objective like more views, better awareness, or higher engagement. And that’s why you need to tap into them to amplify yourself.
Which LinkedIn Ads To Use To Market Your Personal Brand?
The network offers a plethora of ad options. While all of them can be pressed into use, there are three that work best for thought leadership.
1. Sponsored content
These are promoted posts that appear directly on the feed of the people you want to reach. You can use single images, carousels, or videos to amplify your personal brand through them.
Sponsored content is invaluable because it captures a person’s attention when they are most engaged – while actively consuming content. Plus, they are a great way to nurture critical relationships. Here’s how you can get started with sponsored content ads.
2. Dynamic ads
Companies can afford to market themselves through generic ads. Thought leadership needs an individualized touch. This is where dynamic ads step in. Each ad has the name and profile photo of the targeted viewer, giving them a personalized feel.
Follower ads and Spotlight ads are the two Dynamic ads you should focus on to market your personal brand. The first helps you expand your followers and the second allows you to share insights and other content with your target audience.
Here’s how you can easily set up dynamic ads on LinkedIn.
3. Text Ads
Attention spans are fleeting on social media. If your ad is long (or dull), your audience will scroll right past it.
Text ads, with their small image, short headline, and brief blurb, are excellent at catching eyeballs.
These are your usual pay-per-click or cost-per-impression ads that appear either on the top banner or the right rail of the page. Text ads are easy to create and allow tailoring based on the people you wish to reach.
Here’s how you can get started with text ads on LinkedIn.
How To Correctly Use LinkedIn Ads To Boost Your Personal Brand?
At a time when skipping advertisements has become muscle memory for people, you have to be savvy with paid promotions. With this in mind, here are the best practices for LinkedIn ads you need to follow:
1. Play to the right audience
Even the best of LinkedIn ads will fail if you don’t target the right audience. Find out the demographics of your existing followers and then use it to set the location, age, gender, interests, education, and more while building your ad campaign.
2. Keep it brief
Fleeting attention spans mean you have mere seconds to sink your hooks in, so keep your written content short and sweet on dynamic and text ads. LinkedIn recommends 150 characters or fewer since they perform best.
3. Add stats to ads
If you’re promoting long-form content, lift stats, or even quotes from it for the ad copy. Snackable stats grab attention and work wonders for your engagement because people tend to share them more.
4. Get visual with them
Rich media like image, video, and audio engages the audience, and engagement is equal to the enrichment of your personal brand. Two vital elements here are a) keep the media eye-catching, but it has to resonate with your content’s message, and b) 75% of sponsored content engagement is on mobile devices, so your content must look great on small screens too.
5. Always remember to Retarget
Retargeted ads have 10x higher clickthrough rates, and it lifts engagement rates to 400%.
So, don’t think of LinkedIn ads as one and done. Show them to the same audience more than once. However, you can always tweak your messaging and get creative with the ad copies to get your audience hooked.
Marketing Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn Is A Soft Sales Approach
Promoting thought leadership is not full-on, frontal-assault with a no-prisoners-taken approach. It has to be unobtrusive.
Remember, the current audience can sniff a sales pitch from a mile away, and it makes them instantly wary. Any credibility your personal brand has built is destroyed with it.
That’s why, to market your personal brand on LinkedIn, you need to take the soft sales approach. In other words, your focus has to be providing information first and generating business second.
We leave you with one last piece of advice. Like with everywhere else, when you use LinkedIn ads, measure your success after every paid effort, and then tweak the succeeding campaigns accordingly!