Creating branding templates - LinkedIn Tutorial

- If your employee has a profile on LinkedIn, they can be found on LinkedIn. So you want to make sure that they are representing the company in the best possible way. And that's why it's really important for you to create a template that you can share with them that they can use to optimize their profiles. Now I'm not going to go into depth on everything that makes a great LinkedIn profile. Check out the LinkedIn learning library for excellent courses on how to do that, but what I do want to emphasize is the need for you to create a template your employees can then use to help them create their own branded profiles. So, what should you include in your template? Well, as we mentioned earlier, a few background image options that maybe match your company page. A few headlines to choose from for each role in your company, an outline of a good summary per role, and we're going to go more in depth in that in just a moment, a description of your company to add to their current experience and media, blog posts, links, white papers, PDFs, really anything that makes their LinkedIn profile a resource for the buyer, and that can be added to their featured and experience sections. As I mentioned before, employees own their own profiles, so they don't necessarily have to add the branded copy and visuals you provide, but let them know that it could benefit them as well, and it can certainly benefit your company if they do so. After all, a rising tide floats all boats. Now I mentioned the summary above, and that's an area that you might need a little bit more information on to make it stand out and still apply to your employee base. When you're creating your summary template for your employees, what do you want to focus on? Now, first of all, it needs to be buyer centric and focused on the common issues your typical customers or consumers have. Address how you, your product or your service can help them to solve their problems and fulfill their needs. And let people know who you work with. Are you a B2B, a business to business? Are you a B2C, business to consumer? Are you a government agency? Do you work with educators? Are you a solopreneur? You basically want to write your profile for your ideal client or product, so when they read it, they can identify themselves in it. Now, the first thing that we recommend writing is a sentence which is a call to read. Basically, you've got 2000 characters to work with, but only if people click on see more, so you need to have a call to read that addresses your buyers, point of pain, needs, curiosities and desires. You want them to click on, see more. You also want to create your profile first in a word document or in a template and then you can add emojis, spacing, special characters. Now you can't add bold, italics, anything like that, unless you use a third party app, but you can add bullets and special characters and emojis. When you're adding emojis, please make sure you keep your audience in mind. You might like unicorn poop emojis, but your B2B buyer might not. Finally, you want to put a call to action at the end of your summary, as well as your contact information, and if you're uncomfortable sharing that email address or phone number that you've had for years, you can always get a Google number or Gmail account that you use only with LinkedIn, and that will help you track leads as well. Now I mentioned adding media earlier and LinkedIn recently added the featured section. So you want to make sure to provide your employees with PDFs, word documents, images, smaller files, smaller documents, links to websites, blog posts, Vimeo videos, YouTube links that they can just simply add to their featured section by clicking on the plus sign. Unfortunately, most employees profiles, if they even have an about or summary section read more like a resume than a resource for your buyers, but if you create the content in a template that they can then copy and paste into their summary section, they're a lot more likely to optimize their summary or about section to something that attracts readers. Make sure to download the profile template in the exercise files to get you started. Provide your employees with the content that they need. The external documents, photos, sites, videos, and presentations. And once you've created a template with all of those assets, please train them on how to use it. A quick one to two hour training should be all you need. Once adopted, be assured that your brand is going to show beautifully on your employees' profiles.