Your LinkedIn profile is like a virtual shop window for your digital agency.
The LinkedIn Summary / About section is one of the first things people will see when they come across your profile together with your profile photo, banner image and headline.
But so many digital agency owners miss out on these valuable promotional opportunities by not optimising the marketing assets LinkedIn offers you.
Whether we like it or not, LinkedIn – the biggest B2B networking platform – keeps exploding. So how can you take advantage of this?
Most common linkedin summary mistakes
I’ve been looking through lots of agency owner LinkedIn profiles and the most common mistakes I saw people make with their LinkedIn summaries were:
???? Being too modest about your achievements, skills and experience and how they could benefit your target audience
???? It was simply too short. It’s like designing an 8-page brochure and only filling 2 pages with content
???? Too formal: LinkedIn in no longer a CV so don’t send people to sleep by trying so hard to sound professional
???? They lacked any real conversation openers and CTAs
???? Don’t mention how you can help your ideal clients
Do any of these sound familiar? Hop over to YouTube to discover how you can transform your LinkedIn summary to attract your dream clients for your agency.
Read this blog to learn how to make your LinkedIn profile a lead-generating machine by optimising it!
Power up Your Own LinkedIn Summary Checklist
Your LinkedIn summary section is the place to sing your own praises, to hook in your ideal audience and to offer conversation openers. Use it to:
- Build trust and authority
- Speak to your audience’s pain points directly
- Show what makes you tick
- Share stories from your journey which relate to your audience – link story blog
- Share your most relevant experiences and skills linked to how your target market can benefit from them
- Highlight successes and offer evidence
- Show glimpse of life outside work
- Add interesting and surprising facts
5 LinkedIn Summary Examples from Digital Agency Owners to Inspire You
I’ve enjoyed researching these and there’s lots to cherry-pick from for updating your own LinkedIn summary.
Example One: Lee Jackson
My good friend Lee Jackson has a stand-out LinkedIn summary.
His target audience are event managers and business owners looking for the best platform for their virtual event.
Lee uses humour in his LinkedIn profile and doesn’t take himself too seriously. He says things like:
“Lee Matthew Jackson is a confident, relaxed and good-looking Dad. He wishes he could communicate in GIFs only. Never without his baseball cap and an accompanying Dad joke.”
That’s so Lee, and his summary is super memorable. The layout is great, it’s so easy to read, and it shows it won’t be boring when you work with his Event Engine agency as a partner.
For you, treat it as a conversation opener with a potential client, and be yourself.
Being in the events industry can be stressful at times, with so many tight deadlines to meet; as a client, you’re looking for an agency that has great people to work with.
There’s no point in making yourself sound stuffy or corporate.
What Could Lee Do to Improve his Summary?
Firstly, I’d recommend he rewrites it in the first person. LinkedIn is no longer as formal as it was when it first started out and should be used as a people-to-people platform. He should also add some more text – he’s got 2,200 characters to use.
He should add a pitch for Event Engine with his contact details, and a mention of his podcast. Having a podcast oozes expert status and credibility, which builds up trust with his ideal customers.
Lee is an online and offline events organiser himself, so to make his summary five star, he could mention a few of the challenges and pain points that event planners experience. This could be ‘how to encourage delegate interactions’ or ‘how to handle speakers whose audio setup is not up to scratch.’
Lee can then demonstrate how his agency’s systems and processes help to solve those challenges. He should also add the keywords he wants to be found for within his summary; Google will be happy!
Don’t be shy about promoting yourself! Your LinkedIn summary allows you to show what makes your agency different – and better – than the competition.
LinkedIn is all about being social and connecting with people who could be helpful to you. This video on lead generation will help.
A good LinkedIn profile is like a conversation opener and your best homepage in one, so make your summary stand out by showing your personality.
When you update it yours, think: are you making yourself sound more relevant and interesting than your competition? Are you showing the real you?
Example Two: Beth Livingston
An accomplished online course creator, Beth has been running her agency since 2009. She has an amazing track record, which she shows off on LinkedIn.
In her summary, she dives straight into the pain points experienced by her coaching and courses target market. This is a really great technique to entice people to keep reading:
How do you control scope creep without angering your client?
How do you get your client to understand all that is involved in building a website?
How do you get the client to give you the content?
For your own profile, think about what pain points you help to solve for your clients. After your target audience has viewed it, what do you want them to do next?
Include a clear call to action.
Beth gives her website address for people to find out if she can help them.
What can Beth do to Improve her Profile?
Overall, Beth’s is a confident-sounding LinkedIn summary which shows that she really understands her audience. There are a couple of tweaks she could make to make it even better.
She could add more detail – your LinkedIn summary should be like a sales page, so take advantage of the free advertising space the platform offers. She could also share testimonials from previous students, and find ways to inject a little more of her personality into her profile.
She could make it less formal, and discuss the secret sauce that her students use to manage their projects. That’s really intriguing and would be great social proof.
And to make it more eye-catching, she could use emojis to break up the text.
Beth could share more of her why, or a story from her journey that would really resonate with her fellow business builders.
She could also share some numbers – how many people have listened to her talks, how many years she’s been in the industry or how many students have graduated from her academy.
LinkedIn Summary Example Three – Jan Koch
Jan Koch is a fellow German and he’s a master online business builder, and if you’re in the digital agency world you’ll definitely have heard of him.
Like many agency owners, his LinkedIn summary is too short, but what he does say builds trust and authority.
Jan mentions he’s a proud Cloudways Maverick and that his programme Virtual Summit Mastery is industry-leading.
If you’d like to see his LinkedIn profile on the screen, you can watch the vlog here.
Jan could name his dream customers’ pain points so he can show how he helps them to overcome their challenges.
For example, that they want to build a relevant audience for their services:
Jan could show how Virtual Summit Master helps with that and how his students have increased their email list and income.
See your own LinkedIn Summary as a space to make yourself appealing to your dream audience and capture their attention.
Like Beth, Jan could include some stats and figures, and he could be inspired by Lee and share a glimpse of his life outside work – remember, people want to get to know the real you! And as always, he needs a call to action.
Example Four – Corey Dodd
Corey Dodd is an amazing brand strategist and community builder. Like Jan, his summary is very short and needs fleshing out. And when Corey originally wrote it, he was in the frame of mind that LinkedIn is very formal.
I happened to speak to Corey at the same time as I was putting together this blog and the vlog that goes with it, so we chatted about his LinkedIn profile. He said he’d update the about section using a more approachable tone of voice – more in line with how he talks.
He also planned to add details about his Facebook community because that helps to build trust and authority, and let more of his personality shine through by adding his trademark emojis.
He’ll share more behind the scenes information about how he makes his work happen, and he’ll work on the format to really make the space work well. Corey felt inspired to make changes when he saw how valuable a good profile is for his business. If you are too, this vlog will also help.
Example Five: my favourite LinkedIn Summary – Piccia Neri
Piccia is a UX expert and global speaker. She uses the space on her LinkedIn profile really well and makes it easy to find relevant information. She draws her audience in and shows off her multifaceted expertise and asks how she can help.
If you like to be inspired by Piccia’s amazing LinkedIn summary, check out this vlog.
What Next?
If you’d like help with your own LinkedIn profile, get in touch for a free discovery call.
One of my Wunderstars optimised his profile and using a simple LinkedIn hack, secured a project x15 of his usual project value. Making time for your LinkedIn work is so worth it!
And if we find you want to get fast results, book a Power Hour consultation with me.
We can explore who your target market is and come up with a plan for optimising your profile and creating interesting content so that they can find you on LinkedIn.
I can’t wait to hear from you!
