How to Prepare to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more than just a networking platform—it’s a powerful tool for building a personal brand that attracts opportunities, establishes credibility, and helps you connect with the right people. However, before you start posting, it’s crucial to lay a strong foundation. Without clear goals and audience insights, your efforts may feel scattered and ineffective.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the essential steps as you start to build your personal brand on LinkedIn, ensuring that you don’t waste your valuable time and that your content and engagement strategy are both intentional and impactful from your first post.

Why Personal Branding on LinkedIn Matters

Your personal brand is how others perceive you professionally. It helps you:

• Establish authority in your industry

• Attract clients, employers, or business partners

• Differentiate yourself from the competition

• Create meaningful professional relationships

With the rise of AI generated content, it’s easier than ever for someone to pose as an authority figure. Having a strong personal brand is a way to display authenticity in an age of skepticism.

Put differently, having a strong personal brand has never been more important than it is right now.

But before you dive into posting, take a step back and define what your brand should stand for.

Step 1: Define Your Personal Branding Goals

Personal branding isn’t (just) about gaining followers—it’s about positioning yourself in a way that aligns with your aspirations.

In order to better define success, it’s important to clarify your goals. Ask yourself:

• What do I want to achieve on LinkedIn? (e.g., career growth, thought leadership, business opportunities)
• What key messages do I want to communicate?
• In what areas am I already an authority figure?
• How do I want people to describe me professionally?

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Your content should speak directly to the people who matter most to your professional growth. To define your ideal audience, consider:

1. Whom do I want to reach? Or who do I want my ideal audience to consist of? (e.g., potential employers, new customers, industry peers)
2. What are the challenges, interests, and goals that are common in that audience?
3. What kind of content do they tend to engage with?

A lot of people skip this step, but understanding your audience and creating content for them is a key part of growing a following.

Step 3: Analyze Your Current Audience

Before making big changes, assess where you currently stand:

• Who follows you already? Review your LinkedIn connections and followers.
• What past content performed well? Hint, you can find this in your LinkedIn analytics.

Often people have audiences and they don’t even realize it. Before setting out to capture a new audience, it’s important to consider how you can nurture the audience you already have

Step 4: Find the Overlap Between Your Target & Current Audience

Your most effective place to start targeting LinkedIn content is at the intersection of who you currently attract and who you want to reach. Try this simple exercise:

1. List the topics your current audience engages with.
2. List topics your ideal audience would find valuable.
3. Find the common ground and build your content strategy around it.

For example, if you’re a marketing consultant with a background in journalism, you could create content about storytelling in branding, appealing to both marketing professionals and media industry peers.

By following this strategy you can reach new people without leaving your existing followers confused, helping to generate engagement while you’re starting out.

Final Thoughts: Set Yourself Up for Success

Before you start posting, take time to clarify your goals, understand your audience, and define your unique value (what is your USP?). By laying this groundwork, you’ll be able to develop LinkedIn content that leverages your current audience to help accelerate the growth and engagement of your new target audience.

At WestWord Communications, we specialize in content strategy and personal branding for professionals and business leaders.