MBA 051: Level Up Your LinkedIn Profile with KAREN WESSELS

Karen Wessels

Digital Marketing specialist and co-founder of SnappSales.

Elevator Pitch: Who is Karen Wessels?

Karen is the co-founder of SnappSales, a premium marketing agency in the B2B space. They help their clients find quality sales leads through inbound and outbound marketing both nationally and internationally.

Starting Out

When she left one corporate position for another, Karen was approached by a former client to work on their national marketing campaign. This opportunity served as the catalyst for her to start her own business.

Sales and Marketing for Small Businesses

When considering whether to employ either a sales or a marketing team, Karen calls it a “chicken and egg scenario”. You’re not going to grow your business without sales, but at the same time marketing is very important. Karen suggests that a small business starts with marketing as the foundation. Because many people “fear” sales to a certain extent, marketing can serve to fill the sales pipeline. The growth and success of any business is dependent on both sales and marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Social media offers the smaller business great reach within a limited budget. Before you start marketing consider whether your business is B2B or B2C. Facebook and Instagram are great for marketing products whereas Twitter and LinkedIn work better for B2B ventures. The advantage of social media is that it’s free, easily accessible and user-friendly.

LinkedIn as Marketing Platform

Karen understands LinkedIn quite well and the majority of their client base originates from that platform. Your profile is there to speak on your behalf. When creating your profile on LinkedIn, Karen suggests starting with a suitable business profile picture, not a picture of your company logo or your family. Use a professional image that portrays you in the best light. Consider your description – what are your skills and what are you passionate about? What could your company do to bring value to the person viewing your profile? Be as descriptive as possible when listing things on your profile. An insightful profile will be all the more engaging to the viewer and could lead to more connections.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

Even your part-time varsity job, something as seemingly insignificant as bartending could highlight certain secondary skills. It all depends on how you word your experience. Some viewer may read through your profile in detail while others will merely skim over it; the onus rests on you to keep both types of people in mind when creating your profile.

Making Connections

You can randomly connect to people for the sake of connecting and to get your numbers up, or you can be smart about it and build connections more strategically. You can carefully consider the field your business specialises in and the kind of people you want to connect with – do they add value to your network? Like many aspects of marketing you need to spend time on this every day. Karen suggests you put aside 20 minutes per day to build new quality connections and engage with existing connections. It’s difficult to assign an ideal number of connections as it varies from one business to another.

Making Mistakes and Learning From Them

People neglect to add a suitable photograph to their profile. When you represent your company, people want to see what you look like. Another common mistake is having an incomplete profile with too little information. Karen strongly suggests you do not use the standard LinkedIn connection message but rather opt for a personal message.

Elevate your Profile

Besides making quality connections, make use of LinkedIn publications to air your view on topics and to share your knowledge.