How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer: Learning From Top Marketing Agency Influencers

If you want to build a strong LinkedIn presence, where you’re looked to as a thought leader and considered a credible source of information, you might want to become a LinkedIn influencer. 

Although the term “influencer” is often thought to mean lifestyle videos and brand deals galore, it looks a little different over on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn is a more professional platform, becoming an “influencer” means you’re influencing someone’s ideas in their industry, rather than their buying habits.

Becoming a LinkedIn influencer has its perks, especially for marketing agency founders and teams. Throughout this article, we’re going to dive deeper into what LinkedIn influencers are, why you might want to become one, plus how you can become a LinkedIn influencer—with data from some prominent influencers to boot.

What is a LinkedIn Influencer?

A LinkedIn influencer is a LinkedIn professional who has built a large and engaged following on the platform. 

Like we already mentioned, LinkedIn influencers are different from the influencers you see on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. On LinkedIn, we’re talking more about value and ideas within a professional industry. Being an influencer simply means you’ve built a network of like-minded professionals who are interested in what you have to say.

In addition, the threshold for becoming an “influencer” is much lower. While influencers with 10,000-100,000 followers are considered micro-influencers on other platforms, users with that many followers on LinkedIn can actually hold a lot of sway. In fact, some of the top marketing agency influencers we’re referencing throughout this article have just 7,000-70,000 followers.

Of course there are still the big names out there—consider Richard Branson with over 18 million LinkedIn followers and Neil Patel with over 700,000. But you can build a sizable network of 10,000-25,000 followers and see success on LinkedIn.

Why Would You Want to Be a LinkedIn Influencer?

There are a number of perks you start to see as you build your LinkedIn community, which is why many users want to become LinkedIn influencers. Especially if you’ve founded or work for an agency, you can start to build a credible reputation that can make clients trust you with their businesses.

But more than that, let’s dig into a few reasons you may want to become a LinkedIn influencer:

• Grow your network with other influential people in your industry and make new connections with potential clients.
• Become a thought leader in your industry by posting your knowledge so others look to you for expert advice.
• Build your personal brand so your name becomes recognizable and you create more opportunities for your agency
• Solidify your experience and credibility so potential clients feel secure working with your agency
• Generate more leads and prospects through your growing network and proven expertise

Essentially, being a LinkedIn influencer gives you the unique ability to showcase your knowledge, build credibility, get more clients from this platform, and make new connections that could potentially become paying clients. But becoming an influencer can be tough. That’s why we’ve put together a seven-step guide to help you in the next section.

How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer (With Lessons From Top Marketing Agency Influencers)

Starting growing your LinkedIn presence so you can become a trusted source of information. These seven-steps will help you solidify your place as a marketing expert on LinkedIn so you can build a wider network and bring in more clients to your agency.

1. Set Your Goals

What do you hope to get out of your (hopefully soon-to-be) newfound influencership? This is the very first thing you need to figure out, as it’ll pave the way for the rest of your growth strategy.

Some goals to consider include:

• Creating an engaged community
• Finding a close-knit group of like-minded people
• Becoming an industry expert
• Building your personal brand
• Generating more leads and finding more clients

You can of course hope for all of it. But if you pinpoint your underlying goal ahead of time, it will help you structure your LinkedIn profile and content strategy to match it.

2. Optimize Your Profile

The next step is to optimize your LinkedIn profile so that it properly introduces yourself to your new connections, showcases all of your relevant experience, and helps you achieve your goals.

Let’s walk through each section you need to completely fill out and share some examples of marketing agency influencers who are doing it well.

Profile & Cover Photos

First, upload a high-quality, professional headshot that’s 400 x 400 pixels as your profile picture. If you have a headshot of yourself on your agency website, make sure to use the same image to create consistency and help people recognize you more easily.

But more than that, you need to make sure your LinkedIn privacy settings show your profile photo to all LinkedIn users, rather than just those you’re connected with. If you don’t have a profile photo visible, people may not initially trust you, as evidenced by this recent LinkedIn post:

To ensure your profile picture is visible, click the Me dropdown in the top navigation bar of your LinkedIn dashboard, then click Settings & Privacy from the menu that appears.

Scroll down to the General Preferences section, then click Showing profile photos and make sure it’s set to All LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn also allows personal users to add a cover photo to their profile, just like companies can, in order to provide even more context into who you are and what you do. Use this as an opportunity to create a branded cover photo that matches your agency and lets your new connections know exactly what you have to offer.

Some ideas for your cover photo include:

• Highlighting your agency’s logo and tagline
• Visually sharing your agency’s service offerings
• Explaining your own expertise
• Sharing some professional accomplishments
• Showcasing big name clients you’ve worked with

If more than one of these ideas strikes your fancy, you can also create a slideshow with up to five cover images if you subscribe to LinkedIn Premium.

Let’s look at an example of an agency founder who’s done a great job branding their personal profile to match their agency. Ray Slater Berry, founder of content agency dslx, has a matching cover photo and profile picture, his agency tagline front and center, and a great visual to grab attention.

Headline

Your LinkedIn headline is an up to 220-character description of who you are and what you do. Your headline lives at the top of your LinkedIn profile, but also appears within the LinkedIn feed as a quick introduction for users who see your posts or your comments.

Because your headline lives alongside your name across the LinkedIn platform, it’s essential to include a synopsis of exactly what you do professionally so your target audience immediately knows if they’re interested in connecting with you or not.

Take a look at this agency co-founder’s LinkedIn headline:

Simple and straightforward. Co-founder/CEO of his influencer marketing agency. He focuses on brand-influencer-creator collaborations. This is a brilliant introduction into what Brandon does.

However, this is not the only way to craft a LinkedIn headline. Let’s take a look at Kayla Bryant, a director of digital strategy at a PPC agency, and how she’s introduced herself.

Kayla has built a personal brand around her marketing expertise. She doesn’t even mention her agency within her headline because she doesn’t have to. She talks about who she is and even brings in some personality because she wants people to resonate with her as a LinkedIn influencer rather than just her work.

Both options work perfectly. This all just goes back to what your goals for the platform are. Do you want to focus on your personal brand and who you are? Or do you want your agency to be a part of the conversation?

Pro tip: Just make sure the most important part of your LinkedIn headline is at the beginning. Unless someone is viewing your profile, they only see the first part of your headline, so you should always start off with your professional work before diving into some personal anecdotes.

About You

Your LinkedIn About section gives you the opportunity to dive deeper into what you do, why you do it, what you’ve previously accomplished, and why people should work with you.

You have up to 2,600 characters here, so you don’t need to worry about being succinct. You can include your professional experience, quotes and testimonials from past clients, major achievements, and more.

Take a look at this example from digital marketing agency founder Michael King:

Michael has done a deep dive into his experience over the years, which can help potential clients feel excited about the impact his agency can have on their brand.

But just like with your LinkedIn headline, you have the freedom to use your About section however you want. And if you don’t want to use more than just a couple hundred words, you don’t have to.

This is exactly how agency CEO Garrett Mehrguth chose to use his About area, sharing a succinct biography that lets his connections know exactly what he does:

Decide what you want to showcase in your own About section and start writing. You can access this by going to your profile, scrolling down to the area labeled About, and clicking the pencil icon to edit it.

Professional Experience

As you scroll further down your LinkedIn profile, you’ll get to the section where you can highlight your professional experience. You connect the companies you’ve worked with to your profile, share your job title(s), and summarize the work you’ve done. It’s almost like a glorified resume.

But this is also a great way to highlight your agency, its success stories, and its service offerings. You can even include the work you did before starting your agency (or starting to work at an agency) to further prove your experience in the industry.

Agency founder Joanna Wiebe has done a great job of filling out her professional experience to let connections know just how long she’s been in the marketing world:

Other Sections

There are several other sections you can fill out to provide even more context into your professional experience and knowledge if you so choose. Some of those include:

• Educational experience
• Licenses and certifications
• Skills you have
• Courses you’ve taken
• Languages you know
• Volunteer work you do and causes you support

3. Put Together a Content Strategy

Once your LinkedIn profile is completely put together, it’s time to start planning your content strategy. This covers details like:

• Your content niche: What types of topics will you cover? Whether you run a social media, influencer marketing, PPC, or content agency should help direct your LinkedIn content niche.
• Your posting schedule: How often will you aim to post? Plan this out ahead of time so you can put content creation into your working calendar.
• Types of content you’ll create: What types of content are you comfortable creating? Will you mostly create text posts? Take pictures? Record video?
• Some content ideas: Before you start posting, come up with some ideas for posts. This could include things like an educational post, a funny and relatable anecdote about your industry, or a story about something you recently learned.

Your strategy should be fluid, though. Pay attention to what seems to resonate most with your audience and create more posts like those.

Let’s look at some post ideas from well-known marketing agency LinkedIn experts. These influencers share a wide variety of content types and topics, so it’s always a good idea to gather inspiration from those who are already seeing success.

First, create long-form content surrounding professional stories. This example from Garrett Mehrguth talks about how he coached an agency owner to $1m MRR:

Another idea is to share humorous content that relates to your industry. This post from agency VP of SEO Lily Ray brings some humor into her post about SEO and AI:

You can (and should) share educational content relating to your agency’s services. This example from Tas Bober is perfect. Her agency creates landing pages for paid ads, and in a recent post, she shared her template for said landing pages:

Test out different content formats. Share a video of your speaking to your audience as a change of pace, instead of having them read your post like normal. Here’s a great example of this from Kayla Bryant:

As an influencer, even on LinkedIn, sometimes people want a peek into the behind-the-scenes. Consider sharing some transparent posts about agency life, like this example from Lashay Lewis:

There are so many options out there for how to create posts that resonate with your audience. Test some of your own ideas while also spending a good amount of time scrolling through other content to see if it sparks any inspiration.

However, one thing is clear: These agency influencers post specifically about topics relating to their agency’s services. If your agency offers paid ad services, make sure your content focuses on digital advertising. If you run a content marketing agency, focus exclusively on the state of content. This is the best way to carve your way into becoming an industry expert.

4. Consistently Share Valuable Content

So you’ve got your content strategy planned out. Now it’s time to start sharing your content. The important thing here is consistency. If you take too much time in between posts, the algorithm is going to notice, and it’s not going to be happy.

Here’s a post from a LinkedIn member who noticed this:

All this is to say that once you start posting on LinkedIn, especially if your goal is to become a well-known influencer in your industry, you need to remain consistent.

In our analysis of 15 well-known LinkedIn marketing agency influencers, we discovered that the average influencer publishes 21.2 posts within a four-week period. 

The most active user had shared 75 updates within the last four weeks while the least active had shared just four, an average of one per week. The most recurring number of posts was 18-22 within the last four weeks.

We can see from this data that there seems to be a sweet spot that tells us that influencers should create around 4-5 posts per week.

That means you should be posting nearly every weekday. It’s essential to stay consistent and present on the platform to maximize results. To help you keep up with this posting cadence, consider:

• Creating and scheduling posts ahead of time
• Keeping a running list of post ideas to refer back to
• Hiring a LinkedIn ghostwriter to help with content creation

This can help you stay on top of your content calendar, especially during time periods when your inspiration well seems to have run dry.

5. Engage With Other Users

But what is equally important to posting consistently is engaging with other users on the platform. You don’t want to simply shout your expertise into the void. Starting conversations with other people in your industry as well as your target clients can be a great way to get your posts seen by more people while also making genuine connections.

Spend some time each day doing the following:

• Searching for people in your target audience and sending them connection requests
• Scrolling through your feed and reacting to/commenting on posts that resonate with you
• Responding to other comments to start conversations

Be yourself and have conversations the way you’d want to if you were meeting these people in person. Don’t think about your end goals here, and instead focus on building genuine relationships.

6. Monitor Your Performance

LinkedIn offers basic analytics for personal profiles to help you monitor how many people you’re reaching with your content and which posts tend to resonate over others. Familiarize yourself with these analytics so you can keep an eye on your performance and adjust your strategy to continue growing.

If you head to LinkedIn.com/dashboard, you can get a bird’s eye view of your recent performance:

Click on each of the above metrics, like post impressions or followers, to get even more insights about your performance.

You can also discover your top performing posts so that you can create more content surrounding those main topics.

Monitoring your performance should consist of:

• Looking for patterns in your top performing posts
• Monitoring for growth and analyzing the reason behind any performance dips
• Checking out the demographics of your followers to ensure they match your target audience
• Analyzing your most engaging posts to see what resonates with your audience
• Diving into individual post analytics to see how people responded to specific posts

Make sure you have a clear understanding of why your audience responded the way they did to each of your posts. This will help you guide your strategy and make sure you continue posting content they enjoy.

7. Grow Your Network

LinkedIn has three types of connections:

• 1st-degree connections: People you’re directly connected to.
• 2nd-degree connections: People your connections are connected to.
• 3rd-degree connections: People you have no connection with.

When you publish a new post, it first gets shown to your 1st-degree connections. If they interact with it, your post may then be shown to some of their connections, and so on and so forth.

So the more 1st-degree connections you have, the more likely you are to reach a wider audience with your content.

This means a large part of your LinkedIn influencer strategy should be finding new people to connect with. However, you still want to be purposeful about who you connect with.

Regular LinkedIn accounts can send up to 100 connection requests per week. Premium accounts can send up to 200 connection requests per week. It’s a good idea to spread that out across the week and find people you’re genuinely interested in connecting with before sending a request.

You can also personalize some of your connection requests as a way to start a conversation or let people know why you’re interested in connecting.

Start growing your network so you can reach more people with your content and build better relationships across LinkedIn. 

Become a LinkedIn Influencer Today

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence and become an influencer within your industry? This seven-step guide will get you on your way to LinkedIn greatness. 

And if you’re looking for a more proactive approach to generating leads and clients for your agency, check out our guide to LinkedIn outreach.