3 Key Ways to Escalate Your Professional Online Presence in 2025
- Brainz Magazine
- Aug 22
- 5 min read
Written by Jeanette Walton, Career Brand Consultant
Jeanette is spreading the word about the essentiality of career branding for all professionals. As a Career Brand Consultant, she has pioneered a career branding framework, amongst other educational resources, to amplify the use of career branding to cut through and stand out.
Are you aware of how essential a strong digital presence is today for all forms of professional advancement? In a climate where AI technology is gobbling up online search feeds, making it harder to distinguish between robot and person, and where job applicant and new business starter rates continue to explode, the time is now to escalate your professional presence.
Some of the other key motivators for prioritising your digital presence are:
All target audiences will seek you out online to find out more about you. I recently had an IT recruiter highlight to me that if a job candidate isn’t on LinkedIn, in her mind, they don’t exist.
Humans are craving a sense of connection, with at least 80% of consumers investing in brands that convey trust and credibility. It’s your online content that will deliver on this.
Print marketing is less effective, with most consumers using online portals to source business data. Speedy online searches remove the need to hold onto physical data.
The integration of your human traits and nuances across digital content and profiles will ensure you remain competitive against AI-generated data (and you won’t be mimicked).
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a job seeker, an employee aiming to grow the business’s customer base, an entrepreneur, or a thought leader; a personalised online presence is pivotal.
Prioritisation of LinkedIn
Anyone who follows me online would know that I’m a huge advocate of LinkedIn. It’s the world’s number one online platform for professional marketing and networking, and it has the capacity to significantly enhance your individualised brand reach and reputation (both locally and globally). Contrary to what some believe, an interactive, engaging, and organic LinkedIn profile isn’t only necessary when you’re seeking a new job.
With more than 1 billion members worldwide, a number that is rapidly expanding, there are an abundance of opportunities that could arise from maintaining a strong, insightful, brand-aligned LinkedIn profile. These include securing robust referral, co-branding, supply chain, and other business development alliances. The continual expansion of your online audience, where the primary intent is professional, paves the way for both commercial and non-commercial career advancement pathways. The embedding of strong brand foundations, with self-evaluations of the impact of your content, encourages evolution.
Key areas I’d recommend focusing on in your LinkedIn profile are:
Optimisation of your 220-character headline, bearing in mind that this is the first and possibly only part of your LinkedIn profile that viewers will see, it’s been estimated that around 80% of LinkedIn users don’t go beyond the headline in search results.
The integration of visual images and media to enrich the personalisation of your LinkedIn profile and better attract scan-reader attention, it’s been reported that a profile that includes a headshot image is 14 times more likely to be viewed by others (wow!).
Applying keyword optimisation across your content to improve your search rankings, ensure you’re sent the right insights and recommendations from LinkedIn, and reaffirm your core professional strengths and offerings, be sure to use a future-focused job title.
Where possible, use LinkedIn auto-prompts, particularly job title and skills suggestions, and connect with registered employer companies and educational institutions. This will be beneficial to your search rankings and convey professionalism in your profile.
Regularly post, share insights, and make announcements on LinkedIn to extend your reach, and update relevant sections with career developments. Consider using the Featured section to highlight professional accomplishments and keep building credibility.
Evolution of your assets
As touched on above, defining a strong, foundational career brand will inspire you to continue growing your digital content and assets. I’m speaking from personal experience here, based on the career brand I developed 18+ months ago, which has helped me stay consistent and constant in my promotions and interactions, while encouraging me to delve into new areas. These include appearing on podcasts, presenting at global symposiums, designing and delivering branding workshops for different audiences, and establishing a YouTube channel.
In my discovery-based discussions with client prospects, it’s regularly been highlighted that they’ve consumed online content I’ve shared across my various digital assets. This content has significantly influenced their decision to reach out and find out more about me, directly from me. And just think about how put off your prospects will be if you don’t uphold clarity, consistency, and constancy across your digital profiles and content, particularly when there are so many other options to choose from. Some sobering statistics on multi-market competitiveness show that around 100 million new businesses are started each year globally, and around 11,000 applications are submitted via LinkedIn every minute.
Key brand evolution practices I’ve used to keep extending my reach and penetration are:
Building and maintaining a portfolio of branded content that I can revamp or repurpose to share across my various assets.
Investing in both Canva and Wondershare Filmora to enrich the visual appeal of my promotions and interactions.
Setting up a YouTube channel where I store longer reels and videos, and provide links when sharing shorter versions.
Updating my LinkedIn profile based on career developments, such as offering a newsletter subscription, making announcements in the Featured section, and adding side hustles to the Experience section.
Saying ‘yes’ to media and other promotional opportunities, whether that’s guesting on a podcast, featuring in a top professionals listing, or delivering a presentation or workshop tailored to specific audiences.
Remain brand consistent
As highlighted above, it’s so important to stay on-brand across your online promotions and interactions. With less than 10 seconds available to convince online viewers that you’re worth further consideration and investigation, why risk losing them due to confusing and inconsistent branding? I can guarantee that if you’re not 100% clear on what to call yourself online or what to focus on in your content, it will limit your ability to build instant, credible connections.
Also, factor in the internal value of defining and exemplifying your own strong, foundational career branding. It will cultivate confidence and inner knowing when you promote and engage online, in terms of who you are, what you stand for, how you stand out, and who and how you can help others. Such internal self-assuredness will be picked up by others, including target audiences, enabling you to come across as authentic, energising, and convincing.
Whether it’s for an individual professional or a broader business, the benefits of taking the time to identify, speak about, and exemplify your own specific career brand include:
Attracting brand- and career-aligned target audiences, whether that’s customers, alliances, or prospective employers.
Obtaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of your core strengths and offerings.
Feeling prepared (and energised) for both planned and unexpected career/business opportunities.
Conveying confidence and self-belief in your brand is likely to be eye-catching and contagious.
Enabling the establishment of a consistent, well-structured brand promotion strategy.
Gaining thought leadership recognition, based on brand-aligned messaging and networking.
With the world continuing to get smaller, including through technologies that continue to adapt, evolve, and impact us professionally, and with more of us striving for career advancement both locally and internationally, it’s more important than ever to prioritise an individualised digital presence that will ensure you’re seen, engaged with, and rated highly. Don’t underestimate the power of defining and promoting your own brand online, across a range of professional contexts.
Read more from Jeanette Walton
Jeanette Walton, Career Brand Consultant
Jeanette is a Career Brand Consultant who helps professionals worldwide to enhance their career prospects. To address a gap in the market, she designed a career branding framework that helps professionals design and apply their own unique career brand. She also avidly writes articles, newsletters and eBooks, features on podcasts, partners with industry alliances, and delivers educational presentations on the benefits of career branding. In her spare time, Jeanette fosters dogs, visits an aged care resident, and co-facilitates a LinkedIn Local networking group.
