As featured on LinkedIn, June 6, 2022.
Why are so many executives asking questions about the craft of personal branding?
Does this require posting on Instagram 4 times a day, or launching a dedicated You Tube channel? Does it involve a personal shopper?
Personal branding is an outgrowth of professional services marketing. While most of us in the field started off representing organizations, over the years, that work has been sliced up into creating strategies for offices, practice areas, and industries. Today, these representations have gotten even smaller. We are marketing individuals, with unique talents, traits, expertise and experience. While Apple markets their brand and the products, they also market Tim Cook.
While you can hire an expert to help you refine and build your personal brand, here are some do-it-a-home techniques to you get started.
- Define how you want to be known. What is your passion? Be authentic to who you are but think about what it is that makes you unique, or different and what expertise you have that others do not. Do your own SWOT assessment. Look at your own strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats.
- Do you offer more than one “line” of business? Are you an author and a lawyer, an executive and a podcaster, a New York-based marketing consultant and a writer for Saturday Night Live? (Okay, not really plausible, but it could eventually happen.) Think about those lines of business and focus on what it is you intend to market. Only then should you turn to tactics.
Know your audience. Define who it is you want to reach. If you’re a doctor, is it existing and future patients or is it big pharma to invest in your idea for a new drug? If you are a lawyer in the IP space, is your audience emerging companies that may need your help to protect their assets?
- Be where your audience is located. If your audience is using Instagram, learn all about it, see what others are doing and come up with your own creative twist that forwards your strategy. If your potential clients are on LinkedIn, a great place for the B to B (Business to Business) or as I call it B to P (Business to Person) relationships, aim to learn everything you can about it and create content for that platform.
As for the personal shopper question, that’s completely up to you, but I am happy to come along to browse.
