Why is your personal brand important?

Crafting a strong personal brand holds immense importance for your professional journey. Here’s why:

• Establishing trust and credibility: Consistently showcasing your skills and expertise fosters trust and credibility among peers, supervisors, and clients. This solidifies your reputation as an respected authority in your field, bolstering your professional standing.

• Amplifying visibility: A robust personal brand elevates your visibility both within your organisation and beyond. Simply relying on hard work may not suffice. By actively promoting your achievements, articulating your impact, and cultivating a memorable personal brand, you accelerate your career trajectory. Leveraging social media and networking platforms effectively expands your reach and attracts potential employers or clients.

• Propelling career advancement: A well-crafted personal brand paves the way for new opportunities and career growth. Being acknowledged as a dependable expert in your domain increases your likelihood of securing promotions, exciting projects, or enticing job offers.

• Setting yourself apart: In today’s fiercely competitive job market, possessing exceptional qualifications and a stellar resume may not be adequate. A compelling personal brand helps you distinguish yourself and leaves a lasting impression on prospective employers or clients, ensuring you stand out amidst the sea of candidates competing for similar roles.

What is your hook?

Can you clearly, concisely and compellingly communicate the hook to your brand?

Let’s begin with explaining a hook. It is a fishing term 😊 and has been adopted by marketers, advertisers, and salespeople alike.

It is a catchy way of grabbing attention and drawing the attention of the people you want to be reading or engaging with you.

One hook I came up with a for a client was to call them ‘the unraveller of … riddles’. This has served them extremely well with people wanting to hire them before meeting based on how they presented their brand.

Without pointing out too many of the obvious points here, our digital presence is etched in digital history. What you put down, stays down. It is there for people to pick up of course! There are many social platforms where the breadcrumbs of your personal brand are marked; Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, and so on. It all threads together with links via your viewing history, email address amongst other things.

Developing your online personal brand needs to be carefully crafted. It helps you to be gain followership, respect and trust. Think about your brand a bit like an exhibition at an art gallery where curation, placement, notes, narrative and marketing are all part of the value-chain. Your brand has a similar value-chain.

How can you define your brand identity?

• Consider the following aspects of brand in relation to what makes you unique, recognisable and memorable:
  • What makes you unique?
  • What do you stand for – your purpose?
  • Your target audience
    • Who are they?
    • What do they want?
    • How do they live life?
    • What kinds of activities are they into?
  • What is it about your uniqueness that will appeal to your target audience?
  • What will people get from engaging or connecting with you?
  • What do you value?
  • Build your identity (more on this below)
  • Consider the tone and approach for your brand. This will include the language you choose to use for your audience. A note here: if you are wanting to connect with everyday people, deliver your content and messages with this in mind.
  • How do you want to be perceived visually – if you are a joker or comedian then using cartoon styles jokes will work. Perhaps not for a lawyer. If you are in the corporate sphere you may decide on a sharp suit and tie approach.

• How will you attract the attention of your target audience?

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  • Create content focussed on how you can serve and engage with your target audience and aligned to your brand.
  • Connect with people via engagement with their content. Make it meaningful with a thoughtful comment or reshare
  • Send people messages focussed on connecting with meaning and have a clear call to action, i.e. let’s meet for coffee and discuss (name what it is you want to focus on)
  • Consider the frequency of connecting personally with people, with posting content and engaging with people’s content. And make it consistent.
  • Proactively find people who you want in your community and connect with them.

•  Check your brand performance every three-six months and evaluate what you are doing and ho it is going. I have a  report where monthly data goes to see what is performing and what isn’t. This helps me  to determine any changes that may be needed.

When doing this critically evaluate the value of what you have been doing and definitively make changes. Do not leave anything to chance!

In the past 10 years I have very intentionally built my brand. Piece by piece. You can too!

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