How to Harness your Personal Brand and Get More Leads Through Social Media
How to Harness your Personal Brand and Get More Leads Through Social Media
I’ll be honest, I am completely sick of hearing the phrase ‘personal brand’. It’s one of those marketing phrases that makes my teeth hurt, with people bandying it around constantly as some kind of magic pill that will answer all your sales needs.
But while that might not be entirely true, there’s no doubt that harnessing your personal brand online can have hugely beneficial effects on your marketing efforts.
What is a personal brand?
Your personal brand is the identity that you hold online, usually related to your business or the company that you work for. This is how you project your personality, thoughts, feelings and expertise to the people who follow you, giving them an insight into the kind of person you are and helping them to understand why you’re the best at what you do.
While they should be aligned, your personal brand is completely separate to your company’s branding. This is all about you and your identity, standing out from your competitors and really boasting about what makes you great.
How to develop your personal brand
If you’re just starting out with developing your personal brand, there are a few steps that I’d recommend taking first.
Think about what you want to be known for
It’s important that you consider the type of topics that you want to talk about online, ensuring these are relevant to your career and that you can offer an authoritative point of view. What are you good at? What are your achievements? What makes you different?
What is your tone of voice?
One thing that is absolutely vital for your personal brand is sticking to the same tone in everything that you post. This will usually be in line with your natural personality, but you may choose to have a more professional or formal tone of voice depending on the industry that you’re in. Your tone is entirely up to you, but you should make sure that it always stays the same no matter what platform or channel you’re using.
Define your audience
The worst thing that you can do is try and write content that is designed to appeal to everyone. Realistically, you only need to speak to your ideal customer. But who is that? Take some time to have a think about the type of person that you want to read your content and respond. What do they do for a living? What are their wants, needs and fears? How can your product or service resolve these? What do you want to do when they see your content? The answers to these questions will help you shape your content pillars and make it much easier for you to produce things that they actually want to read and respond to.
Start posting
The best way to define your personal brand and voice is to just get out there and start. Create a content plan of things that you want to talk about and the types of content you want to put out there, then just go for it! Don’t worry too much in the early stages if you make mistakes, or if your content bombs. Just take lessons from this and keep at it until you feel more confident in your work.
Harnessing your personal brand online
Once you’re comfortable with your personal brand, it’s a good idea to get all your social pages updated with accurate details, highlighting who you are and what you do for a living. On LinkedIn especially, you’ll want to pay special attention to your headline and ‘about’ information, as these will help to form a person’s first opinion of you. It’s all about standing out amongst the noise and showing people what makes you different.
Consistent posting is also vital when it comes to creating a well-formed and attractive personal brand. People want to know more about you, where you’ve come from, your experiences and what makes you tick. You can share whatever you want online, but I always recommend you keep a fair mix between salesy posts and things that are a bit more personal to you. You can talk about bad bosses you’ve had in the past and how this helped to shape your career, or what you wanted to be when you grew up. The idea is to humanise your brand, showing that you’re a real person who can help your audience.
How long does it take?
Unfortunately, as with many content-based marketing strategies, seeing the results from using your personal brand online can take time. Effectively, it’s a trust-building exercise with your audience, giving them time to find out more about who you are and why they should work with you.
Having said this, the sooner you get going, the better! And it’s never too late to start.
If you want to get in touch to find out more about how I use my personal brand online and the results I’ve had, feel free to pop me an email.