Over the years, digital marketing has evolved with people using different tactics to successfully market their businesses. For some people, search engine optimization (SEO) is considered the strongest way to build a following, with content marketing closely connected to that. For some others, a combination of social media marketing, video marketing pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and influencer marketing is the way to go.
However, from experience, everyone agrees that there’s something bigger than all these forms of marketing. It doesn’t necessarily fall into the digital marketing category because, it’s a mixture of professional, personal, digital, content, social, and almost all forms of marketing.
It’s personal branding!
According to Forbes, brand messages tend to get 561% more reach with eight times more engagement if shared by the employees’ social media handle than when it’s shared by the company’s social media handle.
What does this tell you? Personal branding is super huge!
If you’re looking to succeed in today’s socially connected and digitally driven world, you must learn to build and use your personal brand to connect with more people. Gone are the days when it was just for celebrities, or self-obsessed personalities, it’s for everyone!
Take a cue from Elon Musk and Richard Branson, they have more individual Twitter followers than their companies. The simple truth remains that people connect more with people or personal brands than they do with companies. This is because they want to connect with a person, someone with values, a defined personality, convictions, insights, and many more.
Pia Silva puts it like this:
“With so much content and so many small businesses popping up online, a brand that connects to a person’s face is much easier to trust faster. It takes less time and effort to build a relationship with a personal brand as compared to a business brand.”
Building your personal brand connects you on a personal level with potential clients. The more you’re connected, the more business opportunities will present themselves to you.
Here are some tips on how you can develop your personal brand to connect with more people.
Define what you do, your objectives, and your goals
Let’s say you’re a coach. What type of coach are you, life coach, business coach, fitness coach, health coach? Whatever it is, add it there. Always be specific with what you do. Don’t be afraid to add the corresponding adjective that defines what you do.
Wear your title proudly and in time, your tribe will start to identify your name with your chosen title. Let your goals and objectives be clear because that is what defines your mission as well as your target market. If you’re not sure what your mission is or who your target market is, then you need to do a little more research to identify them.
Define your brand attributes
What type of personal brand are you building? How would you like people to see it or rather, what image are you trying to portray? Whenever your name or brand is mentioned, the first thing that comes to people’s minds is exactly who you are to them. This is good if you’re able to portray the right attributes as it will put your name on people’s lips which means, you’re the go-to person when it comes to a specific issue. Therefore, it’s important to establish the attributes you want for your personal brand. Make sure these attributes are in sync with your objectives, goals, logo, brand colors, and overall image online.
Be consistent with your presence across platforms
Don’t have separate images or portrayals of your brand on each online platform. Maintain the same values, principles, and knowledge irrespective of the platform. Don’t appear different on Facebook than you are on Twitter. Let your presence online also match your offline image completely. Communicate clearly with your web designer, graphic designer, and social media managers making sure that they’re all in sync with what you portray on different platforms.
Breathe life into your personal brand
People are more inclined to trust you if they can see the person behind all the content published online. Since you cannot meet all the individuals that form your audience in person, the quickest way to meet them is through videos. Videos allow you to come alive in their homes giving them daily encouragement and provocative tips or answers to the solutions they’re seeking.
Video content proves to them that truly, there’s someone behind the professional brand who is real. While making the videos, make sure to add some of your brand elements like brand colors and logos so they’ll recognize them whenever they visit your website or other platforms.
Give incentives to your target audience
Incentives are one of the fastest ways to connect more people to your personal brand. Giving away products related to your brand avails you a greater chance of attracting a new audience. For example: if you’re trying to build a personal brand as a copywriter, you can attract more people to your brand by creating a contest where contestants submit their email addresses, and the winner is rewarded with a free slot for creating copywriting content for them.
A women’s clothing shop tried incentives by offering a $100 silk Kimono with a $16 production cost to female customers patronizing a local BMW dealership for free. They all had to come to the boutique with a letter from the dealership confirming them as their customers. More than 600 women took the offer, spending an average of $400 on other items in the boutique when they visited the store. In the end, the boutique was able to generate $240,000 in sales with an expenditure of $9,600.
Show you’re an expert
This can never be overemphasized. One of the things that attract a large base of customers to a personal brand is the professionalism and the quality of knowledge the brand can give. You must be able to share super-helpful content with your audience. Set yourself apart from your competitors in the online space by providing them with unique and rock-solid content that not only educates them but also solves their problems. Doing this will get the attention of new customers who will gradually learn to identify with your brand.
Appeal to the Millennial Mind
Building a personal brand in the modern internet space without putting the millennials into consideration is like building a castle headed for destruction. Here’s why:
The millennials have a large demographic online and as such will always be the first to see your personal brand content and respond to it. They are the socially connected generation. Therefore, you must create contents that are structured to grab their attention. Also, make sure your personal brand is present on platforms that appeals most to them such as Snapchat and Instagram.
In Conclusion
The aforementioned tips have proven effective when it comes to leveraging your personal brand to connect more people. Always create helpful and valuable content and deliver on your incentive promises when you make them. Gradually, you’ll be on your way to creating a new path for your personal brand as well as making more conversions or sales of your products and services.