Personal Branding – Your Designed Portrait

Nine seconds is the average attention span of people today. This influences how you attract business, close deals and build loyalty. Personal branding is an integral part of business in today’s marketplace. It isn’t about boasting or puffing yourself up. It is an honest pitch, that will differentiate you from the global marketplace. A pitch of who you are and what you do.

The benefits of a strong personal brand are:

  • you can land the job you wanted;
  • you can charge more;
  • it will cost less to get new customers and;
  • higher chance of satisfaction because the brand creates a level of trust and quality on the deliverables.

Know Who You Are & Be Yourself

Research what your strengths are and how others perceive you. Ask for feedback from friends, family, and others in your circle to find out their thoughts and impressions of you. Also check your online reputation and search your name in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

I used Sally Hogshead’ ‘How to fascinate’ to evaluate my strengths. This test gives you a lot of information about how to use your strengths. If you want to know more about this check out the video below(fyi: I’m the maverick leader of course I’ll test again in two years or so)

Build a Strong Personal Brand

After defining your strengths, an elevator pitch and a story to introduce yourself you can focus on creating content. Content is the reason people fall in love with you. It doesn’t have to be a lot, just a few targeted topics you care about.

Part of your brand is your ‘look’. You can spend ages on this, and most ‘branding posts’ are about assets such as business cards, websites and the layout of your Facebook page. However pick a look within two hours on envato. I love this place. It has templates for every medium.

Choosing Your Channels & Following Up

Your target audience is probably your own sector unless you are selling services and products for a specific market. Consider this while picking your engagement channels:

  • Make a list of channels which you want to use and research if your target group is present.
  • Adwords or other paid channels won’t add any value, unless you have stuff to sell on your personal website.
  • Choose two social media channels to focus on, which preferable you already use, and make sure you can maintain it and are consistent.
  • Make a plan (I use Hootsuite and WordPress) when and how you are engaging with your target audience.
  • Monitor all these channels via Google Alert, Hootsuite or Google Analytics.
  • Online is only great when combined with offline. People are much more committed when you see them face to face.
  • And make sure you live up to the promise you made.

Now that you’ve made it this far, you probably have a longer attention span then nine seconds.

Great! Because building a strong brand is an ongoing process. If you start drawing out a time frame with tasks attached now you are already halfway.

Good luck.

About author View all posts

Cindy Crijns

My passion is combining technology and marketing to reach potential clients & retain current customers. Specialities: B2B, B2C, SMB, Social media, demand generation, brand management, analytics & customer insight.

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