A personal brand is not only a well-known name, a flamboyant clothing style, and a number of followers on social networks. First of all, these are the associations, feelings, and emotions that you evoke in people. The most famous definition of personal brand belongs to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: “Personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room”. The good news is that you can influence these conversations if you know exactly what you are and how you can use it.
Previously, a person’s name was associated mainly with their work. Today, the field of activity that will bring fame can be as wide as you like. All the businesses need to be closer to their audience in order to influence them and the right way of development. It’s not enough to create the social media page and choose the logo within icon maker tools. There’s more work that should be implemented.
Why Should Businesses Be Closer to Their Audience
Empathy: find what worries the reader
The main principle of customer service is to think about the customer, think like a customer is also relevant for content creation. People are not interested in reading how great you are, how great your employees and your service are. They want to know how what you are doing will help them solve their problem. They want to read about themselves on your page.
Put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers, get used to them, feel what they lack for complete comfort. Then it will become clear what benefits you can give based on your experience and expertise. In order to be imbued with the needs of your audience, you need to clearly understand who you are writing for. The classification “Women 25–45, average income” has not been working for a long time. Today it is important to understand the behavioral characteristics: what a person is interested in, how they make a choice and make a decision, what are their values, views, lifestyle.
Generosity: Share, Don’t Try to Sell
Head-to-head sales and direct advertising on social media don’t work. If you end every helpful post with a “Buy!” The willingness to share disinterestedly, on the contrary, attracts people and rallies a loyal audience around the brand.
Share your knowledge
You are an expert at what you do. You know more about the situations in which your product is needed and the problems it solves than any individual subscriber. Share this knowledge in the form of life hacks, helpful tips, answers to frequently asked questions, etc.
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Share data
Doing research and surveys? Collecting market statistics? Process data, design and publish on your social networks, form an expert image.
Share your experience
Experience is not a recipe for “successful success”, but “How we did something” cases. You earned money, lost money, changed something in your work, and got the result, so share it. And the audience will begin to perceive you as a source of interesting practical content. Important: the experience should be your own. If you just read a lot of articles on the topic or listened to smart speakers, but did not live the situation yourself, this will not work.
Frankness: get ready to open up
Not many brands share their success and failure stories. Someone is too lazy to fish out these stories from everyday practice and process them into the content. Someone believes that the internal kitchen should not become public knowledge.
But if you are not ready to “lift the curtain”, share the exclusive, talk about your experience, your conclusions, lessons learned from failures, then there is no point in starting a blog or pages on social networks or going out to the media. General phrases and a superficial glance are of no interest to anyone.
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Relevance: catch the wave and ride it
Track what the media and social networks are discussing, catch and ride a wave of discussions. This does not mean that you need to be an “expert on everything” and talk about what you don’t understand. Comment on your expert topics: readers are interested in the expert’s opinion. Plus, journalists constantly monitor social networks and quote high-quality and resonant comments.
Be wary of talking about politics, religion, sexual preference, and other sensitive issues. If in the wake of an argument, you clearly state your position, this is cool and deserves respect. But you need to be aware that this position is not shared by your entire audience. Weigh the risks.
Humanity: Tell business through people’s stories
People are interested in reading about people. And business is the people behind the brand. Show the inner life of the company. Show how the office is arranged, how people work in production. Introduce your audience to your employees, tell their stories and your company stories through their mouths. If you work in the B2B field, invite your clients to an impromptu interview, ask them to talk about their experience with you.
Human stories and experiences are a great way to natively tell about your services, attitude towards customers, the mission that you have chosen for yourself. Reading stories, subscribers “from a safe distance” try on the role of your client, evaluate how they will feel comfortable with you. And they get one step closer to becoming your client in reality.
Conclusion
At the heart of every personal brand are three things: professionalism, popularity, and reputation. The first comes with experience and depends only on your personal contribution to your development. But popularity and reputation are external resources that can be obtained if you work out a high-quality strategy for promoting your personal brand and follow it.
Thanks to social networks, our world has become more transparent: today you can find information about each person in just a couple of seconds. At the same time, you can tell the widest audience about yourself and your projects. Therefore, managing a personal brand becomes especially relevant: it is important to choose not only where and how, but also what to tell.
Your personal brand can be a universal key to self-realization and help in any area. Thanks to it, you can find a new job, make useful contacts, get a role, sell your product or service, or strengthen your company’s brand. Thanks for your contact with the audience.
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