Lesson Four in this series was all about how to make your packaging an accurate and appealing reflection of your personal brand. This lesson is about how you promote your brand to those who don’t have the benefit of meeting you person.
Actively promoting your brand means that you don’t have to explain yourself and what you offer over and over again. Your brand goes ahead of you acting as a shortcut to answer the questions people ask most often – i.e. “What do you do?” and “How can that help me?”
The three suggestions below are intended to help you get the word out about yourself.
1. Become an expert
Definition of an expert: someone who continuously acquires and displays knowledge about a particular subject.
Becoming an expert doesn’t mean you need to know everything about your area – it means that you need to know more than 80% of your target market.
To establish yourself as an expert in your field you first need to decide what you need to know to be considered an expert. Once you’ve done that you need to write your own study plan. What do you need to read, listen to, or experience to be able to talk about with authority on your subject of choice?
Once you’ve acquired this knowledge you need you need to learn how to behave like an expert – more on this in a later post.
2. Brag gracefully
Those of us who were brought up to believe that humility was something to aspire to may have a particularly hard time with the idea of self-promotion, let alone doing it. But the reality these days (if it was ever any different) is that our managers and seniors are generally too busy to notice, let alone go out of their way to deliberately represent our efforts favorably to others except in passing.
Peggy Klaus author of The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn with out Blowing It defines bragging as talking “about your best self (interests, ideas and accomplishments) with pride and passion in a conversational manner intended to excite admiration, interest and wonder, without pretense or overstatement – in other words without being obnoxious.”
This means you need to ensure that those that need to know are aware of your experience and achievements and how having you working for them adds value.
Learning to weave stories and examples of what you have done into conversation without looking like a big-noter is an art from that is well worth the practice.
3. Choose the best channels for you
The generally accepted rule of thumb is that a potential purchaser needs to be exposed to a new brand at least three to five times before they will buy. This is as true for personal brands as it is for products or services.
There are many ways to get the word out about your brand but it is important to choose the channels that work best for you and your brand. For example if you’re an introvert forcing your self to become the busiest public speaker in your area may not be the right choice for you.
Equally you need to start where you are – this might mean ensuring you speak up in internal meetings or taking the initiative to present your team’s learning from a recent project. Over time you might seek to challenge yourself by publishing, volunteering for formal positions in your industry’s professional group or becoming a commentator in the media.
Whatever you decide upon you need to make sure it is something that works for who you are and what you’re best at and succeeds in showcasing your brand to your target audience.
The bottom line of all these suggestions is that it pays to have a plan for increasing your brand visibility that plays to your strengths and also doesn’t make promoting yourself a full time job.
Lesson Six moves this focus another step forward by looking at the skills it takes to communicate effectively.
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