Expert Advice: What is a Personal Brand?!
Personal Brand expert Jennifer Holloway, from Spark, joined us recently for a live online surgery - a perfect chance for everywomanNetwork members to ask questions and gain advice directly from an expert.
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What is a personal brand ?!
The strategic answer to that is it's something that could really turn your career or business around because it’s the key to leveraging the age old rule that ‘people buy people’; companies use their brands to help us decide if we want to buy their products or services, we can use ours to help people decide if they’re buying us.
The practical answer: it's a clear, concise and authentic way of letting people know who you are and what you’re all about that tells them what you’re bringing to the table other people aren’t (or at least not as well as you are!)
Working on my personal brand feels a bit pushy/salesy. How do I make the idea more palatable?
When people think of personal branding a voice in the back of their heads often says, “Ooh, that’s just self-promotion – you’ll sound arrogant and people won’t like it.”
My reply to that is you have a brand whether you like it or not (people will always have an opinion about you) so working on it makes perfect sense; you don’t want to leave something as important as that to chance when it’s the key to people buying into you.
It’s perfectly possible to have a personal brand where you get your messages across in a subtle way though, without being pushy or salesy.
A good first step is to make sure that every way that people come into contact with your brand – whether the channel is a verbal one, a written one or a physical one – is giving out the right messages about how you want to be perceived.
Because if people are getting a consistent, professional message about you that has a hint of your personality ie brand coming through loud and clear too, the messages will get through without you resorting to shouting from the rooftops!
My challenge is selling! How on earth do I ask people to buy training, coaching and consulting from me without looking or sounding like I am selling? My presentations at conferences are defined as 'inspiring' as they are focused on the audience, not me...I find it so hard to sell...
I've a great bit of advice for you...ditch the thought that you have to 'sell' ie to ask people to buy your training, coaching and consulting.
Feel better?
It did when I realised the same thing in the early days of getting Spark off the ground! Because here's what I've learnt - and I'm not going to pretend it's rocket science!
Fact: People buy people before they buy what they're selling, and in your case where you are your own business, that's especially true.
Fact: You're already inspiring people with your presentations which means people are buying into you.
Fact: If you concentrate on simply telling people what you do with the obvious passion you have (even from your posting) the selling will do itself because you'll come across as authentic and people will trust that they should buy into you (can you see a theme emerging here?!?)
The biggest mistake you can make is to try and become a 'salesperson' that you're not as people will sniff out a fraud at 20 paces and the trust will disappear.
That said, one thing you could look at doing is assessing what other ways you can get yourself and your message out there that add to the presentations and keep you on people's radars. I write a fortnightly blog and when I do a seminar I offer people the chance to get added to the mailing list - no hard sell, just the fact they'll get lots of other great tips.
In doing that I've actually had people come back to me months later when the time became right for them to work on their brand.
Is the act of creating your personal brand actually an exercise in editing your true self and therefore creating an unauthentic persona?
I want to clear something up from the off here: when you 'create' your brand all you're doing is pulling together the best bits of what you are already and presenting it in a clear, concise package. What you're not doing is creating something that you want to be but can't deliver - that would be inauthentic.
We all know the consumer brands we buy into because we trust what they're promoting as their values, beliefs, etc are true. And we also know the consumer brands we don't buy into because we don't believe what they're peddling no matter how good they say it is.
Personal brand is no different. It's not about editing away the negative stuff, it's about focusing in on the really good stuff.
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