Welcome to this lesson of the Growth Hacking Academy, which tackles personal branding. Even today, for many people — entrepreneurs included — thinking of themselves as a brand feels unusual. Yet living in a digital age, they probably already have a personal brand.
If you have any online account at all — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, a wiki, a forum — that is your personal brand. All you have to decide is whether to ignore it or develop it actively in order to create new opportunities for work or business.
Often, though, marketing yourself, or self marketing, gets confused with self-promotion. So let’s look at exactly what personal branding is and how it’s done.
Let’s begin.
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Personal branding: what is it?
Here’s the “official” definition given by Wikipedia:
Personal branding is the practice by which you first become aware of, and then structure, your own brand.
But what does personal branding actually mean?
Coined in 1997 by Tom Peters, the term usually refers to the ability to identify, develop and promote your own personal assets to an audience much as you would a product. It’s the ability to communicate effectively what sets you apart from others and what you want others to see in terms of technical and interpersonal skills, experience, behaviour, values, personality and style.
It’s the simple, interesting and intuitive way you tell your story, through which you connect and build engagement with your audience and let them recognise themselves in the “product” and the values it represents.
Professionally, it’s the image — the perception others have of you and, by extension, of your products and services — along with your ability to influence that perception positively. It’s no accident that Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, defines a personal brand as “what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
Why do personal branding?
Having covered what personal branding is, let’s look at some of the reasons you should do it and the benefits it brings:
- in a global, highly competitive market where job risk is high and the old model of a job for life no longer seems to work, being good isn’t enough. You have to stand out, make yourself relevant, and communicate well — through the right channels — why your audience should choose you rather than someone else;
- a strong personal brand identity can win a place in customers’ minds, build trust, widen your audience and, in doing so, grow a business significantly;
- it lets you connect with “ideal” customers and build valuable, lasting relationships with them;
- it reduces pre-sales costs and time, because it attracts genuinely interested customers;
- it lets you be seen as an expert in a field, niche or area of competence, and helps build the audience’s trust in the brand.
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Who needs personal branding?
Several groups would certainly benefit from personal branding. Let’s go through them.
1. School leavers and graduates looking for work, or employees who want to progress or retrain
Studies show that HR departments in most companies use the web (Facebook and Google especially) to gather information about possible candidates.
Others show how inclined we are to hire and do business with people we know and trust.
Others still show how being highly recognisable online, holding a network of influence and being able to exercise it on social media in a company’s favour counts in your favour with employers.
2. Freelancers, consultants, experts and “solopreneurs” who want to start out on their own or reposition themselves, online or off
People like buying from people, and the fact that here there’s a real person behind the brand or logo is an advantage.
For anyone to ask for your services, though, you have to be visible online, and building a personal brand is perhaps the most important way of presenting yourself online and off — of giving current and prospective customers the certainty that the promise to solve their problem will be kept. After that it’s down to your ability and skill to stay influential in their minds.
3. Entrepreneurs, senior managers and professionals wanting to strengthen the credibility of their company or practice
In a corporate setting, developing the personal brand of entrepreneurs, senior managers, chief executives and professionals is rarely done. Yet through their network of influence, their reputation and their communicative effectiveness, these people could bring real benefit to the products and services associated with their names, or with the companies they work for.
Those benefits are measured in:
- greater trust: people believe the people they know far more than companies’ promotional messages;
- visibility: the personal branding of senior managers, chief executives and salespeople, tied to the company’s own, improves the company’s image and can become a valuable marketing vehicle;
- more business opportunities: expanding a personal brand opens the way to new niches, both inside the company brand’s main field and in complementary ones.
Free to use image from Google Images
How do you do personal branding?
Personal branding managers, coaching, videos, books, growth hacking strategies and guerrilla marketing, digital PR, personal branding courses.
As you can see there are many people you could hand the development and promotion of a personal brand to, and many ways of gaining the knowledge to do it yourself.
Whichever route you choose, it can’t ignore some practical, useful advice. Let’s go through it.
Building a personal brand
How do you build a personal brand? The starting point is an honest look at yourself and your business. That lets you identify and define your current assets (skills and qualifications, passions and interests, values and beliefs).
On the basis of those assets you then define your mission (what you want to do) and your vision (what you want to do it for) and — very importantly — the message you want to convey. Finally you decide which traits of your personality your self brand should reflect.
To do all that, ask yourself questions such as:
- Where do I excel?
- Which business goals do I want to reach?
- What do I want to build my business around?
The next step is personal brand positioning, or professional positioning: working out where in the job market to place yourself according to your skills and expertise.
Once that’s done, you define your unique selling proposition (USP) — the value proposition that sets you apart from competitors.
This stage involves analysis of the market, of competitors, of your strengths and weaknesses, and the definition of KPIs. Here it helps to ask yourself:
- What makes me, or us, unique against the competition?
- Who is my target audience?
- What are my strengths and weaknesses?
For deeper analysis you can use methods such as SWOT analysis (see also the SOSTAC, 5S and 5W models), or visual business design frameworks such as the Personal Branding Canvas.
Image from bigname.it
It’s a visual model built on a lean approach: following the nine sections it divides into lets you identify your USP. At the same time it produces results in visibility, credibility, respect and recognition, and helps define an effective personal branding strategy.
Promoting your personal brand
Once you’ve defined a compelling USP for a specific audience and built a brand that appeals to them, it’s time for the promotional stage. That can involve conventional and unconventional personal branding strategies across different channels:
1. Content marketing
Build a content strategy. Producing and distributing quality content that’s free and useful to your target audience is one of the most effective ways of building your personal brand and becoming an authority in the market you’re addressing.
Among the kinds of content used: blog posts, podcasts, video, infographics, webinars, PDF guides and case studies.
Among the channels most commonly used: blogs and websites, podcast directories (iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn), social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram), email, SlideShare and forums such as Quora and Reddit.
2. Storytelling
Behind every business there’s a vision, passion, courage, competence, experience, emotion — in other words a story to tell, one the audience wants to hear. Storytelling is an excellent form of communication for conveying a brand to a specific audience through a story, building engagement, gaining credibility and letting people recognise themselves in the values the product stands for.
3. Social networking
The various social platforms are an extraordinary means of promoting a personal brand (Facebook Ads, Instagram Stories and so on) and their importance can’t be ignored. So optimize your social profiles, starting with LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, and build a community around your personal brand that you can lead, interact with and share content with.
To build your community and create and maintain valuable relationships within it, create private Facebook groups, take part in live events, or build sites where members can access exclusive content for a small monthly fee. And don’t forget to:
- follow the influencers in your field;
- keep an active presence online;
- take part in discussions on the various platforms;
- create quality content and share it regularly;
- reply to comments and objections.
4. Blogging
Having a personal blog or site is an important component of a personal brand, so it has to be properly optimized for conversion and able to give the visitor the best possible user experience (UX).
The blog or personal site is also your calling card, the first touchpoint through which the audience interacts and forms its judgement about the brand and the business. Particular care therefore has to go into optimizing certain key elements of the homepage and the site’s landing pages, among them:
- logo: it has to look professional, ideally created by a designer;
- value proposition: it has to be clear and clearly visible at the top of the homepage;
- images: they have to be high quality (the brand image especially) and different from the ones used on social profiles;
- social proof: add the logo of every publication or outlet that has mentioned you, along with customer testimonials;
- call to action (CTA): make sure your content always carries a clear CTA and that the links work;
- about page: the page where you can tell your story and let your audience get to know you;
- product/service page: make sure every product and service is listed properly and that converting is simple for your visitors;
- contact page: make sure the details on your contact page are correct.
5. Visibility
Another important component to think about in online personal branding is an effective strategy for brand visibility. Immediate visibility can basically be bought through paid advertising or PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.
The other route, over the medium to long term, is SEO techniques — to help content rank organically in the search engine results page (SERP) — and growth hacking.
Other ways of gaining visibility:
- Digital PR: public relations on digital channels but also on outbound ones — TV, radio, print;
- Guest blogging: a link building technique consisting of writing and publishing articles and pages your audience reads on someone else’s blog;
- Public speaking: taking part in meetups, live events and conferences your audience cares about.
Personal branding examples
To understand exactly what this involves — and for inspiration — here are some examples of successful personal branding, well known and less so.
1. Steve Jobs
Free to use image from Google.com
The charismatic co-founder of Apple, remembered not least for turning his presentations into unique events. Careful, scrupulous, a perfectionist and a lover of design, he never left anything to chance. On personal branding, Steve Jobs left us a great deal with that famous address to students at Stanford University. The video on YouTube (here it is) has already had more than 32 million views.
Three short quotes gathered by Henna Inam (found here):
- “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. […] And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
- “Think different […] the ones who see things differently […] the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
- “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful — that’s what matters to me.”
2. Richard Branson
Free to use image from Google Images
Branson is a perfect example of how well-fed personal branding can make someone’s professional fortune.
He did badly at school and left at 16. Even so, through his fighting, adventurous spirit, he became a multimillionaire entrepreneur. The traits of his character show up in every deal, and in every talk, seminar and conference he takes part in.
Consider how he founded Virgin Airways:
Branson had to take a flight from Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands, but few people had booked and the flight was cancelled. Almost as a game, Branson called a private company, chartered a plane and wrote on a blackboard “Virgin Airways $39 one way to the British Virgin Islands”. The flight filled quickly and marked the birth of the airline (Swati Joshi).
On personal branding he said: “A brand is much more than a name or a logo: it’s a promise and a contract with every customer you deal with.”
3. Serena Basetti
An example of how personal branding can be done with unconventional marketing techniques. Frustrated at being unable to find work, under the pseudonym “Saradisperata” she published a provocative post in 2006 on a blog created for the purpose, titled “I’m selling myself for a job”.
In it she said she was ready to spend a night with someone in exchange for a permanent contract with a minimum salary of €1,200. The post caused an uproar, gathering 3,500 comments in a short time and being picked up by the media. Within a week she had an offer to write and publish a book, which went on to do reasonably well.
Personal branding tools
In an age of digital transformation, the tools for self branding have changed too. LinkedIn above all, but also Google Hire, Xing, Meetup, Spiceworks and Data.com are the new promotional instruments.
Add to those a whole set of personal branding tools:
1. Canva
Canva (here it is) is a design tool that lets you create and customise graphic projects easily and intuitively, even without particular technical skill.
2. Google Alerts
Google Alerts (find it here) is a free tool from Google for monitoring your web reputation. It lets you track web pages and set up alerts, received by email, when particular words and topics are used.
3. Mention
Mention (go to site) is a social media monitoring platform, doing much the same job as Google Alerts but on social media too. With it you can track words and topics across various web platforms. If you’re building a personal brand, the tool is well suited to monitoring every mention, even in its free version.
4. Klout
Klout was one of the best-known web applications and was considered reliable for assessing the level of influence your content generated across platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare and so on). It scored influence from 0 to 100, and to use it you simply connected your social accounts. The service has since closed, but the idea of measuring influence with a single score lives on in other tools.
5. Meetup
Meetup (site) is a platform connecting people in the same area who share interests. Meetups are real gatherings where members and organisers come together in person to meet, talk and pursue activities around their shared interests.
The platform is therefore a solid means for anyone wanting to keep building their brand offline.
Personal branding: books
Here are some of the most widely recommended titles on personal branding.
1. Luigi Centenaro and Tommaso Sorchiotti: Personal Branding. Promuovere se stessi online per cercare nuove opportunità
A comprehensive book, recommended particularly for anyone approaching personal branding for the first time. In Italian.
2. Riccardo Scandellari: Fai di te stesso un brand. Personal branding e reputazione online
Known online by the name of his blog, Skande, Riccardo Scandellari addresses everyone who needs to build a brand and to earn and manage the visibility that comes with it. In Italian.
3. Seth Godin: Purple Cow. Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Author of numerous international bestsellers and one of the world’s best-known marketing bloggers, Seth Godin explains how to put a purple cow (something remarkable, unexpected, exciting) into everything you devise, so as to arrive at a product that doesn’t go unnoticed. The book is a manifesto for anyone wanting to create products or services that stay in the memory.
Conclusion
By now you’ll have a clearer idea of what personal branding is and how to do it, what to do to make your personal brand known, and which techniques and tools to use.
Every technique in this lesson is covered in more depth in the earlier lessons of our Growth Hacking Academy — because yes, if you were wondering, growth hacking can be used for personal branding.
So go and read the earlier lessons and stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy. In the lessons ahead we’ll go deeper into what growth hacking is and the techniques and tools it uses.
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