The benefits of putting effort into a personal brand are endless; from building awareness for your vocation online to being invited to speaking events. It’s truly one of the best new business development and/or marketing tactics being used today.
We’ll let you in on a little secret…
Developing a personal brand takes a long time and it’s not uncommon for personal-branders to get caught up in the limelight or looking flashy, while they should focus more on building true relationships and delivering a quality product or service.
In order to build a personal brand you need to be willing to put yourself out there in a somewhat unfiltered way (format doesn’t matter) while delivering consistent value and insight for your ideal clients.
In this episode of In the Know, Andrew interviews David Knox of David Knox Productions (“the Netflix of Real Estate Training”) on starting a personal brand in business.
Now we’ll delve into some of the main talking points.
Direct Prospecting
What’s the point in building a personal brand that doesn’t yield the desired results? Answer: there isn’t.
You need to start with identifying for whom your content will solve problems. Until that occurs – you’re just guessing as to what type of content to put out, which networking events and webinars to attend, etc. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our High Level episode regarding ideal clients.
Beyond that it’s essential you get out in front of ideal clients, industry peers, and other thought leaders to build those relationships – they will become your tribe.
Once these two critical items are sorted, as David touches on in the episode, the rest becomes easy:
- type of content to produce
- best platforms to publish on
- producing messaging that will resonate
Building Familiarity
As the direct prospecting and client interactions commence, you can always document your experience while providing value in the process.
Example:
You meet Wendy at a conference and she seems interested in your services. You connect on LinkedIn that day and follow up a few weeks later – to no avail.
If you are producing content that speaks directly to her pain points and you provide unique insight to her situation regularly – it only strengthens her perception of your ability and she’ll soon think of you as an expert in this regard.
Think of it as the most friendly, non-intrusive drip campaign imaginable:
“Oh, hey there’s Robert again on my feed talking about why my close rate is so low… maybe I should shoot him a message to see how he would help me with this.”
And therein is the importance of not only prospecting correctly but using your personal brand to build familiarity.
Taking Things to the Next Level
When done right, personal branding can afford many unique opportunities that most “mere mortals” typically don’t experience:
- Speaking events
- Podcast invites
- Notoriety / awards
- Peer recognition
- Business offers
- The list goes on!
David is a prime example; he has climbed from talented real estate agent to owner of a real estate training company and is effectively “on top of the brand” giving high level speeches, attending trade shows and industry events all while promoting his company.
It’s this type of branding (or marketing) that is proving to be widely successful for many different types of businesses as it’s predicated on value exchange, not salesmanship.
And, along those lines, we mustn’t fear giving away our best stuff or our secret sauce. A lot of the “vanilla” insight has already been shared, mulled over, and implemented whereas the truly unique perspectives are the ones that turn heads and get talked about. This couldn’t be more true than in the world of content and sharing thought leadership.
Example: which article would you rather read?
The Fundamentals of Marketing
OR
7 Unheard of Ways to Market Your Business in 2021?
Challenge
When we start working with certain companies, we often roll out a personal branding strategy for several key players. Here is one of the challenges we give them…
Shoot a video introducing yourself to your LinkedIn following. In it, share some of your personal and professional goals for the year and ask them to share two key pieces of advice for someone just getting started on the platform.
Start posting, start engaging, and continue building the personal brand you already have.
episode links
listen to podcast
coming soon!
hosted by
Andrew Engel
special guest
David Knox
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