Tags – Online Personal Branding
The face of business has seen more change in the last 20 years than a combination of centuries beforehand.
It is true that businesses (and brands) are primarily driven by human connections. However, how we form those connections has been transforming at an unprecedented pace.
And I am willing to state that, even though physical interactions still stand supreme, your personal brand now resides online.
And this shift began in 2003.
The Launch of LinkedIn
LinkedIn has been a game changer.
A platform that started as a website to enlist people’s online CVs, LinkedIn has quickly evolved into a virtual playground to find, meet, and learn about other professionals. It took a decade or so for LinkedIn to become supreme when it comes to online networking, but the last 2 years have shifted the whole grounds for personal branding.
With Covid playing its part, personal branding has shifted online.
But that does not mean that the underlying principles of personal branding have changed.
Principles of Personal Branding
Personal branding is developed around 3 principles:
You need to be genuine; you need to stand out; and you need to provide compelling value through whatever you do. What has changed is: how you instigate the whole process of developing your personal brand. And we have seen this continually in recent years: First impressions now happen online. Here, you can do quite a bit to get on the right footing.
Managing 1st Impressions Online
This is your chance to align your personal brand online with who you really are.
Let’s start with the basics: make sure that your profile is up to date. Doing so is not just important from the perspective of being found and people reading your profile, but also from the perspective of keywords; i.e. what people search for on LinkedIn. Changes are that search is going to become your primary source of traffic, before your personal branding kicks in.
Next, work on developing your relationships with your connections. This is your chance to become visible and start adding value to the people you are talking to.
From here, reverse your efforts: try to take the connections into the real world, interact over email, and run events where you invite your connections etc. I suggest making interactions like these a habit. This way, you will keep adding people to your ecosystem and remain in touch with them. Otherwise, there is little point in working on your personal branding, as you will be leaving holes in your process.
And, probably the most interesting thing here is: doing so also allows you to establish your business brand, without being too intrusive.
Demonstrating Brand Value
This is where you take the fruits of your personal branding to the next level.
Whether you arrange online meetings, send emails, interact via an event or whatever, look at how you can enhance your business brand and make it more visible.
In short, in the world of online branding, personalities drive the branding, but it still brings opportunities to highlight your business.
So whether you are adding your business branding to your slides or email signatures, keep planting the seed. This way, even if you are not converting people instantly, you are setting the stage for remaining in the memory and condition your audience to come back to you or have that sales conversation when your connections are ready.
In short, your efforts online in terms of developing your personal branding can be directly connected to your real world success.
Just make sure that you stay on top of your interactions, and have a system of taking the next steps with your connections.
If this seems too daunting, there is one more element you can add to your personal branding: video.
Adding Video to the Mix
Put simply: video is the next best thing, once you start seeing growth.
There is only so much time you can spend with each of your connections. Here, videos make it more manageable to continually share value; value that does not need to be individually communicated and can be mass shared.
Interestingly, we are exactly at that stage now.
So, if you are interested in knowing the exact steps to take to establish your personal brand, we have made a video on it, that you can check here:
To learn more, get in touch with us today.
In the meantime, check our LinkedIn Lead Generation services to find out how we can sort out your LinkedIn outreach efforts.
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