Marketing Yourself: Tips for Personal Branding

Branding isn’t just about your company or the products or services you market. It’s also about you—your personality, your motivations. Successful business owners monitor and grow their personal brand alongside their organization’s brand. Below are some tips for strengthening your personal brand:

• Know who you are: Think about what makes you unique, dependable, and trustworthy. The better you understand your strengths and limitations as a person as well as a business owner, the more likely you are to build lasting relationships with clients, co-workers, mentors, and other professionals. Taking a quick online personality test like the Myers-Briggs can help you explore your motivations and evaluate your management style. That self-awareness will help you relate to everyone you encounter as you market your business.
• Reach out: Take the time to interact with your audience, and when you do, practice good storytelling. Relate the good and the bad—there is always a lesson to be learned, and honesty is crucial to building trust.
• Maintain a strong network: Leverage your personal brand to create partnerships with other organizations. Develop relationships with directors, managers, contracting officers, business owners, and C-suite executives and other high-profile professionals. These relationships will give you access to opportunities that you may not have had before.

A word of caution: Make sure you’re networking with people that will support you and help you grow. Also, make sure you’re not the smartest person in the room—if you are, you’re in the wrong room.

• Position yourself as an expert: Once you’ve gained experience in your field, market your services as a subject-matter expert—someone with the knowledge needed to teach others about that subject. Find opportunities to speak and teach at workshops, conferences, and other events, whether in person or virtually. Share your knowledge with the networks other companies have built so that you can expand your own. And encourage people to consult with you about how they can grow their business. Ideally, those consultations will be a prelude to paid work.
• Harness the power of social media: Draw your audience into the conversation. Keep them engaged with regular blogs, podcasts, and other timely content. If you’re an influencer on social media, you’re more likely than other business owners to land fruitful partnerships. If you aren’t an influencer yourself, look within your network to find one—and then find ways to partner with them.

Don’t lose sight of your personal brand when you’re marketing your business. A bit of self-knowledge and a well-kept network will strengthen your success.

Badie Designs provides marketing and branding services across a variety of industries. Contact us today for help with developing your personal brand.