Cofounder of The Market Vibe , a digital marketing agency that helps brands enter their next phase of growth.
What do LeBron James, Selena Gomez, Richard Branson and Serena Williams have in common? Excellent personal branding.
In the Harvard Business Review, executive coach Harrison Monarth defines personal branding as something “much more intentional” than your reputation; it is “how you want people to see you” (emphasis his). And the good news is that you don’t have to be LeBron James, Selena Gomez, Richard Branson or Serena Wiliams to benefit from personal branding.
My wife and I have promoted our digital marketing agency with a roughly 50-50 split between personal and business content. We’ve seen seven benefits in particular from leveraging personal branding to market our business.
1. Building Trust And Familiarity
Nielsen conducted a study in 2013 and found that 60% “of global consumers” who have access to the internet “prefer to buy new products from a familiar brand rather than switch to a new brand.” It’s not a recent statistic, but it remains a telling one. People have always wanted to know who they’re doing business with, and that’s not going to change.
Personal branding is a great way to build trust and familiarity with prospective and existing customers. For example, in my industry, a lot of similar information is circulated online about digital marketing strategies. You can go to a dozen digital marketers and get almost identical general tips. But with personally branded content, you will stand out for who you are in addition to what you offer.
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By pulling back the curtains of your business, you’ll enable people to peek into the day-to-day of running your business. Demystifying the process will help you create the familiarity that will keep your brand top-of-mind.
2. Becoming More Relatable
While building trust and familiarity, you’re also becoming more relatable to prospective and existing customers.
They’ll see the trials and tribulations that come with running your business. Writing in Inc., AJ Agrawal, who was the CEO of Alumnify at the time, described “how powerful it is when someone tells us a personal story that relates to his or her business.”
When you think about some of the most well-known companies today, like Apple and Amazon, chances are their origin story is one of the first things that comes to mind. Origin stories remind us that many people who reached incredible heights didn’t start out on top. Everyone has to start somewhere.
3. Standing Apart From The Crowd
It sounds contradictory, but in addition to making you more relatable, personal branding can help you stand out from the crowd.
One of my agency’s clients is a great example of this duality. She sells stationery products. For the most part, people view stationery products from different companies in a similar light. However, with personal branding, this client has been able to showcase her witty personality, giving her brand a unique flavor that sets her apart. Her videos show potential and current clients that she’s relatable and that she brings an “it” factor to the table.
4. Not Having To ‘Sell’ As Much
When people know what to expect from you, you won’t have to sell them as much on your products or services.
Thanks to our personal branding efforts, when my wife and I get prospective customers on the line they’re already familiar with us through our content; they’ve seen what we have to offer. They aren’t shopping around quite as much to compare our digital marketing services to other agencies. Instead, we’ve found that they’re typically using that sales call more as an introductory call to get started.
5. Getting The ‘Trickle-Down’ Effect
With personal branding, you can build a stronger, longer-term foundation as a familiar, trustworthy business. That will help you re-up existing clients and win new ones.
Remember that Nielsen study I referenced above? When people know who you are and what you stand for, they’re more likely to turn to you when they’re ready to make that particular purchase. Think about the companies you opt for in your own life.
For example, you probably don’t need to board your dog often, but when you do, you might be more likely to turn to the local dog boarding business that posts behind-the-scenes videos of staff playing with the dogs in their care. That’s a brand you’ve been exposed to, and you probably feel it is a safer bet than a competitor whose ads you’ve seen online.
6. Expanding Your Reach
Some of the most popular videos that circulate on our social media feeds these days can be classified as “edutainment.” By producing personally branded content, you can expand your reach on social media.
For example, as was reported by The Drum, as “fintech continues to accelerate, financial brands are looking for ways to create deeper and more meaningful connections with consumers.” So much so that edutainment “content, which blurs the line between education and entertainment, is booming on TikTok and has helped propel finance into the fastest-growing category on TikTok in South East Asia.”
I’ve seen the popularity of edutainment with our own personal branding efforts. If you put one of our personally branded videos next to one of our business-branded ones, 80 to 90% of the time, the personally branded one performs better. My theory is that people enjoy learning in a fun way from one video instead of watching videos that are strictly for entertainment or videos that are strictly “all business.”
7. Gaining More Unique Opportunities
Personally branded content is, in short, a way to market your business more implicitly—and it just happens that it can help you secure more ways to implicitly market your business, like speaking engagements and collaborations.
The personally branded content my wife and I have uploaded to our personal social media accounts has gotten us speaking engagements that we might not have obtained otherwise. People see who we are as people, as a married couple and as digital marketing experts, and invite us to speak at events. These speaking engagements have helped us continue to position ourselves as thought leaders in this space—creating a loop of personal branding success.
Creating personally branded content doesn’t necessarily have to be a complicated process. In the second (and last) part of this series, I’ll give you some tips that will help you build a great personal brand.
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