Insight on Winning With Your Personal Brand  

You’ve probably heard more than once that you have got to build your personal brand to compete in today’s workforce. Whether you’re applying for a babysitting job or climbing the corporate ladder, your brand helps you compete and win. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 84 percent of hiring managers use social media to hire — 96 percent use LinkedIn, and 53 percent use Twitter. Now you have the ability to control the impression you make digitally before you even step through the door for the interview, and that’s powerful!

What is part of a personal brand, and why do you really need it? A personal brand is a combination of several things, from the first impression you make with your appearance, voice, and dress to the digital footprint you’ve left behind on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to the business card you use. The Internet has certainly enabled people to brand themselves and reach larger audiences than ever before. Now you can share your ideas directly with the world through social media and connect and interact with people you’ve never met in real life.

Having a strong personal brand does more than just help you land the next job. This investment in yourself can lead to new opportunities; people are attracted to other interesting people, so let opportunity find you by creating the right environment. It also helps you tap into the six degrees of separation, discovering new people through your online and offline network.

Before you begin, do an audit by using Google to see what your brand looks like already online. Review any posts that could be damaging, and if possible, delete them. Set yourself up for success as much as you can.

Then, start by developing your unique personal brand statement. It may help to think about yourself as a business: What product do you offer and to which audiences? What makes you unique from others? In business, we call this a unique selling point (USP) or value proposition, and it’s always how we first approach marketing a product we’ve created. Remember to make sure you strike the right balance between a statement that’s reflective of who you really are but that also sells you. As in marketing, you should define your core capabilities, define your target audience, and then shape your approach to this segment. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. If you do, you’ll likely end up being nothing to anyone.

You may find it helpful to also think about your values, what you stand for, and what’s important to you. Differentiating yourself this way also helps you focus on which audiences to target. For example, I identified culture transformation, diversity and inclusion (D&I), STEM education, and travel as my key themes, and I tailor the content I create and share to these topics. This same approach applies to building the Lenovo brand by becoming a brand that people talk about. To do this, the organization aligns itself with interesting people and partners. Your personal brand is no different. Find the people who are doing things differently in your industry and align yourself with them.  Make sure you create proof points for your accomplishments that illustrate the traits you’ve identified in your personal brand statement.

Once you’ve established who you are and what you’re selling and to whom, you can start thinking about how you’ll market yourself – the channels and type of content. I’ve found blogging, sharing on social media, and posting digital thought-leadership pieces to be the most effective online tactics, and offline, I’ve focused on connecting to others in my industry through speaking roles at conferences and working with organizations in my local community that make a difference. In our approach to building the brand, we focus on fewer, bigger, and bolder initiatives. That means strategically focusing on the marketing activities that will make a difference in your brand. That also applies to the number of social media accounts – some people will advocate creating lots of accounts on different sites. I prefer to go with quality over quantity. Establish and maintain only the number of social media channels for which you can create fresh, engaging content on a regular basis. Adapt your content to how your audience engages on each channel. For example, you may create a graphic of a social media post on Instagram linking back to the blog post, but you may choose to post an abstract of your article on your LinkedIn account linking back to the blog post. Some content may not be adaptable to all your channels, so pick the ones that best suit your content.

All of these tips culminate around an important piece of advice: never stop learning. If you fail to remain relevant in your industry or your circle of expertise, then your personal brand can fade. Once you’ve built your personal brand, you have to grow and evolve it, just like a business. While this doesn’t take a lot of financial resources, it’s an investment of your time and energy. The investment pays off in terms of your relevance in the marketplace.