The Personal Brand Opportunity
In the current world of influence and social currency, the art of Personal Branding is having a real moment. Everyone from content creators to entertainers, corporate leaders to entrepreneurs, are talking about it, because, influence = success. Right?
And if you’re a woman and you’ve spend anytime in the online business space, you’ll have heard directives telling you to just ‘get visible’, to ‘show-up’, to build the ‘know, like and trust’ factor’ through your marketing, to be ‘authentic’, ‘to be vulnerable’.
The belief being that your personal brand is you and success comes from building an intimate relationship with your following.
In short, there are a lot of people espousing the value of having one, but very few with a point of view on what it means to have real influence, beyond your number of followers, especially if you’re using it to build and grow a business and not just a following.
We aren’t in the business of building something and then trying to monetise it, we need it to drive our businesses in the right way, in line with our ambition. We need to be more strategic.
Here are five ways you should be thinking about building your personal brand as an ambitious entrepreneur.
ONE. Give it a very specific job to do.
When you’re a founder-led business, your personal brand is an important strategic lever. It’s a super power that bigger corporations don’t have, but it needs a focus. In the same way, the way you position your business should be focused around what you’re trying to achieve - you’re trying to build credibility in a certain space, to premiumise your offering, to grow your relevance within a different audience - your personal brand is just another channel for you to land it.
TWO. Know who you want to influence and why.
You’ll be infinitely more influential in a way that impacts your bottom line, when you know whom you want to influence and why. So ‘potential customers’, sure. But depending on the scale of your task and how stretchy your aspirations are, influencing your peers and the surrounding industry will be just as important. Even industry bodies and the media. They aren’t buyers, but they are potential evangelists, opinion leaders and even tastemakers, that will help to land you where you need to be.
THREE. Ground it in your ambition, not your day-to-day.
The biggest limiting factor in the world of personal branding is when business owners only think as far as using their brand to sell their services on repeat. It lacks energy and stretch. You’ll run out of ideas pretty quickly and you as the sales engine is not the future you’re trying to build. Think bigger. Where is it you want to be? What kind of opportunities do you want? What’s the nature of the work you want to be doing? Play in the biggest stretch you can muster.
FOUR. Base it on an idea, not self-promotion.
‘Personal Branding’ can feel a bit icky and overly corporate. It’s you shouting your achievements from the rooftops, hoping to be noticed by your boss. This is not that. We’re using it to actively position you and your business in a certain way and so it’s most powerful when it’s based on an idea. It might be your big, guiding mission in the world. The way you want to disrupt your industry. Your valuable difference in your space.
You aren’t self-promoting, you’re talking about an idea that helps you actively claim a space for you and for the business.
FIVE. When you do it right, it gets to be bigger than your current business.
At a certain level most entrepreneurs outgrow their businesses in their original form. They want their personal stretch and uplevel and that requires a bigger perspective on what they stand for and the spaces they might move into.
Maybe it leads to a new business idea, a significant evolution, a new career or just a stretchier set of experiences for you personally. If you’re only ever thinking about the mile-wide corner of the industry you currently work in, you’ll miss these opportunities completely. It requires a more expansive imagining of the spaces you move in.
At every level of your business journey, your personal brand is a superpower to be leveraged with absolute strategic precision. That’s when the real magic happens.
