When you put together all the components of your brand, you need to make preparations and start taking active, systematic action.
Goals and strategy for personal promotion
Set clear and measurable goals that will clearly show that your personal brand is working, that you’re moving in the right direction.
Bad goals:
- I will be popular in small circles;
- I will be recognized at conferences;
- I’ll have a lot of followers on Instagram.
Normal goals:
- Increase my Facebook followers to 2,500 and my Instagram followers to 20,000;
- Get at least 10 referrals per month for a consultation or product through personal channels: social media, blogging, speaking engagements.
When you have clear goals, you need to make a clear and step-by-step strategy on how to reach these goals. You can use MindMap, a regular notebook, a task manager.
Nerd: Break down your goals into sections with clear indicators to keep track of whether you are doing everything right.
Communication and messaging.
You need a clear and understandable message in your communications: what and how you want to get across to your audience, what to share, what to accomplish, how to connect with your own goals.
Decide on these points:
- What you will be communicating about and what values you will be broadcasting – for example, about your company, the inner kitchen and how the corporate culture helps you stand out with an emphasis on the “company is about people” value.
- How personal your communication will be – will you cover certain aspects about family, hobbies, weaknesses.
- What channels will you use to communicate with the world and showcase your personal brand – write to the media, blog, speak at conferences, publish blog posts, arrange themed meetings, etc. It’s better to choose 3-5 channels rather than spreading yourself out over 5-10.
Planning
Without a comprehensive system, a content plan, and clear deadlines, the whole personal brand story can be over in 1-2 months.
Form a big plan for all the work you do to promote your personal brand: when and where to speak, where and what to write, what media to knock on, what to record a video about and when.
Create a unified content plan for your social media and blog posts, and try to maintain a balance between the directions and messages.
To keep a balance in your publications (business, personal, social, interesting, etc.), think about the headings/themes of your content.
Packaging
You’re about to start actively promoting your brand, but this is not a case where the first, second and tenth pancake can be a cakewalk. You need a bright and right start here, because the wrong impression and image will be hard to fix.
Get all your outfits together, find the best prom photo, and you can conquer the world. Joke. Let’s go in order:
Check the relevance and adequacy of all the information about you online – old profile on Social, random registration in the Japanese beer-loving community, etc.
Clean up/correct anything that might say negatively about your image, the vibrant brand you already so clearly represent.
Do a quality, studio photo shoot that fits the image, the value, the image, the style.
Note: a professional photo shoot is not always about a strict, business suit and pencil skirt. If you’re organizing youth events or teaching young children how to oil paint, chances are you’ll be presented differently by people. Try to be as natural and smiling as possible – it’s appealing.
Put in all social networks, messengers, mail 1 photo. Use exactly this successful portrait during publications in the media, at friends in blogs. So your avatar will start to be recognized, read, easily highlighted in the news feed.
Design all additional elements of your external image and communications (email signatures, business cards, etc.).
Implement
The most interesting part. Many people start with this stage, then something goes wrong, and it turns out you should have done some good prep work. But you’re already prepared, so you can move on to action.
Types of activity
Departing from the strategy, understand what areas and types of activity are priority, effective, available. One specialist for a personal brand is better suited to live performances, another – live broadcasts (because the geography is wider), a third – the articles in the media and personal blog.
Content, good and different
You prepare a high-quality, author’s content, which helps to achieve the goals, hits the target audience and suits the format of the site. Media articles, blog posts, live broadcasts, videos. We’ll deal with all this in the next section, but get ready now – you need content, you can’t do without communication.