Personal branding and its role in business

6 min read
Personal branding and its role in business
Picture: Dzmitry Skazau | Dreamstime
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Is a personal brand as useful for a businessman as many people think? Does it help increase sales? If so, how and what other proof does it carry? Today we will figure it out.

What is a personal brand?

Personal Brand is a marketing tool used to increase the efficiency of human interaction with the world. Simply put, it’s not how you talk about yourself, but what others think of you.
Personal branding
Picture: Airdone | Dreamstime

His influence on those around him is significant and, in fact, continuous. Basically, it works twice. The first time is when a person starts a branding campaign, and the second time is when others talk about him. That is, word of mouth is turned on.

Therefore, a personal brand can comprehensively solve several problems at once:

  • forming an attractive, positive image among customers, building trust;
  • identification of an expert, his selection among the array of competitors, increasing recognition;
  • creating a database of contractors who share the expert’s values, purchase his products or use his services;
  • sales and profit growth.
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However, the Russian mentality, a certain stereotyped and stereotyped thinking gave rise to many myths around a personal brand. Here are a couple of them that I personally encountered:

A personal brand is the lot of show business stars, athletes, politicians and tabloids. A personal brand is a way to amuse pride, an ego, but not a real tool for achieving goals.

I am sure that my further story will dispel them.

Who needs to promote a personal brand?

For many years of working with a personal brand, I can talk about those groups of people who need it. And it’s not just super-stars.

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These are private practitioners, those who are looking for a dream job, and entrepreneurs. I explain their interest as follows:

  • Word of mouth mentioned (nearly 90% of people believe in recommendations from others);
  • Large target audience coverage;
  • converting leads received through personal channels into customers;
  • • Recruit confidence that personal branding is an advantage for job seekers over competitors, as well as added value to the employer. By the way, 75% of them prefer online search for candidates, including by studying their social networks and Internet positioning;
  • and so on.

Personal Brand Components

Personal branding is not about likes and ego posts. It’s about painstaking work on yourself.
Personal branding
Picture: Dzmitry Skazau | Dreamstime

We can distinguish at least 7 components, each of which is significant and requires more than one month of study.

Building a personal brand begins with self-identification. Without it, it is almost impossible to tell others who you are, what kind of specialist, what kind of personality. Without clear positioning, you will float and lose the trust of people who feel false and insecure.

An important quality of a brand person is expertise. Think Ford, Gates, Jobs. They became known for what they knew and understood. Failures were associated with work in unknown and alien niches.

However, an expert without values ​​is an oxymoron. Values ​​are the third component of a personal brand. They mean not only work, but also life guidelines (whether you promote the institution of the family or open relationships, respect elders or do not consider it necessary to listen to their advice, and so on).

The synthesis of the above gives rise to goals. Realizing himself, his strengths and weaknesses, motivators and limitations, a person understands what he wants and what he strives for. Moreover, people respond more actively if your goals relate to society. They make contact better, they want to get to know you and use your services if you care about their well-being, about peace in the world, and not about the color of your car and the amount of gold on your body.

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However, many have goals, but the original approach is the trump card of the few. Tell others what makes you or your product/service different from your competitors, back it up with facts, and they will believe you.

From the original approach comes the image – a complete picture that you broadcast to the world. The same thing that is primary when people get to know you, and secondary when the acquaintance becomes trusting. This includes your style of dress, demeanor, gestures, speech, etc.

The last element of the brand is the legend, story. The life path that you have traveled, becoming a brand person. The more thorny and difficult it is, the more confidence in you.

If all the elements are harmonious and worked out, we get a powerful tool for interacting with others and, if you like, influencing them – a personal brand.

Above, I have already mentioned the tasks that it allows you to solve. Let’s consider them in more detail.

How a personal brand helps to sell and not only

It’s simple. A personal brand acts as a kind of marketing package that attracts the right opportunities and the right people to you.
Personal branding
Picture: Wirestock | Dreamstime

The traffic of offers and prospects for a person-brand is always high. He is constantly approached by those to whom his goals, values, expertise are important, namely:

  • customers to buy a product or service
  • Media to print his story or get a comment,
  • partners to cooperate
  • and so on.

In a word, if you are recognizable, those who need it will find you. And the longer, more thoughtfully you build your brand, the more often and better these incoming offers. They convert first into leads (those who are interested in you, but who are not yet ready to buy from you), and then into customers. The average check, respectively, increases in proportion to the growth of interest in you.

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Moreover, you can carry out sales both directly and … without sales. No cold calls or CP mailings, exorbitant fees to marketers. Only the cost of increasing brand coverage, and even then that are returned a hundredfold. One of the clearest examples is the deal of Oleg Torbosov, the owner of the Whitewill real estate agency, to sell a property for $1 million through his Instagram Direct. His subscriber expressed a desire to buy, the application was transferred to the sales department and everything went well. And why? Because Oleg is working on his image, he attaches great importance to the trust of his clients and the degree of their involvement.

Instead of an epilogue. Personal branding is not easy. But it is efficient and reliable. With its help, you can solve “unsolvable” problems for others of increasing sales, reducing costs, increasing customer involvement, and so on. But we are talking only about a competently and painstakingly built personal brand, and not fiction.
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