How to grow a personal brand to boost your business in 2022

Hello family, it has been a good year and I'm happy that you made it to 2022. Success awaits you & me in this year but we can't achieve it doing things the same as last year.

Annus Mirabillis - Albert Einstein

I love that statement from Albert Einstein which mean "a remarkable or auspicious year"

Today we are going to talk about building a personal brand, as I share with you my 2 cents on that subject. For I know you're in search of a purple cow effect, making a difference in your marketing and increase sales, and brand awareness. You're at the right place at the right time, this article is for you.

Your personal brand will follow you everywhere you go. It needs to be an authentic manifestation of who you are and amplify what you believe at all times. It's not an easy walk in Africa Unit Scare Park. Your personal brand is not only a reflection of series of job functions like accounting, marketing, or finance but more of a thought leadership and giving back the data and information that you know to show case that you're and expert in you line of work.

Information wants to be free - Stewad Brand

This is an expression that when you acquire knowledge and experience you should not be greedy with it and keep it to yourself. You should share it then you go and acquire more.

When people view you as a thoughtful, Opinionated, experienced, and trusted leader, they are more likely to view your work or business positively as well. So you also need to make sure that your content is all about what you represent and you're ready to stand in front of a crowd to vouch for the content you're putting out there. Sounds scary right ? It should be because you're about to be bigger and better than your industry expert and you can't wait any longer.

That’s why cultivating your personal brand can be a smart business strategy. If people admire, respect, and trust you as a leader and expert in your category, just like how they do to that industry person whom you admire in your industry or field of work they’ll easily associate your business with these positive feelings, right ?

So if you were wondering why do you need social media to help you grow more sales and traffic to your business this is for you and keep reading I have so many insightful facts for you to consider. 

How do you start building a person brand

To start building your personal brand, you need to identify your unique skills, this is something you're passionate about that you have experience and ready to share with people so that they can give you some business.

It’s critically important to define your niche and then work to appeal to your target audience. If you’re launching a business, your focus should be aligned with your business. If you want to build a personal brand, your niche should be in a specific area of your work, such as real estate, agriculture, finance, or food production.

The next step from here is very essential and you need to take your time doing this task, identify your audience. 

In as much you might want to sell to everyone you just can't do that because a 🤏🏽small list of good and qualified leads or prospects can help you grow your business significantly. So you need to thoughtfully pick your audience. 

Next, after defining your target audience start thinking about how you’ll reach them 🤔

• What content will interest them?
• What tone of voice will they respond to?
• How will you prove your value to them?

Create a pierce of content 

I would want to challenge you to do just a 300 words article and see what it can do, and don't forget to tag me after you've published it so that we can get to read it and talk about it.

I just told you one more trick about tagging on LinkedIn, because once I'm tagged all my 20K+ followers will be able to see your article on their timeline. 

So make sure that you put links to your business as you bring out value that people can get from your industry and how they can do some of the processes easily and better. Because consumers of this age are not willing to give you their money if you don't show case that you'll give them value and something extra on top of the products or services that your want them to buy from you. 

Are you the right person to grow a person brand at your company

This one here is a damn question, I don't know why I had to use it as heading but, someone here might be damn enough to ask that, but let me shed some light on that point here. 

A strong personal brand is obviously important for a CEO or head of a company because any speaking engagement, interview, or public appearance will naturally get publicity for their business.

But it isn’t just for only Mr. or Ms. Boss. If you have or among a team of talented people in an organization, with your own different special roles, you can promote the business that you work for, while they’re promoting your own personal brand as a thought leader by sharing your experience and just give your opinions publicly.

For example, let’s say you're into food manufacturing and you’ve created a range of new healthy smoothies like what Yanaya did. The people from the factory/kitchen can speak and post to healthy food lovers groups/community about their work on your new line of healthy smoothies, the ladies and dudes from operations, that the waiters and can do the same about such an experience they have serving a generation of healthy enthusiast customers and sell it, and the marketing guys can create content and share how this new line is beneficial to them personally and in doing so this whole chain is advocating for healthy food while they're driving traffic to your business by sharing your brand name and links. They also create a perspective of being the frontiers in help produce healthy food.

However, you don’t always need to talk about your business to help it. If you have expertise in other areas your audience is interested in, create content around that. It helps you reach people who’d never normally discover you or your business.

Just remember, like I said before the first step to having a personal brand is just having an opinion and being willing to share it.

After that, you can do the same preparatory work you would do when building a brand for your business.

Here are 3 Questions to ask yourself: 

1. What field (insights, ideas, etc.) can I claim expertise in?
2. What’s my specialty in that field, and how am I different than other experts in it? 
3. How would someone benefit from listening to me and following my advice?

Platforms that you can use to grow your personal brand

I personally recommend that you start with LinkedIn as your primary social media platforms, because it offers you access to so many things that as a professional person you'll need to create a personal brand then you can use the other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok as a mix to strengthen and drive more traffic, but today we're going to focus mainly on LinkedIn. 

• Fill out all sections of your profile, this strategy includes an engaging and storytelling “about” section, headline, bullets about past experiences that clearly describe the impact you had, skills (get endorsements for these!), and recommendations (request these from colleagues, clients, or mentors).
• Interact and comment your insightful comments on other influencer's posts. Find influencers that are in your area of expertise. If you leave insightful comments, they will garner likes, encouraging other people to connect with you.
• I recommend you post frequently, with this I don't mean 5-10 times per day 😂, posting once everyday can be really helpful. I know most people might also struggle with it as well, because posting once a day without any topic in mind is very difficult, trust me I've been there It’s daunting to start posting, but this is the fastest way to build a following. So you definitely need to do this and it gets easy as you gain momentum on social and when you clearly define your knowledge and interest right. Here's my advice, Post around your knowledge and interests at all times to develop that authentic personal brand.

Providing valuable, helpful content demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about. It showcases your expertise. You need to create a content strategy that is strong and authentic.

Step one, all your social media accounts, create a short bio that sets up your story and make all the content you post genuinely helpful and insightful. You want to be known as a trusted authority in your space.

Step two, is to research what subjects within your expertise are generating more traffic. You can then jump on trends relevant to your niche to make sure you’re in the conversation.

Step three, is remembering to cover several types of content. Posting only video or only text can get stale. Share different types of content across all platforms. These content types include:

1. Articles
2. Online courses
3. Info-graphics
4. Podcasts
5. Videos
6. Webinars

You can share this content on the many platforms available, including:

• Personal blog/website
• Other blogs and online publications
• Email list/newsletter
• Podcast 
• Tiktok/Reels
• YouTube
• Twitter
• LinkedIn groups

Step four, make sure your accounts look and feel worthy of your brand. Use the same, high-resolution profile photo for all of them, and delete any older posts and content that aren’t aligned with your new personal brand.

Lastly, after that you should get your personal website in order and ready for search engine optimization (SEO). This will be handy so that when your leads are engaged and ready to buy from you using those links that you added to your business they can easily reach out to you without any hustles.

Your site is a great way to get you exposure through SEO. To make sure your site is working hard to get you new visitors, keep an eye on which keywords get you the most traffic, and then optimize your site for those words. Which is a topic for for another day or how about you just get to talk to me directly on how you can do all this? 

That's it for this week, I hope you've extracted some insights from this newsletter and please subscribe to our emailing list for more exclusive updates and promotions from Digital Mate Inc.

Leon Mandigara is the CEO & Founder at Digital Mate Inc, & marketing consultant for so many brands and individuals. Want to schedule a meeting or call with him? click here.

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