Nowadays, it is important for business leaders and entrepreneurs to develop or enhance their own personal brands because doing so can contribute to a more robust business for their organizations.
As a company’s top executive or business owner, having a personal brand gives you an opportunity to connect more genuinely with your customers. Your brand can enhance your customers’ emotional attachment to your corporate brand, in a much more personal way.
Branding brings good business
With a firmly established personal brand, you will be seen as a leader not just in your company, but also in the industry where you operate or even the wider community. This can help strengthen your network and possibly lead to better opportunities for yourself or your business.
According to LinkedIn, people who establish their professional brands and leverage their presence on the platform are 78 percent more likely to ‘outsell’ their peers who don’t. Having a personal brand makes business sense because it helps your bottom line.
In addition, a recent industry report on social media usage from top executives noted that 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when the CEO of the business uses social media and has a strong personal brand presence on digital platforms.
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Ways to boost your brands
1- Define your niche. Similar to corporate branding strategy, it helps to define your niche as a professional and business leader. Remember that your reputation is not quite the same as your personal brand. The former is the sum of how others perceive you, and the latter is what you want, intentionally and strategically, others to know about you.
It is also important to align your personal brand with the corporate brand you represent. Your brand should reflect your organization’s core values. In most start-ups, organizations also evolve to reflect their founders’ values. In many ways, such complementary alignment brings a lot of business benefits, both for the company’s chief executive or business owner and the organization.
2- This niche will become a key component of your personal branding strategy, which will be your roadmap to building and managing your brand. The Branding Journal recommends consistency in your personal branding, as doing so will help you gain the trust and respect of your audience, both offline and online.
3- Once you have determined your personal brand, the next step is to consciously make an effort to communicate it. It does not make sense to have a brand that nobody knows about. Make sure you reach out to your target audience, whether in the real world or through social platforms. This will help expand your circle of influence as well as create new connections that can contribute to your own personal brand and to your organization’s growth.
4- There may come a point when you have to reinvent yourself, and therefore there will be a need to readjust your brand. This is necessary because your personal brand needs to reflect the changes that have happened in your professional life. This is normal, and the key to successfully communicating this transition is to be authentic.
Once you realize and harness the full potential of your brand, you will have gained an important tool for achieving great success.
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