Introduction
In this guide we’re tackling “personal brand”.
Personal brand is a superpower if you can nail it.
I believe everyone can. You are a person. You can work from there!
Personal brand is, in short, sticking your name and face on the front-end of your business.
It makes it a lot easier, cheaper and effective to grow an Audience and Tribe and thence make sales. Yes I said “thence”, sue me.
Over the course of the guide I’ll show you my CISIP framework:
- Commit to personal brand
- Focus on your Individuality
- Nail your personal Story
- Build a consistent Identity
- How and where to Project your brand
We’ll cover one element a day as per usual. Kicking off today with a focus on what exactly personal brand is, why it’s so effective and how to commit to it.
We’ll cover:
- Part 1: Commitment to the bit
- Part 2: Harness your individuality
- Part 3: Your personal story
- Part 4: Identity crisis
- Part 5: Project and be heard
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Let’s get started:
Commitment to the bit
First up it’s my job to convince you to use personal brand.
There’s a tonne of resistance to personal brand, generally for two reasons:
- You don’t want to put your personal brand on the front of your business
- You think that personal brand doesn’t work in your industry.
On the first point (not wanting to be the face) I get it. I’m naturally introverted. I hate being on camera. I don’t like being the centre of attention.
Why I use personal branding
But I know that the benefits of personal branding are too powerful to ignore.
Today, just today, which is a Saturday my personal brand has brought in 1 partnership deal, 2 inquiries for 1:1 coaching and 3 requests for requests for corporate training.
All landing in my email and DMs – inbound rather than me chasing people. And none of these people knew me on Friday.
The net value of those (if they come to fruition) is probably $20k+
That’s from me sitting down and recording a 3 minute video. My face, my voice. Explaining a topic that I know a bunch about.
People do business with people. They need to know, like and trust the person before deciding to work with or buy from the business. Personal brand accelerates this process exponentially.
Would this have happened if:
- my profile picture was a logo?
- my writing was corporate?
- my videos were highly produced, edited animations?
Nope.
And the ironic thing is that doing it using the personal touch is much cheaper and faster than the “produced” route.
Higher upside and lower cost. In business we call that an absolute no brainer.
What about AI?
You may have seen the newer AI avatars. Basically tools that allow you to make an AI replica of your image and voice.
It’s super impressive technology. And super powerful for a lot of companies.
Does this mean you can avoid putting your face out there?
Technically yes. But I don’t think that’s the play.
As these AI avatars become cheaper and easier it’ll become the default.
By sticking with raw, authentic less produced video and text you’ll distinguish yourself. You’ll stand out amongst the mass of beige boring AI avatars.
This sounds a bit anti-AI right? In this particular case yes!
I think AI is really useful at dealing with certain tasks. And the reason we’d want these tasks done by an AI is so that we can free up our time for more creative personal tasks.
Like building a personal brand!
We free up capacity using AI precisely so we can double down on the thing that humans are better at doing – being human!
B2B and personal marketing
OK what about the more “corporate” B2B companies. Surely you can’t put your personal touch on the brand right?
Nah. Of course you can.
Businesses are still composed of people. And people do business with people.
LinkedIn for example – the most successful content on LinkedIn is from people, not company accounts.
If you’ve ever set up a company page on LinkedIn you’ll know this struggle. It’s easy to get personal profile connections and impossible to grow your company page. Nobody cares.
Coming back to my recent video that brought in partnership and consultation offers. 2 of them saw me on TikTok and then reached out to me on LinkedIn. And one of them works with a sovereign wealth fund.
It’s all very B2B but again they connected with me because I’m a human being, not a brand. Personal trumps professional.
If you are starting or growing your own business there’s also the hard fact that it’s impossible to outspend most large corporations on advertising.
Personal branding is your competitive advantage. Hell, massive conglomerates wish they had a personable face. Why do you think Nike pay athletes so much to feature in their adverts? Why do you think perfume adverts are all fronted by celebrities?
Leverage your comparative advantage.
Find the personal brands
Hopefully you are already warming to the idea of developing and deploying a personal brand. We’ll build on that over the week.
For now though what I find is helpful is reviewing the other personal brands in your sector.
You’ll need an AI with internet access for this. A paid version of ChatGPT or alternatively use the free version of Perplexity.
Here’s a prompt:
Act as a marketing research assistant
Help me find strong personal brands in my industry.
My industry is [niche]
Find individuals who leverage their personal brand to expand their reach online
Find me 3 x large, 5 x medium and 10 x small accounts
For each provide their primary platformFor this example I plugged in “business coaches in the UK” as the niche. Go as niche as possible for best results.
Here’s what ChatGPT returned:
Perfect – these are all solid accounts to look into. It’ll generate large, medium and small accounts.
Your task is just to visit these personal accounts and have a look at how they have positioned themselves. Look for inspiration.
One caveat here: it’s easy to look at these polished profiles and lose hope. Remember that these are the end goal – not where we’ll be starting!