First of all I want to apologize for being gone for so long. I have been working on a new business and it has taken all my time for the past couple months. It launched just last week and while any new start-up is an uphill battle, things are looking good so far!
As I worked on this new venture, the concept of personal branding came up time and time again and so I thought that I would talk a little about what I have learned over the past few months of planning and launching this new business.
- Branding is about creating a perception of you and the business you operate as being of value to your potential clients.
- Branding puts you at the top of people’s thinking when they consider buying your product/service within your chosen niche.
- Branding makes you stand out from the crowd when people are choosing who they will buy from or work with.
So … how do you begin the process of branding yourself to your niche?
First of all take some time and decide what kind of business you want to build. You cannot brand yourself as an expert in a particular niche if you do not like working in that niche or with the people who populate that niche. When you have no desire to work in a particular area, you will not do your best for either yourself or your clients. You need to only consider niches that wake you up in the morning and keep you up at night!
Next, you need to decide how your skills can benefit those who work/play in the niche that you have chosen. Think about what they might want and need. Find out their likes and dislikes. Then design your business and your brand around what will cause them to take notice of you.
Then, establish a marketing campaign that will do two critical things: generate leads and convert the leads into customers/clients. This is where most people fall short in their branding efforts. They spend lots of time designing logos and developing their slogans, but when those things are done the campaign to get all of that out to potential customers/clients just doesn’t happen.
You should always keep the whole picture in view while building your personal brand. That “whole picture” requires lots of innovative thinking that will not only give you place as an expert in your chosen niche, but will also create a system that will market your expertise to that niche.
Just my thoughts ….