Personal Branding

How does a personal brand looks like?

Personal branding is an intentional effort to create an Influencer public perception on you while positioning yourself as authority in your Industry and career by elevating credulity and differentiating yourself in competition.

To have the insight about your personal brand, you should ask yourself first -what are you really passionate about? What do you love doing? what do you think your strongest attributes are? What sets  you apert from others?

The Benefits of a Strong Personal Brand

Apart from pumping up your ego, what tangible benefits can a powerful personal brand deliver? For starters, Visible Experts make more money. Often, a lot more. The chart below shows the relative billing rates for each Visible Expert level.

Figure 1. Relative Hourly Rates Buyers Will Pay, By Visible Expert Level

As you can see, buyers are willing to pay over 13 times more for a Global Superstar than an average professional. But even Level 1 experts hold a significant advantage over their undistinguished brethren.

The reason stars can charge more is that many buyers are willing to pay a premium for experts they believe in. They are willing to shell out extra for the confidence that a Visible Expert will bring more knowledge and experience to their problem, solving it more quickly, and with greater precision. Higher billing rates aren’t the only benefit. Here are a few others:

• Highly visible experts attract more media attention. When a reporter needs an authoritative quote, they reach out to the experts most closely associated with the issue at hand.
• Well-branded experts also are able to secure valuable partnerships more easily, and with more desirable organizations.
• And as I mentioned earlier, they attract better quality clients, too. In many cases, clients will seek out an expert — cutting out the competitive proposal process entirely. That’s when you know it’s working!
• Experts with strong personal brands also benefit their firms. As a result of the halo effect, an expert’s reputation often spills over to the organization he or she works for. This relationship can have very real effects on a firm’s brand and business development prospects. According to our research, about two-thirds of Visible Experts on average have this remarkable effect on their firms.

What about buyers? What types of experts do they seek out most? The following chart shows that Level 4 experts are most in demand.

Figure 2. Buyer Demand (% of Buyers) for Visible Experts by Level

You may notice that demand grows at a steady rate through Level 4, then drops off sharply. Why aren’t Level 5 experts getting the love? The answer almost certainly has to do with their sky-high fees, which dampen demand. Of course, when you can charge thirteen times more, you don’t need as many clients.

The 7 Critical Tools for Personal Branding

One of the most important things we learned from our research was which marketing tools have the greatest impact on an individual’s personal brand. Without this data, we’d have to select our tools based on unreliable anecdotal evidence, trial and error and intuition. But you’ve got a better option: hard data from scores of real-world professionals.

Here are the top tools from our study, rated on a 1 (least impactful) to 10 (most impactful) scale:

Figure 3. Total Impact of Tools

My takeaways?

• Clearly, writing a book is an effective way to demonstrate your expertise and build visibility. And if you look around at the highest profile experts in your field, chances are most of them have written one or more books.
• The next two items are forms of public speaking engagements. The best-known experts speak frequently to large groups, including prospective clients and industry peers.
• Websites — both firm sites and personal ones — appear on the list. Not all Visible Experts have personal websites, though Level 4 and 5 experts often do.
• These individuals tend to write frequently, including blog posts, articles and monthly columns.
• And they use two somewhat wonkish (at least to a non-marketer) marketing tools: email marketing and SEO. These may sound like a lot of bother, but believe me — they are critical to your success. Without these two tools, the others will be far less effective.

So let’s boil down what we’ve learned. Here are the seven critical tools you will need to include in your personal branding strategy.