When I kick off a keynote and share the benefits of personal branding, audience members get excited. They are enthusiastic about the potential of increasing their success and happiness at work, and they are motivated to align who they are with what they do and how they do it.
Later on in the presentation, I share the actions required to build and maintain a strong brand – so they can take advantage of the incredible benefits. That’s when a bit of stress creeps in. Participants are eager to experience the rewards of a personal brand, but they are concerned about how much time and effort it will take to create communications material and make it visible to their target audience.
Here’s the great news. Regularity is more important than effort. You need not devote an hour a day on branding to be successful. Here are three ways to make automatic deposits in your personal brand bank. You don’t have to make personal branding your full-time job.
1. Be Persistent
There are three important Cs when it comes to branding – clarity, consistency and constancy. The third C – constancy – is all about being ever-visible to decision-makers and influencers. Strong brands are not binary, and they don’t go into hiding. So you need a plan to be regularly visible. Before executing your communications, develop a plan for the frequency of your branding actions.
To make this happen:
- Identify the kinds of content you want to communicate. Make sure it will be valuable to your target audience and will allow you to express your point-of-view – what you want to be known for.
- Commit to what seems like a reasonable frequency. It might be one communication per week or one per month. Choose a realistic timeline that you have the discipline to execute.
- Choose communications tools you enjoy. As long as they will reach your target audience, choose activities that will not induce dread when you think about creating them.
- Create a stash of long-shelf-life content (timeless content that has no expiration date). Use it to supplement what you create regularly so that when you’re crunched for time, you can reach into your “content cupboard” and find relevant messages.
- Don’t begin executing your communications plan until you have a supply of material built up in your content cupboard – about 10-20% of a year’s activities.
2. Be A Magician
No, I am not suggesting that you saw a woman in half or make a dove appear from a handkerchief, but I do recommend that you turn one thing into many. Never think of any individual branding action as a sole activity. Build multiplicity into your media plan to amplify the impact with little additional effort.
To make this happen, generate content with the intent of creating different versions using different media to expand visibility. For example, if you speak to your local professional association, turn that one live event into a series of online personal brand communications:
- Have your presentation video taped so you can create a series of clips that you can publish on your YouTube channel
- Have still photos taken of your presentation and post them to Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
- Create a PDF of your PowerPoint slides and post it to SlideShare
- Integrate your SlideShare post into your LinkedIn profile
- Turn the content from your presentation into a Blog post (or a series of Blog posts) and use the LinkedIn long-form publishing platform to share it
3. Be A Bean Counter
Measure the success of what you’re doing. Without evaluation, you’ll never know if your personal branding effort is futile. You need to measure the success of your different actions so you can refine your communications plan and spend time on just those activities that drive the best result for your personal branding. Determine what works and do more of that.
To make this happen, evaluate your communications using some of the following measures:
- # of views
- social actions - #of likes, shares and comments
- increase in followers, fans and connections
- impact on your target audience. Identify the communications efforts that attract your ideal target audience and bring you closer to your goals.
It’s true that effective personal branding requires creating and executing a communications plan, but this shouldn’t be onerous or stressful. Follow the three steps above to be ever-visible to your target audience – giving them valuable content that expresses your point-of-view with the greatest possible efficiency.
Learn more about building your personal brand. Download my complete list of 50 eye-opening questions to ask yourself when uncovering your brand here.
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