Start your Personal Branding Now !!

In the age of internet and social media – reputation, trust and recognition of the promoter of an enterprise is equally important as that of the Enterprise itself. 

Article by Raj K Pathak, Brand Advisor to SMEs & Startups

NEW DELHI: Welcome to the age of Personal Branding.  It is not just sufficient to have a brand for your product or company.  What is most important is the You – the brand.  Customers, investors, bankers and small shareholders are able to identify with a company when the promoter is a trusted brand.

However often Personal Branding is mistaken as self promotion. Personal branding is about strategy to get meaningful relationships with your customers and network where asself promotion is building network of thousands of superficial connections.

Some of the most recognized  personal brand among global as well as Indian entrepreneurs are:

Robert Branson – Virgin Group

Anand Mahindra – Mahindra Group

Shiv Nadar – HCL Technolgies

Vijay Kumar Sharma- PayTM

RiteshAgarwal- OYO Rooms

So, how do you become a brand?

You start by creating your Brand Statement.  A typical brand statement can be like

“Mr. AtulKakkar is a West Africa Commodity Trading Expert”

Then create a strategy for online and offline branding.

Online Branding

You need to have presence across social media particularly LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and engage your target customers/consumers and prospective investors and business associates.  A strong presence across social media with regular updates and messages from you followed by timely replies to comments from the followers will make you a strong online brand.

You can also build a personal website and publish your profile, photos, videos, awards/achievements and activities.   Regular update of the website is very essential to bring in repeat visitors.

How to leverage your online presence?

It is very important to publish content regularly.  The content can be announcements from you about your products/services, seasonal greetings, links to your articles/press coverage and some write-up on topics related to your industry or of general interest (like ‘Effect of GST in your industry’)

You can leverage the presence of website and social media pages and can do cross branding across them.

Offline Branding

To get visible across main stream media, you need to define and implement a Public Relations strategy.  Regular interviews of you on current affairs – particularly related to your industry in Print/TV media, articles by you in the press and lectures and panel participations in Industry Seminars and Conferences will firmly establish you as a Brand among the print media readers and TV viewers.

Any media coverage/activity on you need to be immediately posted in social media and published in your website. Synergy between online and offline presence helps in giving your Brand increased visibility and results in higher Brand recall.

Wow!  Let me start doing it..

This is the thought that comes to the mind of most of us.  We the entrepreneurs think that by squeezing existing resources and contacts, we can create Personal Brand ourselves.  To some extent it works among personal contacts.

However to achieve a progressive creation of your Personal Brand – engaging professional experts will result in focused and measurable results.

Is it going to be a tough, expensive exercise?  Do you need to spend millions of rupees?

There are companies who provide these services at pocket friendly budget and engaging them will help you to focus on the strategy instead of trying to do it with your in-house resources which usually is self promotion only.

If people like you, they will listen to you,
but if they trust you, they'll do business with you.
- ZigZiglar

Start your Personal Branding Now !!