Jeff Bezos, the founder of giant Amazon, Believes that a personal brand is what people say about a person when they leave the room. You need to consider several important points to create positive associations with your name.
Clear Positioning
Formulate the concept of a personal brand at the start: what business problems do you solve, and how will you achieve them? For example, if your field is game dev, you should not create a too severe and strict image for yourself in social networks: readers may experience dissonance.
Do not build an image of an image that is very different from the real one: it is difficult to maintain, and potential customers will feel insincerity. You are you, just marked “from company X”.
At the stage of positioning, the theory of archetypes can help. These are spacious images with recognizable characteristics. For business, they often use the system proposed by Margaret Mark in the book “The Hero and the Rebel”:
How does it work? For example, when we hear the word “hero”, we imagine a strong and confident person who, no matter what, overcomes difficulties and helps others. If you choose this archetype for your brand, you will convey confidence and the ability to solve any problems.
Do not stop at one archetype; use a bunch of several. Choose a leading model and two additional ones.
For example, as a leader, you want to create an image of not only a successful IT company but also a friendly environment for talented juniors. Then you can choose “Magician” as the primary archetype and create content for students and beginners from the “Sage” archetype. The first will show that his team can solve the most difficult tasks, and the second will show that he is ready to share his unique knowledge and experience with beginners. The tone of voice for different archetypes and segments of the target audience will differ, but not dramatically – one person writes and talks about different things.
Strategy
When you have decided on positioning, decide what you will write about. Use different types of content:
- Informational: posts demonstrating expertise = helpful articles, collections, case studies, life hacks and insights. Also – industry news, news of your company. This type will help create a reputation as a professional in your field.
- Entertaining: humor specific to your field, memes, and light texts unrelated to the main activity. Usually, something about management styles or psychological tricks you’ve tried.
- They involve surveys and questions. Ask the audience for advice or ask for their opinion. People love to be helpful.
- Selling: in a personal blog, you can recommend products and services of your company and talk about them more informally. Perhaps – to hold special promotions for readers.
There should be a balance between posts of different types: when the blog “leaves” in one of the directions, subscribers become uninteresting. Don’tDon’t forget that your brand is not a corporate blog. Readers are waiting not only for expert posts or IT industry news but also for personal stories. Think about what part of your life and daily routine you will show on the blog. If necessary, contact a content marketer to draw up a detailed plan.
Content
A personal blog gives more freedom than a corporate public one, but the quality of the content must be high. Blurry photos in the elevator, shaky videos, and grammatical errors will not work. Remember that a clear structure and meaning are essential to read the text to the end. Here’sHere’s a little cheat sheet:
- Determine the goal: the text without it is letters to the wind. Therefore, before writing anything, answer yourself the question “why?”.
- Make a plan: To avoid losing the main idea along the way, from the introduction to the conclusion, think over the structure in advance. Break the future text into paragraphs, write down the primary thoughts of each of them, and then develop and reveal them. So you can tell the story in order without breaking the logic.
- Clean up the “garbage”: when the fast is ready, let yourself and it “cool down”. Get distracted by another task, and return to the text in half an hour. So you will see it with a fresh look and remove the flaws. Feel free to throw out unnecessary pronouns, simplify turns, and break up complex sentences – you are not writing scientific work; the text should be easy to read. You can use the service “Glavred” – not a panacea, but it will highlight the excess automatically.
- Use a conversational style. No one writes on social networks in a literary language – the platform allows you to be more straight forward and relaxed. You don’t have to go into familiarity (if this is not part of your brand), but you also don’t need to make a cat of a scientist out of yourself, either 🙂
Doubt that you can write all the texts yourself? Use the services of a copywriter. Make a TOR for him with goals and objectives, and let him read your posts so he can copy your presentation style. But remember – falseness is felt and causes rejection, so be careful when choosing a specialist for this role.
Conclusions
Forming a personal brand is not just maintaining a personal page. It’sIt’s as much a job as creating ad creatives and generating leads. It requires a thoughtful, systematic approach. For example, our head of sales, CEO and sales lead their social networks.
They have a clear plan for posts on social networks: at least one personal post per week and one repost from the company group with their comment. As a result, 38% of applications in June came from a personal brand, and their conversion to closing was 73%.
For the leader’s social networks to work for the company, you need to:
- Formulate goals and objectives: why a personal brand is needed and what it will give to the business.
- Could you choose an image and stick to it? Describe the person that blog readers should represent: who he is, what he is, and how he acts. Find suitable archetypes, and define TOV.
- Think over a strategy: what will be published, when and for what purpose.
- Create high-quality content: relevant photos and videos, interesting and useful texts for the target audience.
As a result, a strong personal brand will help attract new customers, establish new business relationships, and strengthen your reputation in the IT community.
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