This January, Generation Next has looked into how developing a personal brand is a crucial step to build your network and profile among the business community. In this blog, we’ve wrapped up our learnings from the month.
What are the benefits of creating a strong personal brand?
The main benefit of creating a personal brand is that it can be instrumental in attracting potentially valuable business contacts. People are more likely to trust someone with a positive reputation, and a personal brand can help you create that. Other benefits include:
- Increases your own profile as well as your company’s brand.
- A personal brand will help you become more visible online.
- It can help you appear more relatable which attracts connections.
Lucy Rennie’s three steps
Communications specialist and author Lucy Rennie ran a webinar for Generation Next members this month. She talked us through her three-step process to ensure you brand yourself as a “go-to” person for the product or service you are offering.
Creating what Lucy refers as an “intentional brand”, involves three steps:
- Clarity around who you are and your offer to create trust in your relationships
- Communicating your purpose, your story and what you stand for
- Connecting with the right people, and creating a bank of “cheerleaders”.
Generation Next recommended read: This is just a snapshot of Lucy’s work, and you can read more about it in her book Clarity, Communication & Connection: Three Clear Steps to Future-Proof your Business. It is a great read if you want to know more about attracting and retaining more of the right kind of people who will invest in your product or service.
How do we go about creating a personal brand?
From our learnings in the past month, we’ve compiled some steps to get you started when creating a personal brand.
- Have a purpose
- This is something you want to be known for within your community.
- Be the best version of yourself
- This will help you become more relatable in the eyes of your clients.
- Share your story
- How did you get where you are? Telling your true narrative through a variety of creative ways such as video or a personal website, can once again help you create an authentic persona. Take a look at our awards programme as an avenue to share your achievements over the past year and get your name out there.
- Target the right people
- As we’ve learnt from Lucy, you need to find the right people to believe in your story and they will follow where you go.
- Be consistent with your strategy
- Once you’ve created your brand and you’ve got an audience, you need to consistently engage with them. This could be through digital content or by attending events within your business community.
- Let others share your story
- Once you’ve built a following, you can allow others to tell your story for you. Word of mouth can be the best form of PR.
To do the above, there are a series of tools which can help you, including:
- Social media – LinkedIn is particularly great for profile building
- Video and content creating platforms, such as TikTok, Lumen5 and Canva
- Grammarly
- WordPress
To sign up to our programme of events for the year, enquire about membership today or talk to our team at gennext@emc-dnl.co.uk.
