A few years ago, Hinge embarked on a research project to learn all we could about these industry stars (we call them Visible Experts®) and their personal branding strategies. Our researchers interviewed over 1,000 Visible Experts and buyers of their services to figure out what was going on and exactly what they did to develop and market their personal brands. We published our findings in a groundbreaking book, The Visible Expert.

Today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: most of these Visible Experts aren’t much different from the rest of us. In fact, many of them admit that they aren’t the smartest or most knowledgeable people in their fields. They weren’t born writers. They weren’t born orators. And most weren’t born with exceptional charisma.

Instead, they developed their personal branding strategies the hard way, through trial and error. That means each one of them followed a different path, trying and discarding a host of tools and techniques along the way.

By the end of this article, you will have a powerful advantage that these experts didn’t: a concise summary of the research-based personal branding strategies that are proven to increase your reputation and visibility as an expert.  So you won’t have to experiment. Even better, I’m going to give you a detailed roadmap that you can follow, step-by-step, to greater visibility and reputation.

Before we jump in, however, I want you to know there is one vital characteristic you will need to take your personal brand and career to the next level — the determination to see it through. Take it from me, there will be bumps and obstacles along the way, and you may need to make occasional course corrections to get back on track. But that’s okay. A little adversity comes with the territory, and you need to be prepared to push through the inevitable head winds.

Now, the last thing I want to do is discourage you. Building a successful personal brand—one that propels you to prominence in your field is actually easier than it looks.

Remember, from the bottom of the mountain the summit always looks unattainable. But if you focus on the process of getting there—taking one small step at a time—you’ll find yourself looking down with amazement at the world you left behind. It’s a journey well worth taking!

Who This Article Is For

I’ve developed this roadmap for any service professional, expert or executive who wants to build a personal brand but doesn’t know where to start. It’s also for marketing directors at professional services firms who are tasked with making their organization and people more visible.

Whether you are a solopreneur or work at a Fortune 100 firm, the process I lay out is the same. I have one caveat, however. Whatever your role, there is one fundamental I can’t teach you — you have to have bona fide expertise in your field. There’s no faking expert knowledge.

What is Personal Branding?

A personal brand is the combination of an individual’s visibility and reputation among their customers and peers. Personal branding is a program of activities designed to elevate a person’s visibility and improve their reputation. As they become better known and respected, these individuals grow in eminence and earning power.

Personal Branding Examples

To bring this concept of personal branding to life let’s consider a few examples. For an expert working in the professional services industry, examples of personal branding are focused on building their visibility and credibility as an expert. Consider an experienced architect who specializes in modern bridge design. They might address both their visibility and reputation by speaking at industry conferences where they can showcase their expertise and describe some of the innovations they’ve implemented in their work.

If this architect were to work with a public relations specialist they might further build their visibility and reputation by connecting with journalists and other influencers in the architecture industry. A PR professional might book appearances on a few podcasts and perhaps arrange an interview in a prestigious magazine.

Another way this expert could build their personal brand is by writing regular thought leadership pieces on their firm’s blog. They could then share this content with their connections on LinkedIn. And if they optimize their blog posts for search engines, they can be found by a whole new audience—one that will only grow over time.

So with this definition and examples in mind, what does a personal branding strategy look like?

What Is a Personal Branding Strategy?

A personal branding strategy is a plan to take your reputation and career from relative obscurity to high visibility. It describes where you stand today and what level of visibility you want to achieve in the future. Then it lays out in detail the tactics, tools and skills you will need to attain your goal, including the daily content calendar that will guide your daily journey. A carefully planned strategy takes the uncertainty out of your quest for Visible Expertise so that you can concentrate on carrying it out.

A modern personal branding strategy is strongly rooted in content marketing. In fact, most of the skills and tools described in this roadmap are components of content marketing — but as they apply to building your personal brand. If you are new to content marketing, or if you just want a refresher, I suggest you read over our free Content Marketing Guide for Professional Services.

The Five Levels of Visibility

In our book, The Visible Expert, we identify five progressively more visible levels of expertise:

Level 1: Resident Experts. These experts are well respected within their firms and by their clients, but they have little visibility outside of those audiences. Most Visible Experts start their journey here.

Level 2: Local Heroes. These individuals are beginning to become known outside of their firms. They are more active in their local business communities, often speaking at business functions and blogging. They may even bring a little new business to their firm.

Level 3: Rising Stars. These experts have developed a regional reputation. They are fairly well known among peers in their area, and they speak and write frequently on their area of expertise. Rising Stars tend to bring in higher-quality business and charge higher fees.

Level 4: Industry Rock Stars. These names are well known across the nation for their niche areas of expertise. They attract premium clients and fees. As a result, they become significant assets to their firms.

Level 5: Global Superstars. The world’s elite experts, Global Superstars have broken out of their niches and become recognized more broadly in their industries. They command the highest fees, and firms around the world want to be associated with them.

Your first job is to figure out which of these levels describes you today. Then you need to decide what level of expertise you would like to achieve.

Before you jump immediately to Global Superstar, keep in mind that each successive step requires more effort and time than the step below it. For instance, it’s generally easier to move from Resident Expert to Local Hero than from Industry Rock Star to Global Superstar. To become a global household name, you will probably need to invest much of your free time. Are you obsessive and dedicated enough to pull it off? Only you can answer that.

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.

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

The reason Visible Experts 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 benefits do they get by working with Visible Experts? In the following chart from our research on Visible Experts and their buyers, we learn that there are many ways that businesses benefit from working with Visible Experts.

As you can see from the data, Visible Experts not only solve problems more quickly, they make their clients better, too. They teach clients new things, bring new ideas to the problem at hand, and increase the credibility of the teams they work with.

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 experts. 

Here are the most impactful marketing techniques Visible Expert use to raise their visibility and build their reputations in the marketplace:

What can we learn from this data? Here are my takeaways:

• Public speaking is the most impactful marketing technique Visible Experts can use to build their personal brand. Not only do experts benefit from the various conferences and speaking opportunities they attend, they can use their history of speaking to build their credibility over the long term. They can place a list—and even video clips—of their previous speaking engagements on their bio page. This record makes it easier to get more speaking activities in the future.
• Writing a book is an effective way to demonstrate your expertise and build visibility—this has been true ever since we began studyings Visible Experts over a decade ago. And if you look around at the highest profile experts in your field, chances are most of them have written one or more books.
• Every expert needs a platform to publish written articles, videos and other expert materials. That be a personal website or their firm’s website. What’s important is that there is a centralized place where all this great content is organized and accessible.

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:

1. A book. Whether you do it yourself or enlist a ghostwriter, you will need to produce a book that addresses your area of expertise. A book is a critical credibility builder. Your book can be traditionally published or self-published. Traditionally published book can deliver instant credibility, but self-published books (for which you can set the price or give away for free) offer more flexibility. Either way, you will also need to promote it, since even name-brand publishers rely on their authors to do most of the marketing. A book can be a heavy lift, so don’t feel like you have to tackle it right away. But set a firm goal to produce one in the next couple of years, if not sooner.

2. Speaking engagements. Public speaking is an important platform for building your reputation and personal brand. Audiences are predisposed to trust anyone who stands at a podium, so just getting there is half the battle.

3. A website. If you are part of a larger firm, you’ll want to focus first on your bio page. It should present sufficient credentials to convince people that you really know your stuff. Here are a few things it might include:

• Detailed personal bio
• Academic degrees
• Certifications
• Awards
• Publications
• Presentations
• Important projects
• Associations
• Affiliations
• Speaking videos

To see an example of an effective bio page, check out Katrina Christakis’ bio on her law firm’s website. Or take a look at my bio page on Hinge’s website.

Once you begin cultivating a regional or national reputation, you may want to consider developing a personal website, too. You can use this site as a platform to promote your books and public speaking.

4. A blog platform. Every expert should be blogging. It’s the most accessible way to demonstrate your expertise. It’s also one of the easiest ways to start building a loyal following. And when you apply search engine optimization (SEO) principles to your posts, you open up a whole new world of prospective clients who, for the first time, will find you through online search (see number 6 below). A blog is an essential tool if you want to spread your wisdom quickly and widely. Your blog can either reside on your firm’s website (this is preferable, since it can boost your SEO performance), or you can create a separate blog.

5. Email marketing service. If your blog is for introducing gobs of new people to you, email marketing is how you turn many of those readers into loyal followers — even raving fans. Using offers to download valuable educational content such as executive guides and whitepapers, you can entice a certain percentage of your blog readers to opt into your mailing list. You can then feed these followers a steady diet of free educational goodies, as well as additional offers that deepen their engagement. I’ll explain the mechanics of all this in the Roadmap section below.

6. Search engine optimization (SEO). If you think SEO plays no role in your line of work, you are almost certainly wrong. Every year, more and more organizations use online search to find and vet their service providers. But even more relevant to your journey up Mount Expert, business people today instinctively fire up Google whenever they encounter a thorny business problem. In many cases, they research the problem and possible solutions themselves — before they seek out professional help. In other situations, professionals use search to find thought leaders in their field. SEO is the tool that connects you to the people who are intensely interested in the problems you solve. And you would never meet 99% of them without it.

There’s one additional tool that you will need, one that will save you a lot of time and headaches:

7. A media kit. Experts get requests for bios, speaking samples and photos all the time. So it makes sense to have those things ready to go at a moment’s notice. Even better, put them up on your website bio page where interested parties can find them without asking. Every time a last-minute request comes in, you’ll be glad you have it at your fingertips. Wondering what one looks like? Here’s the media kit of Hinge’s Managing Partner, Lee Frederiksen.

This list, of course, just scratches the surface. There are dozens of tools that you can use to engage your audience. Think webinars (which are just a different take on public speaking), advertising, public relations, SlideShare, video and web analytics, to name just a few. As your personal branding strategy begins to reap dividends, you may want to introduce and test a handful of new tools and techniques.

There is great deal to say about each of these tools. Unfortunately, I don’t have space here to address them in detail. So I recommend that you download our free book, Online Marketing for Professional Services, which describes many of these tools and how they fit into an overall marketing framework. Don’t worry that the book is written for companies — there’s plenty in there that applies to individuals. It lays out a content-based strategy to grow your brand, very much like the one I describe in this roadmap. Also, be sure to check out the Additional Resources at the end of this piece. 

Skills You’ll Need for Your Journey

Now that I’ve introduced the seven critical tools, let’s explore the fundamental skills you will need to learn along the way. You may have at least a rudimentary understanding of some of them already. If so, that’s great — you’ve got a head start!

Before I get into the specific skills, however, I have to pause and discuss a larger issue, a “master skill” that will encompass your entire Visible Expert journey. You may be good at it already, or you may have to acquire it like the rest of us — the hard way, making incremental improvements over time. I’m talking about your role as a teacher.

You see, your reputation as an industry leader will be built to a great extent on your ability to translate complicated material into easy-to-understand language. While not all experts are teachers, all Visible Experts and thought leaders are excellent teachers.

What I mean by this is that you will be dedicated to educating your audience. Your driving impulse is to be helpful. You will be a teacher first and sales person a distant second.

But if you follow the roadmap below, you won’t have to sell your services at all. A steady flow of business will emerge naturally from your relentless pursuit of helping your audience.

Okay, let’s talk skills. You can tackle the list below on your own, or look for help from outside professionals or members of your team. Either way, here’s what you will need to get started:

Writing. You may be a good writer or an indifferent one. But if you want to be an effective teacher and build a compelling personal brand around your expertise, you must be able to produce clear, nontechnical prose that’s a pleasure to read. If you aren’t an excellent writer already, you have two options:

1. Learn to write clear, plain English. There are many readable books and online courses that will get you up to speed relatively quickly. (One of my favorite books is The Plain English Approach to Business Writing by Edward P. Bailey, Jr. — it’s a quick read and very practical.) Learning to write in plain English can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.
2. Work with an experienced writer or editor. If you don’t have the time or inclination to work on your writing, that’s okay! You can always hire a writer or editor to turn your subject matter expertise into sparkling prose. Experts work this way far more often than you might think — in fact, at Hinge, we provide this service to many of our own clients. Just think of all the successful ghostwritten books out there. It works for blog posts and anything else you need to write, too.

Public Speaking. Most experts are comfortable speaking to their target audience and fellow professionals. If you have a fear of public speaking, you should at least try to conquer it. Like all skills, mastery comes from doing, and in most cases the fear will fade quickly. (That said, it’s perfectly normal for even an experienced speaker to feel nervous before delivering a speech.) If you are new to public speaking, start by addressing small groups — at the local chapter of your professional association or chamber of commerce. Or try a peer support group, like Toastmasters. You’ll need to build up a speaking resume before most national conferences and trade shows will consider you.

Blogging. Either you or a colleague will need to handle the mechanics of getting your posts online. It’s not difficult to learn, but this is another skill you will need to master, nevertheless.

SEO. Search engine optimization is an entire discipline in itself, but you can learn the fundamentals in a day or two — enough to begin thinking more strategically about what you write. While there are technical aspects to SEO that may be beyond your capabilities (for instance, building your website and blog in a way that Google can easily discover your content), the basic mechanics are very straightforward. The most challenging part will be learning how to research keywords that are relevant, attract enough search volume to be worthwhile and not too difficult to rank for on the first page of Google’s search results page. It’s as much art as science. Hinge University and can be a good place to learn the basics, though there are many valuable online resources.

Outreach to blogs and publications. There’s more to SEO than keywords. To get the most from your blogging and SEO investments, you’ll need to generate outside links to your posts. A common way to do this is to write guest posts on other people’s blogs — or articles for online publications — that include one or more links back to your blog and/or website. To find these opportunities, you will need to research these online publications and reach out to their owners or editors. There are techniques you can learn that will make this process more efficient and successful.

Email marketing. Email marketing is very different from sending personal emails. First of all, you will need to subscribe to an email service provider. You may have heard of MailChimp or Constant Contact, but there is a long list of other providers offering different features and price points. More sophisticated marketing platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft also include email delivery services. Whatever service you choose (and, please, do not use Outlook or any other desktop email client), you will need to learn how use this tool to send out a basic email broadcast and understand its analytics. Later, you may want to try out more advanced features, such as personalization, segmentation and automated drip campaigns.

If you have the resources to enlist helpers, you may not necessarily need to master all of these skills. That said, the more you know, the more likely you are to grow. So it would be wise to at least familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of each.

Your Personal Branding Roadmap

Now it’s time to bring everything together into a coherent plan of action. If you have made it this far, I assume you are committed to a long-term program to build your personal brand. If you are serious about building your personal brand over time, turn this roadmap into a formal plan. That means writing it down, mulling over your answers and updating the plan as you think of new ideas or decide to make course corrections.

The roadmap below is a general outline. It’s up to you to color between the lines, fill in the details and make it utterly, wonderfully yours.

Phase I: Your Strategy

Step 1: Determine where you are today. Before you can begin your ascent, you need to know where you are starting. Are you a Level 1 Resident Expert or a Level 3 Rising Star? Use the descriptions in the section above titled Five Levels of Visibility to determine your baseline position, or read Chapter 3 in The Visible Expert for a more fulsome explanation of each level. 

Step 2: Identify your specialized area of expertise. You are already an expert in something, but is that “something” fairly broad (“family law,” for instance), or is it very specialized (such as, “child custody law”)? The more niche your expertise, the easier your rise will be. If you aren’t already, consider narrowing your focus. But if you can’t pare down the services you offer, you can at least plan to narrow what you write and speak about. Just keep in mind that eventually you will need to follow that intended focus with action.

Step 3: Define your audience. Who will be buying your services? Who will influence your buyers? What industries do you serve? What roles in the companies buy your services? The answers to these questions will be the people for whom you craft every blog post, every speech, every book, every webinar… you get the point. When writing, always keep your target audience in mind. It will help you stay on point and attract the right kinds of prospects to your business.

Step 4: Find your angle. This step isn’t absolutely required, but it can really help your personal brand stand out. If you can become associated with an issue, or if you take a controversial or counterintuitive point of view, it’s often easier to gain notice. Having an angle also gives you an anchor — a unique perspective — that will mark each piece of content you develop as yours.

Step 5: Decide which tools you will use. Go back and review the 7 Critical Tools section above and figure out which ones you will tackle first. And don’t be afraid to consider other options, as well. If you have experience with webinars or video, go ahead and make them part of your plan.

Step 6: Assess your skills. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the program if you are doing it yourself. Not because it takes a great deal of effort. But because it is so hard to be objective about one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Go through the list in the Skills You’ll Need section above and try to honestly evaluate your proficiency in each. Are you as good a writer as you think you are? Are you a strong public speaker? Which skills do you need to work on most, and which would benefit from a refresher? Develop a prioritized list of these skills and try to figure out which you can work on alone, and which will require a qualified teacher. And this brings me to…

Step 7: Determine who is going to help you. Most of us will need at least a little help along our journey, and many will need a great deal of it. So the first thing you need to do is to decide if you really want to try to make a solo ascent, or if a little supplemental oxygen, a band of Sherpas and an experienced guide might make your climb more successful. As you think about the tools and skill you will need, are there any that you might want to outsource? Line up these resources early so that you aren’t scrambling when you need them most.

Phase II: Setting Up Your Infrastructure

Step 8: Create your media kit. Hire a pro to take a few photos of you and write a short and long version of your bio. Later you can add a video reel of public speaking clips. If you can, include a link on your bio page to download a zipped file of your kit.

Step 9: Enhance your bio/build your website. Add credibility-boosting features to your bio, such as articles you’ve written, speeches you’ve delivered and accolades you’ve won — anything that might convince a reader that you are the real deal.

Step 10. Get set to blog. If your firm has a blog, find out what you need to do to become a regular contributor. If you need to get buy-in from others in the organization, explain what you are trying to achieve. Work with the appropriate people to get the exposure you need. If you will be setting up your own blog, now’s the time to begin building and configuring it. If you need help, find and invest in the resources to make it happen.

Step 11. Set up your conversion tools. To turn web visitors and blog readers into leads, you’ll need to offer them something that’s compelling enough they will provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Usually, this is a longer piece of educational content, such as a guide, whitepaper or e-book. You will need to write this piece of content first, then place it behind a registration form on your website or blog. You will also need to design an appealing offer to entice readers to download the piece of content. To comply with Canadian anti-spam laws (US laws are a bit laxer), you should consider providing language with your form that explains that the reader will receiving additional emails in the future. If you explain that these emails will contain valuable educational materials and advice — and that you can cancel anytime — you should not deter many downloads. Now, if you plan to send emails to individuals in the European Union, you will need to comply with the stricter GDPR regulations, such as requiring people to explicitly opt-in to your mailing list (no pre-checked boxes are allowed) and completely deleting individual’s data from your system upon request.

Step 12. Set up your social media profiles. If all you do is build out your LinkedIn profile, you’ll be fine. LinkedIn is by far the most important social platform for professional services experts. Be sure to complete your profile in full. Then look around for active groups you can join that are frequented by people in your target audience. The next platform to join is Twitter, which you can use to promote your content. Facebook, YouTube and others may make sense in some cases, but I suggest that most experts spend their limited time elsewhere.

Step 13. Select and prepare your email platform. You may be using your firm’s existing email service or CRM, or you may need to set one up from scratch. Either way, make sure you’ve got a nice looking, legible email template ready to go. If you are choosing a new platform, select one that’s easy to use and has robust list management and reporting tools. Also decide whether you will require single opt-in or double opt-in for new subscribers.

Phase III: Develop Your Skills

Step 14. Set aside time each day to work on new skills. The most effective way to tackle a long-term project is to make a habit of it. That means carving out a little time each day to work on one or two pieces at a time. Never forget that this is a business commitment, not a hobby. So it’s okay — in fact, it’s important — to devote part of your workday to upgrading your personal brand. You may commit some of your personal time to it, as well, but it’s an ongoing project, one that will never end. Start building your job around it.

Phase IV: Launch Time!

Read over your plan one more time. Then start implementing it. It will be slow going at first, but it’s important to get the ropes and ladders in place before you set out. You’ve got a strategy, now put it into play!

Conclusion

If you are an expert with ambitions to become a leader in your industry, this roadmap can help put you on the path to a speedy ascent. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed at first, especially if you are busy already. Architect and author Sarah Susanka faced the same dilemma:

“I recognized that writing was what I felt passionate about, but I had no space in my life to do it. And I was so busy with my architecture firm that if I didn’t make some shift in my life, there would never be space for it. So I decided to pretend that I was my own client. I plugged myself into my own calendar and even gave myself a project number. I held myself to it, and that first book changed everything for me. All you have to do is take that one first, small step. It’s amazing what happens when you focus yourself on something that you really want.”

The key is to break down your personal branding strategy into manageable chunks. Don’t try to tackle too many things at once. Little by little, you will begin to see results — a new trickle of email inquiries here, a speaking opportunity there, and an incoming tide of new followers. At some point, people will begin asking for your. And eventually a few will want to hire you and your firm on the basis of your reputation alone. The thrill that comes with seeing steady progress makes all the hard work worth it.

Good luck. And happy climbing!

The post Personal Branding Strategy: A Roadmap for Professionals, Experts and Executives appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

What is a personal brand, you ask? A personal brand is an individual’s reputation in their field, what we at Hinge call a Visible Expert^®. Visible Experts are technical professionals who have attained high visibility and expertise in their industry, establishing a personal brand that is widely recognized. And just as a firm can have an overall brand positioning statement, so can a Visible Expert. We call this a personal brand statement or expert positioning statement. 

In this article, I describe how you can write a personal brand statement in three easy steps—one that will differentiate you from other thought leaders in your field and help people associate you with the value you deliver.

A personal brand statement is a carefully crafted paragraph, usually 4–5 sentences in length, that describes your expertise, who you serve, and most importantly, how your approach is different from that of other experts in your field. It may also specify key issues you believe in.

How to Write a Personal Brand Statement

Many professionals find it difficult to succinctly say what they do. This exercise will help you with that. To start, you’ll need to answer a few questions: 

• What are you an expert in? 
• What do you specialize in (if anything)? 
• What other factors make you different from your competitors? 

The answers will provide the ingredients you need. 

Whether you choose to write in the first person or the third person is up to you, as long as you keep the tone conversational and to the point. Your personal branding statement will speak to a wide variety of audiences, so try to avoid technical language and industry jargon. 

Three easy steps

Step 1: Identify your specialized area of expertise and describe it.

“I am an expert in ________________.” The more niche your expertise, the easier your rise will be. 

Step 2: Build out the middle.

Tell your story—how you’re different, what problems you solve, where you stand on issues. And don’t forget who you serve. Who buys your services? Do you serve a particular industry? How do you want people to perceive you? Two or three sentences should be all you need here.

Step 3: Write a concluding sentence.

 Wrap up the paragraph—and if you can, speak again to your expertise or most compelling differentiator, making your conclusion the most impactful part of the statement.

A Couple More Tips

A little aspiration can be a wonderful thing

As you go through the process and ask yourself questions, you may notice some areas or skills that you need to work on. In fact, you may find yourself speaking about a version of yourself that isn’t fully-baked yet. Don’t get discouraged. As long as it’s attainable, use your aspirational brand statement to set some personal goals.

Focus on issues where you can shine

No matter where you are in your personal branding journey, an expert positioning statement will help get you there by focusing your expertise in ways you hadn’t before. 

A piece of advice? Choose issues that don’t have easy solutions and aren’t likely to go away any time soon. If you are struggling to think of relevant issues, try answering these questions:

1.     Where do your interests lie?
2.     Where do your clients struggle most?
3.     Where can you deliver the greatest value?

Now what? 

Take some time to apply your new positioning to the personal bios and profiles on your website and social media accounts. While you are at it, ask yourself a couple of questions: Do they present you as a highly credible professional? Do they convey a consistent message? 

If done correctly, your personal brand statement will help take your career to a new level of visibility, respect and value. And every time you prepare a new promotional piece or sit down to write educational content, you can dip into your personal branding statement for welcome inspiration.

The post Three Steps to Writing a Personal Brand Statement appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

But won’t our competitors try to poach the firm’s “best people”? It’s the age-old question our friends in Human Resources can’t help but ask.

Based on the latest data from the second edition of our Employer Brand Study, I’ll be exploring the reasons why employers and HR managers shouldn’t be afraid of personal brand building and how encouraging the development of their employees’ individual brands actually increases the overall visibility of a professional services brand, while simultaneously building the firm’s brand as an employer.

Generally speaking, brand building is a crucial component of any firm’s marketing and business development process. In fact, “brand awareness” is a key metric used by high growth firms to measure the efficiency of their marketing efforts. We can also look at a firm’s brand in different capacities: overall as a firm, as an employer and at the individual level—the personal brand.

What is a personal brand? Simply put, a personal brand is an individual’s reputation in their field. So it’s understandable that some organizations might be leery of their employees building personal brands and touting their individual expertise. But this activity doesn’t mean they’re looking for another job. And it doesn’t mean other firms are going to steal your most valuable people.

Instead, raising the visibility of your employees’ expertise and deliberately promoting their personal brands can significantly drive your firm’s visibility, growth and ultimately, reputation as an employer. It can also make your team’s experts happier, more satisfied employees—the kind that stick around for a long time.

Let’s look at some of the benefits that can arise from supporting your employees’ personal branding efforts:

1. A stronger employer brand. Hinge’s Employer Branding Study found that after cultural fit and compensation, the opportunity for career growth was a top selection criteria among job seekers. By promoting the personal brands of your employees, you are more attractive to prospective candidates who are looking to advance their careers.

2. Better reputation x higher visibility = Better brand strength. As your employees build their personal brands and position themselves as Visible Experts, your target audiences will seek them out for their knowledge and experience. Their knowledge is a vital resource that can lead to a better reputation, increased visibility and as a result, a stronger brand—for themselves and their firm (see Halo Effect below). At the end of the day, professional services firms are essentially teams of experts that meet client needs by delivering the very thing some firms are scared to promote, their expertise.

3. The Halo Effect.When your key employees have a strong personal brand, people are more likely to have a positive perception of your firm as well. This is called “the halo effect,” and it goes both ways—a strong firm brand reflects well on the individuals it employs, as well. Firms would be wise to make sure their employees have the tools, skills and support they need to be their firms’ brand ambassadors and leading experts.

4. Greater employee engagement. This year’s Employer Brand Study found that the many job seekers in professional services want to contribute to their firms’ success and to be recognized for their efforts. Employees who focus on developing their own personal brands are by definition more highly engaged. More-engaged employees are happier employees, which leads to higher retention rates overall.

5. Fuel your content marketing program. Cultivate a team of subject matter experts, writers and speakers to impart their knowledge. This fosters a work environment that values teaching, which is key to implementing a thought leadership program and building visibility in the marketplace.

6. Expertise-based referrals. A whopping 81.5% of professional services firms have received referrals from people who have never worked with their firm at all. Often, these referral sources are basing their recommendation on their experience with an individual expert whom they follow online, heard speak at a conference or read on a regular basis (think blog posts, articles and books).

7. Easy succession planning. By developing a core team of visible experts, you are in effect, creating your firm’s core group of future leaders. By supporting your key experts’ personal branding efforts, you are helping boost their confidence and grooming them to take over the business.

In summary, a firm should not be afraid to support its employees’ personal branding efforts. Building a stable of high-profile industry experts is a natural way to develop leadership—both inside your firm and among your industry peers.

The post Why Your Personal Branding Efforts Shouldn’t Scare Your Employer appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

What is a personal brand? Simply put, a personal brand is an individual’s reputation in their field. And the context of professional services, the strongest personal brands are those that have not only a reputation for, but also high visibility around what the B2B marketplace prizes most: differentiated expertise.

At Hinge, we write almost daily about company brands and personal brands. We counsel to develop a personal brand as an industry expert and leader, you must have one master skill above all others: an ability to translate complicated material into easy-to-understand language. While not all experts are teachers, all Visible Experts and thought leaders are. What I mean by this is that as you develop your personal brand, your success will be strongly correlated to the extent to which you educate your audience. Your driving impulse is to be helpful. You will be a teacher first and sales person a distant second.

So what skills help you educate? I’ve noted 6 skills below, and some may be able to tackle this list on their own, personal brand coaches can be of huge value here. Enlisting the help from outside professionals or members of your team – a personal brand coach in other words – can save you not only time, but also money, depending on where your natural skills lie. Either way, here’s what you will need to get started:

Six critical skills for developing your personal brand

Writing. You may be a good writer or an indifferent one. But if you want to be an effective teacher and build a compelling personal brand around your expertise, you must be able to produce clear, nontechnical prose that’s a pleasure to read. If you aren’t an excellent writer already, you have two options:

1. Learn to write clear, plain English. There are many readable books and online courses that will get you up to speed relatively quickly. (One of my favorite books is The Plain English Approach to Business Writing by Edward P. Bailey, Jr. — it’s a quick read and very practical.) Learning to write in plain English can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.
2. Work with an experienced writer or editor. If you don’t have the time or inclination to work on your writing, that’s okay! You can always hire a writer or editor to turn your subject matter expertise into sparkling prose. Experts work this way far more often than you might think — in fact, at Hinge, we provide this service to many of our own clients. Just think of all the successful ghostwritten books out there. It works for blog posts and anything else you need to write, too.

Public Speaking. Not all experts are comfortable speaking to their target audience and fellow professionals. In my experience, this is where a personal brand coach can be immensely helpful. If you have a fear of public speaking, you should at least try to conquer it, given that speaking is a top technique of high-growth firms and the Visible Experts within those firms. If you are new to public speaking and a coach isn’t your cup of tea, start by addressing small groups — at the local chapter of your professional association or chamber of commerce. Or try a peer support group, like Toastmasters. You’ll need to build up a speaking resume before most national conferences and trade shows will consider you.

Blogging. Writing is one part of building your personal brand, but the other part of the equation is getting your posts online. It’s not difficult to learn, but this is another skill you will need to master, nevertheless.

SEO. Search engine optimization is an entire discipline in itself, but you can learn the fundamentals in a day or two — enough to begin thinking more strategically about what you write. While there are technical aspects to SEO that may be beyond your capabilities (for instance, building your website and blog in a way that Google can easily discover your content), the basic mechanics are very straightforward. The most challenging part will be learning how to research keywords that are relevant, attract enough search volume to be worthwhile and not too difficult to rank for on the first page of Google’s search results page. It’s as much art as science. Hinge University and can be a good place to learn the basics, though there are many valuable online resources.

Outreach to blogs and publications. There’s more to SEO than keywords. To get the most from your blogging and SEO investments, you’ll need to generate outside links to your posts. A common way to do this is to write guest posts on other people’s blogs — or articles for online publications — that include one or more links back to your blog and/or website. To find these opportunities, you will need to research these online publications and reach out to their owners or editors. There are techniques you can learn that will make this process more efficient and successful. A personal brand coach can be instrumental here as well, helping manage the outreach functions.

Email marketing. Email marketing is very different from sending personal emails. First of all, you will need to subscribe to an email service provider. You may have heard of MailChimp or Constant Contact, but there is a long list of other providers offering different features and price points. More sophisticated marketing platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot also include email delivery services. Whatever service you choose (and, please, do not use Outlook or any other desktop email client), you will need to learn how use this tool to send out a basic email broadcast and understand its analytics. Later, you may want to try out more advanced features, such as personalization, segmentation and automated drip campaigns.

If you have the resources to enlist personal brand or marketing coaches, you may not necessarily need to master all of these skills. That said, the more you know, the more likely you are to grow. So it would be wise to at least familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of each. It’s a time of opportunity!

The post In this Time of Opportunity, Consider a Personal Brand Coach appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this video blog, Liz Harr will be sharing seven secrets on how to develop a personal branding strategy.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi, in this video blog, I’m going to be sharing some secrets on how to develop a personal branding strategy. It’s something that I talk to a lot of professional services executives about, whether they have their own show and they’re flying solo, or whether they are in a large firm and just need to cultivate a brand around themselves as an expert.

So, it’s something that we talk to a lot of people about in professional services. Now there are seven steps that I’d like to share with you when it comes to crafting a personal brand strategy. First and foremost, you have to start from the ground and figure out where you are. And what I mean by that is, determining where you are today, where you want to go, helps you figure out what you need to do to get there.

Do you aspire to be a global household name or do you want to break out of regional territory and become a national player? Those are the types of things that are really important in figuring out. And then on top of that, understanding your competition will be a layer on top of those goals and helping you figure out where you sit versus where you need to be.

Now, once you figure that out, then you’re ready to think about your expertise platform. It’s really difficult, in fact, almost impossible to craft a personal branding strategy around being a jack of all trades. So, figuring out how you are specialized and how to talk about that is the second step that you would take.

Then you need to think about your audience. Now, think about the roles that your decision makers play within their own companies. Who are their influencers? The influencers is another real important audience that you want to think about as you’re crafting your personal branding strategy and figuring out whom to be visible to.

Fourth is to figure out, what are you going to talk about? What are you going to be an expert in? This is, of course, your angle. And I think the best way to do this is to think about the services that are important to you and your firm as you grow and scale. You may have 12 or 15 services, but which are the ones that you think are really important to your growth?

And then, over on the other side, think about the things you know from your research, and from the dialogs you have with your audience, about the things that are important to them, the things that are keeping them up at night. It’s the intersection of the services that are important to you and the things that are important to your audience, the intersection of that that helps you identify those finite set of issues around which you should be speaking, writing, and networking.

Download the Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Second Edition Executive Summary

Fifth is, know your skills. If you do some due diligence and look at your real strengths, be honest about your weaknesses, this helps you see what you’re coming to the table with. Do you love to speak but you get writer’s block when you have to put nose to grindstone and write a piece of thought leadership?

Well, this is very helpful to know when you’re crafting your personal branding strategy because you may want to do things like what you’re watching today, a video blog, if you enjoy speaking, but you don’t like writing. So, knowing your skill sets is really critical. And I don’t want to get too far to the end, but it helps with the final step. Before you get to that final step, once you’ve thought about your skills, then you need to think about what tools do you need to allow this personal branding strategy to really come to life?

What do you need on your website? Did you find that your audience likes to learn digitally, and so, webinars, or podcasts, or video blogs would be a good way for you to start educating and letting them know about your expertise? Then you would want to invest in those types of tools. Once you have figured out your audience, you’ve done an honest assessment of your skills and you’ve thought about what tools you need to bring your personal branding strategy to life, now you need to do it.

But you likely won’t be able to do it on your own. This is not a largely DIY type of scenario. In some cases, because of your skill set, you’ll find some natural places where you can take this on and do it on your own. In other cases, you may need to consider outsourcing some of the skill sets. Depending on the goals that you have for your firm, you may want to hire and groom these skill sets organically.

But you’ll likely have a mix of DIY, with the outsourcing, with the hiring, and build a team that helps you bring this to life. Some of the skill sets that you’ll be looking for, you know, it isn’t just about writing, it isn’t just about speaking, what about the design that goes behind anything you publish?

What about the design on your website? What about measuring analytics and using metrics to see how far you’re mapping towards your goal? Those are the types of skills that you want to surround yourself with as you’re building your toolkit. So, if you found this helpful and want to learn more, I’d encourage you to go to our Visible Expert Course in Hinge University.

Hope to see you there.

The post 7 Steps to Develop a Personal Branding Strategy [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This video discusses your personal brand, one of the key ways buyers find what they are looking for.

Transcription

Hi, I’m Karl, and today we’re gonna talk about personal branding in the AEC market, and we’re gonna talk about some things that they don’t teach you in engineering or architecture school. We’re gonna talk about your personal brand, which also is your visibility and plays heavily into your reputation in the market. And it is competitive out there. It is a lower barrier to entry now to get seen, to really promote your personal brand, and it’s key because your audiences have limited bandwidth to deal with. They are looking for experts. Hinges research show that that’s one of the key ways that the buying audience and professional services finds what they are looking for, but they’ve got limited bandwidth to do that search so if you’re raising above the others that gives you a real leg-up on the competition.

Download The Visible Expert book

The first thing to start out with is really defining your targets. Who are you talking to? Who do you need to appeal to? What’s your position? And what sets you apart from your competitors? Understand also whether you are the employer, or the employee, or where you are on the team. It’s good for the expert’s career and it’s also good for the firm and has a real halo effect. It can help create demand, it can validate referrals. All of these are key to continuing good business and building new business pipeline.

Make sure that as you put in all this effort, because it does take some effort to get there, make sure that you’re finding ways to report and measure that engagement. So are your personal branding efforts really paying off? Are you getting warmer leads? Are people seeing you and understanding what events or things you might be doing in the field? Make sure that you’re holding yourself accountable to all those things.

I hope that helps and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks.

The post Personal Brand in AEC [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

But branding the individual is especially relevant in the professional services, where developing thought leadership is a critical tool in an expert’s rise to prominence. I’m not talking about the self-described, “empty-suit” expert. Instead, these are serious professionals who want to increase their visibility and become recognized industry experts.

These high-profile individuals are often referred to as thought leaders or Visible Experts^®. But it takes more than knowing your stuff to build a following. To become a true thought leader you need to focus your attention in the right areas.

What areas, specifically? Here are seven critical tips that will build your personal brand and put you on the path to higher visibility.

Top Personal Branding Tips

1. Focus your expertise

Don’t try to be an expert in too many things. The more narrowly you focus your expertise the faster your personal brand will grow. Why? Because people are not very good at associating an expert with more than one thing. Not to mention, it’s very difficult to master multiple disciplines. A few exceptionally gifted people have become experts in more than one field, but most are remembered for only one of them.

If you could become the go-to expert in one thing, what would it be? Try completing this sentence:

“I am the leading expert in ____________.”

Whether or not you consider yourself the leading expert yet is unimportant. “Leading expert” is in the mind of the beholder. If you can state your expertise in clear, simple language, you’ve already taken a huge step forward.

Let’s look at a quick example. Suppose you’re an accountant and you say your expertise is in taxes. That’s probably not going to cut it. “Taxes” is just too broad a concept. Could you credibly be considered “the leading expert” in taxes? I doubt it. A focus on “state and local taxes” would be better, but you may need to go even narrower to find an expertise platform you can “own.” How about “state and local taxes for online purchases”? That’s more like it! It’s very specific, but still applies to a lot of businesses out there.

Okay, you get the picture. Narrower is better.

2. Pick your issues carefully

One more advantage of a narrow focus is that it limits what you will write and speak about. No longer faced with a wide world of possibilities, you can work within a clearly defined range of issues.

But won’t you run out of things to talk about? That’s very unlikely.

When you zoom in on an area of specialty you’ll discover a whole new ecosystem of problems, challenges and ideas just waiting to be answered, explained and debated. In fact, it’s possible to become overwhelmed by the complexities of practically any niche.

The key is to focus on issues where you can shine. Here are three questions to help you filter out the noise:

1. Where do your interests lie?
2. Where do your clients struggle most?
3. Where can you deliver the greatest value?

At first, focus on just two or three issues. These will be issues that you write and/or speak about on a regular basis, so you should either understand them in depth already or be prepared to put in the research to get up to speed. Your goal is to become closely identified with these issues, so make sure they align well with the services you sell.

Choose issues that have legs. That means that they 1) don’t have an easy solution, and 2) aren’t likely to go away soon. If you want to get the most traction from your issues, you should try to take a position that’s different from other experts who work in this area. If you can take a contrarian or controversial stand, so much the better. That’s how you attract notice and stick in people’s minds.

SEE ALSO: The Road to the Top: Personal Branding Examples in Professional Services
3. Shape your personal profiles to be consistent with your expertise

Take a look at your bio on your website and the personal profiles on your social media pages. Do they present you as a highly credible professional? Do they convey a consistent message? And do they connect you to the issues you’ve chosen to write and speak about?

Next, take a look at your areas of expertise and tags. Do they align with the image you are trying to project? If someone were to look at those alone, what would they communicate about you?

Finally, turn your attention to your photo(s). Professional photography is essential if you want to convey a high-end personal brand. That doesn’t mean it has to lack personality — you can take your shot in any setting. But it needs to look great. A web cam portrait or cropped dinner party shot isn’t going to put your best foot forward.

4. Develop a signature piece of content

Most high-profile experts have a high-value piece of content that demonstrates their expertise and amplifies their reputation. It’s an important way they deliver on their brand promise. And it’s their signature calling card. In rare cases, this piece can become even better known than the expert, herself.

For many thought leaders, this signature piece is a book. Sometimes this book becomes the tipping point that catapults an expert to stardom. Most of the time, however, the effect is less dramatic but still critical to the expert’s reputation. If you aren’t ready to write the book on your area of expertise, however, there are other options to enhance your personal brand.

Here’s a great way to start: write an executive guide on one of your issues. Guides are typically 20–30 pages long and cover a topic at some depth. Think of it as an advanced introduction to an issue. Usually, it’s best to write your guide in plain English with the goal of explaining a technical subject to a non-technical audience. (This ability to simplify complex issues is a hallmark of Visible Experts.)

Another option is to produce white papers. These pieces are usually shorter than guides and can be quite technical. Most white papers range in length from a few pages to 20 pages or so.

You can also consider an entirely different approach to your signature content — conduct a research study that explores a problem of intense interest to your target audience. If possible, the topic of the study should align with one of your issues. And when you publish the final research report be sure to include your expert analysis along with the findings, and identify some practical takeaways your readers can apply to their businesses. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to use the findings to inspire countless blog posts and speeches (see #5 below).

Whatever format you choose for your signature piece of content, it should be a sample of your expertise at work and position you as a knowledgeable and creative thinker.

5. Write regularly on your area of expertise

A person’s reputation isn’t created in one big push. It’s built up over time, little by little. That’s exactly how you should think about your thought leadership, too. Writing on the issues you care about in small, steady increments is one of the best ways to build a loyal following.

And writing on a regular schedule comes with significant added benefits, too: it helps you master new material — deepening your expertise — and it forces you to think through and refine your arguments.

Where do you publish your writing? Your firm’s blog or e-newsletter are ideal outlets for your thinking — they are cheap to produce and flexible enough for a busy schedule. You should also look outside your firm for new opportunities to share your ideas. Seek out publications and blogs that speak to your target audience. If you were ambitious, you could even establish a regular guest column in an outside publication, becoming the resident expert on your issue.

However you end up structuring your writing, keep your eye on your end goal: to broaden the visibility of your personal brand and get in front of people who otherwise might never find you.

Now, your writing doesn’t always have to break new ground. Many of your readers will be new or unfamiliar with the issues you cover, so it’s okay to return periodically to your most important points and apply them to different situations. Even long-time readers may appreciate looking at a familiar topic from a new angle.

The important thing is to set a schedule and stick to it. Even when you are busy. Try reserving a time on your calendar every week for writing. If you schedule won’t allow a fixed schedule, you may have to carve out time as it becomes available, or plan to do your writing during off hours.

6. Embrace speaking events and webinars

Public speaking is one of the most popular — and effective — tools used by Visible Experts. It’s a terrific way to demonstrate your expertise and strengthen your personal brand. If you choose your speaking events carefully, you can reach groups of people who not only are in your target audience but are very receptive to your ideas. And if you can meet members of the audience face to face after the event, you can make personal connections that are just not possible online.

Webinars are another great way to expand your visibility to new audiences and build your personal brand. Like speaking events, webinars allow you to share your knowledge and express your personality. You can even field their questions at the end. And once you’ve been doing them for a while, webinars can attract hundreds of qualified and engaged prospects at a time.

Each format has its pros and cons. There’s nothing like standing in front of a live audience to convince people that you are the genuine article: a true expert. But public speaking can be time consuming and, in many cases, expensive. While webinars can’t convey the full range of your expertise, they can be remarkably effective at building your reputation and brand. They free you from the bounds of geography and take less time and effort to pull off. You can also record them and use the recordings again and again.

Whether you choose to speak publicly or conduct webinars (or both), live events provide a unique opportunity to give your audience a taste of your personality. They can also expose you to a new set of people outside your local area who haven’t yet discovered you through your writing.

7. Network with peers and prospects

Here’s a personal branding tip that shouldn’t surprise you: networking can be a powerful tool. It has two important dimensions:

1. Who you network with, and
2. How you do it

Let’s look at these in turn.

Without a doubt you, should be rubbing elbows with people who can use and buy your professional services. That’s a no brainer. But there’s another important group that might not be so obvious — experts. Don’t be afraid to network with other experts, especially those who serve an audience similar to yours but don’t directly compete with you. (For instance, if you an expert architect, you might reach out to top engineers or construction managers.) Their recommendations can hold a lot of burnishing power. And just associating yourself with respected authorities can place you in their league. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to network with your direct competitors, either. They can’t always handle all the work that comes their way, so they can be valuable referral sources. Or if you take a different angle to solving problems, it might complement their own approach.

So where can you find other experts like you? Follow them on social media, get to know them online, and start exchanging ideas. This approach will make you a better expert and put your brand on a higher plane. Building a rapport online also makes it easier and less awkward to meet in person at industry conferences, where you can deepen the relationship.

The “how” is easy. While face-to-face networking has some real advantages, its reach is limited by the time you can spend on it. Social media, on the other hand, can be a faster and easier way to build your brand. (Don’t get me wrong. It still takes time.) To the uninitiated, social media — with its plethora of platforms and tools — can be intimidating. But most industries favor just a few. LinkedIn is the most common social platform across the professional services, and many firms use it exclusively. In higher education, Facebook is very popular. A quick review of competitors’ websites should point you to the one or two essential social media tools in your industry.

If in-person networking is working for you, by all means keep doing it. But if you haven’t yet dived into social media, it offers a lot of possibilities to increase your exposure, meet prospects and other experts, debate relevant issues and share your expertise. This is exactly how personal brands are built.

So there you have it: seven personal branding tips that can make you a better, more visible expert and a recognized thought leader. You don’t have to tackle them all at once. You may even be doing some of these things already. But the more you time you can devote to building your personal brand, the faster your stock will rise.

If you’d like to read a few real-life personal branding stories, check out this post that profiles four experts from a variety of industries.

Additional Resources:

• Find out how to become a sought-after expert in your industry. Download a free copy of our groundbreaking book The Visible Expert^®.
• Read the research study that started it all: Visible Experts^®: How High Visibility Expertise Helps Professionals, Their Firms, and Their Clients.
• Hinge University’s practical, research-based Visible Expert^® course will teach you how to raise your expertise to a higher level of prominence, success and profitability.

How Hinge Can Help:

Want to become an industry thought leader? It’s one of our specialties. Hinge’s Visible Expert^® Program provides all the guidance and help you need to implement a thought leadership platform that builds your reputation and visibility in the marketplace.

The post Top Personal Branding Tips for Thought Leaders appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Based on interviews with over 130 Visible Experts and 1,028 buyers of professional services, Hinge’s research uncovered 16 different tools Visible Experts use to generate leads and increase their visibility in the marketplace.

View this video to discover the top 10 tools you need to build your reputation and ascend to prominence. Get answers to questions such as:

• Which social media channels are most effective?
• Are speaking engagements worthwhile?
• What marketing tactics should be the highest priority?

What marketing tools have you found most effective for building your personal brand in your industry niche? Share your tips by submitting a comment.

Are you interested in becoming a Visible Expert? Get the book The Visible Expert℠ and contact us for a free Visible Expert feasibility review.

On Google+ or LinkedIn? Follow us +HingeMarketing and join us on LinkedIn.

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