It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelancer or the CEO of a 500-person tech company.
Your personal brand matters, and people want to do business with people.
Specifically, they want to do business with people they trust.
A personal brand, regardless of your business model, is one of the greatest lead generation tools in existence. When people build relationships with you and trust you, they trust your company.
When your employees build their personal brands and talk about your company, it shows you have good culture and values. I had the pleasure of speaking to Dot Lung, the Mother of Social Media Dragons.
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In this interview, we cover:
✅ Why and how to build your personal brand
✅ What a personal brand can do for your company
✅ Why you should support your employees in building their personal brand
✅ How to set up a culture that creates brand ambassadors
✅ Dot’s DRAGON formula for branding via social media.
How will you use your personal brand?
Everyone has a personal brand, whether you like it or not.
Personal branding is simply your reputation. It’s up to you to manicure it or let the internet make what it wants out of it.
But what you can do is take an active role in building your personal brand. You can embrace your story and choose the way it’s told.
Good branding makes algorithms and competition irrelevant.
It’s not about telling an inauthentic story to try to force a certain perception of you – people see right through fakeness, and quick. It’s about building an online presence, connecting with people, and sharing your values and what you are passionate about.
People don’t want to buy from corporate brands. They don’t trust them. They want to buy from people. So if you’re building a business, you better be building a personal brand.
It’s hard to do without a clear goal of why you’re building it. What do you plan to achieve?
- Do you want to grow your SaaS business?
- Be seen as a leader in vacation rental tech?
- Land more speaking gigs and interviews?
Figure out your ultimate goal, and then build your brand out from there.
“I really value my personal brand, but also like people that take care of their image online, because it is a reflection of how you take care of yourself in real life. Right? Personal branding is your reputation. And it’s what people say about you when you’re not in a room. And it’s up to you to actually craft that,” Dot told me.
You can mold the public perception about you if you use social media in a smart way.
Your personal brand is a lead generation tool
Dot says the point of the personal brand is generating leads for your business.
It’s to build these human to human connections. Because people are more gravitated to trust with a person then with a logo.
If you’re thinking about a big purchase, you want to talk to a person. If you need consulting, you want to deal with a human, not a company.
Whether you’re operating B2C or B2B, at the end of the day, it’s two people doing business together.
No matter what industry you’re in, dialogue happens between human beings, not with companies. Relationships will never lose importance.
The more that we can humanize technology, through personal branding, the more we’re going to be able to connect with more people around the world, from different industries.
The more you can actually humanize the brand, the easier it will be for people to engage with you.
Your employees should build their personal brand
Helping your employees’ careers makes happy employees. And it’s a fact that happy employees are 12% more productive. Plus, giving them a voice makes them feel more important and motivates them more.
But in order to do this, you need a brand mission and a crystal clear vision.
They need to be a part of it so that they want to share your gospel.
They become brand ambassadors because they are so aligned with company’s values and mission. Not because you’ve asked them to post on LinkedIn twice a week.
If you can get your staff to post and talk about in a genuine, transparent way, it brings a million times (not a statistical figure) more value than the corporate marketing you’d do otherwise.
The more honest your business is, the more it will succeed in terms of digital and social media marketing. That’s simply where the trend is going.
People are thirsty for authenticity.
Employee-level personal branding starts with company culture
You can’t have your employees build a personal brand without their authentic buy-in. You can’t force that. It all starts with your company culture.
Branding, personal and business branding, boils down to culture.
Branding is culture.
Branding is an experience that your team and your customers have when they interact with you. It’s what they feel.
Dot’s DRAGON formula for social media content
Branding today is done through social media and content creation.
Dot has creation a 7-step formula for content that is universal across all industires. It’s called the DRAGON formula. If every piece of content you create for your personal (and company) brand follows this formula, you have a good content strategy:
✅ Dialogue: You are starting conversations.
✅ Relatability: Can people relate with you and your content?
✅ Authentic: You aren’t pretending to be something you aren’t.
✅ Giving: You give value instead of selling.
✅ Opinion: You have an opinion. You use your brain. You will attract and repel.
✅ Niche: You focus on a small set of people that you can serve best.
Dot currently has an Instagram strategy course on Domestika that will help all business owners. You can check it out here. We at Flying Cat Marketing have no affiliation with Dot Lung or her course, we simply think it’s awesome.
Are you building your personal brand? If not, what’s stopping you?
We created a guide to understanding your customer avatar to make sure your content is relevant to them