Unleash your potential and soar to new heights in the world of entrepreneurship, salesmanship, and marketing, as we unravel the secret weapon - personal branding. We're not just spouting theory here; we're diving headfirst into the 15 key elements of a personal brand, running the gamut from the Four C's to the Five P's, and even the less heard of Three A's. We'll also shed light on the silent mover and shaker in any organization - internal employer branding - and its surprising connection with personal branding.
We're not stopping there. Together, we'll dissect various models of personal branding, and discover how you can make them work for you, whether you're an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer. Ever heard of the three A's of altruism? How about the eight laws as proposed by some of the leading experts in this field? We'll delve into all that and more, the importance of purpose, brand promise, perspective and even share our own take on what constitutes the core elements of a personal brand.
And the cherry on top? We're taking you behind the curtain of some of the biggest brands out there, like Wendy's edgy social media persona, Dove's celebration of real beauty, and Patagonia's love for the planet. We'll examine how they use their brand voice to differentiate themselves and build trust. Then, we'll turn the spotlight on you to help you build your personal brand, starting with visibility and digital presence. We'll explore various platforms and types of content you can use to engage your audience and build a community around your brand. And of course, we won't leave you hanging - we'll provide homework and resources to help you build your personal brand framework.
So gear up and let's embark on this exciting journey of personal branding together.
Learn More:
Unleash your potential and soar to new heights in the world of entrepreneurship, salesmanship, and marketing, as we unravel the secret weapon - personal branding. We're not just spouting theory here; we're diving headfirst into the 15 key elements of a personal brand, running the gamut from the Four C's to the Five P's, and even the less heard of Three A's. We'll also shed light on the silent mover and shaker in any organization - internal employer branding - and its surprising connection with personal branding.
We're not stopping there. Together, we'll dissect various models of personal branding, and discover how you can make them work for you, whether you're an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer. Ever heard of the three A's of altruism? How about the eight laws as proposed by some of the leading experts in this field? We'll delve into all that and more, the importance of purpose, brand promise, perspective and even share our own take on what constitutes the core elements of a personal brand.
And the cherry on top? We're taking you behind the curtain of some of the biggest brands out there, like Wendy's edgy social media persona, Dove's celebration of real beauty, and Patagonia's love for the planet. We'll examine how they use their brand voice to differentiate themselves and build trust. Then, we'll turn the spotlight on you to help you build your personal brand, starting with visibility and digital presence. We'll explore various platforms and types of content you can use to engage your audience and build a community around your brand. And of course, we won't leave you hanging - we'll provide homework and resources to help you build your personal brand framework.
So gear up and let's embark on this exciting journey of personal branding together.
Learn More:
Whether you are an entrepreneur trying to build a business digitally, or you are in sales trying to sell digitally, or you are in marketing, the one thing that everybody listening to this podcast needs more of is personal branding, and that's going to be the next topic of this next episode of the digital marketing coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you are a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, a good day to you. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, and welcome to my podcast episode number 342. We are closing in on 350 by the end of the year, which is my promise to you 50 episodes a year, even though there are weeks where we are on or off, as has been recently. One of the reasons that I've been off recently is that I've been hunkering down and creating new content for this new class that I am teaching at UCLA Extension on personal branding how to become an influencer, really connecting the dots between professional personal branding, like LinkedIn profiles, and how to become an influencer on social media, like Instagram, tiktok, or it could be a podcast or it could be a YouTuber. This particular course really excites me because I've been writing and blogging and speaking about personal branding really since 2009, when I wrote windmill networking, maximizing LinkedIn, and also, obviously, as I embarked on writing the age of influence back in 2020, most of the work done in 2019, I already have a chapter there and also do talk a lot about how to become an influencer, and these two things are actually tied together. In fact, you know, at Analytica's B2B influencer marketing event, there is a lot of talk about building up internal influencers by utilizing more personal branding. In fact, for an employee advocacy program, employer branding program, personal branding is critical. When I speak with realtors or when I do social selling trainings, personal branding becomes the core of what we talk about. It becomes the foundation.
Speaker 1:So really excited to teach this course and I wanted to share with you today I've only taught the first week. This is all new content that I'm developing. It's almost like writing a second book in parallel at the same time when I'm trying to write another book on digital marketing. But that aside, I wanted to share with you what I've been sharing with my students of this brand new content that I've been creating around personal branding and specifically. I know this is going to be a little bit general, but I want to get you thinking about your own personal branding by offering you what I believe are the 15 most important elements to a personal brand. Now I call these personal branding models.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of people on the internet. If you do a search, you're going to find a lot of people with a lot of opinions on what actually goes into a personal brand. I'm going to give you my advice, but I first want to start. You know there's lots of people who have lots of, you know, the four C's, the three A's, the five P's, so one interesting personal branding model, and I'm going to name names because I see them on the internet and I want to give them credit. So personal branding is not new. We've been talking about it for a while, but those people that are, you know, contributing to publishing content about the subject, I think should be celebrated.
Speaker 1:So, claire Bond she talked about the three A's of altruism, of selflessly helping others. Authenticity, which I think we can all agree is really important. And action. Obviously, if you don't take action, you never proactively build your brand. I think the altruism is interesting. Yeah, I think having a personal brand part of it is definitely Wanting to help others. Otherwise, why are you doing it Right? So I thought that was good, but I think there's more elements, just three.
Speaker 1:Christine Malas has the four C's of personal branding clarity, consistency, content, connection. Love the clarity. Unless you know who you are, how do you build a brand? Branding's all about consistency. You obviously need content to build your brand and, yeah, you need to build connection. You need to build a tribe, a community. So those are great, but I think there's more right.
Speaker 1:Kimberly Maniz talks about the five Ps personal, pointed, prioritized, purposeful, profitable. Personal, yeah, your authentic self. Right Pointed, focused on a niche, prioritized the actions are aligned with values. So it lists consistent alignment of your brand with your activities. Purposeful, similar to altruism, but she calls it deliberate, narrative and intent. And then profitable positioning yourself as an asset will make you more profitable. Getting better, I thought, because now we have five instead of three or four. I think there's more. I'll just share with you two more before I get to my own to see where I'm going with this. So Jill Howeller has the seven pillars Purpose who you are, why you're here, values what's important to you. I think these are critical as well. Brand clarity how do you wish to be perceived by others? Authenticity right, this is a common theme we're seeing Strengths A lot of people often ask you for help on. I think that's a great way of looking at it.
Speaker 1:Energy I thought this was a really interesting one. What depletes or refreshes your energy? Obviously, you want to do more of things that refresh your energy, less of things that deplete it. And then legacy helps connect us to something larger than ourselves. All of these different models have us thinking sort of outside of the box and do a bigger purpose as to why we're doing it, which I love. These I'll do one more, none other than Brian Tracy Now he actually has a video on YouTube, as well as a short on YouTube shorts and tech talk about the importance of personal branding.
Speaker 1:He talks about a brand being a personal promise and he has eight laws Specialization I think this is in line with the niche. Leadership you need to be a leader, you need to assume that role. Personality. Distinctiveness, which might be related to personality he talks about how it's a little bit different. Visibility obviously need to be visible. You should be positive, or positivity, sense and goodwill. So I think by just sharing a few of these with you, you already get a sense of a few elements that are common, these common threads in building a personal brand.
Speaker 1:I want to take it one step further and give you my advice on what I believe are the 15 elements of a personal brand, and I want you to think about this Should I give you homework? I could, because I give my students homework, so let me keep riffing on this idea. So I believe, if there are 15 elements, we can divide them up into three different phases. The first phase is your foundations right. Without these foundations, you really can't build a brand. I believe the first foundation is purpose. Just like a business exists for a reason, what is your purpose for why you do what you do? What is your why, the motivation behind what you do and how you do it? I think that this really gets in the core of who we are, but also what we do and why we do it. And if we can tap into that, I think it becomes a very, very powerful way for us to talk about all these things and make it part of our content, which is going to create really, really strong branded in our personal brand content going forward.
Speaker 1:The second foundation is your brand promise. What can others expect from your brand? So, hopefully, when you see my brand, you think of well, I hope you do, but you think of integrity. Neil is not going to lead you down the wrong road. Invested in your interest, wants to make you successful, energetic, passionate, right. So the brand promise. I want to give you some examples Nike we can say Nike's brand promise is inspire every athlete in the world, and I think that comes down to the DNA of everything they do. Apple to think differently. Starbucks to inspire and nurture the human spirit. One person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time.
Speaker 1:My favorite go over to the Twitter profile, or should we call it X? I refuse to the Twitter profile of Patagonia and until recently they said we're in business to save our home planet. I thought that was a brilliant brand promise. So what is your brand promise? You know there's a science. I can talk about these different elements, but each one is sort of an art right. No one right or wrong way to do it. You got to do what seems right for you.
Speaker 1:But if you can come up with a brand promise, a one sentence statement that almost becomes your bio on your social media, and what have you? So brand promise is your second foundation. The third is perspective. Without perspective, what makes you unique? So from what angle or experiences do you look at problems? I often talk about how I spent 15 years in Asia, worked at a Japanese company, was in charge of selling to Japan, china, korea, had to take a really, really holistic perspective on sales, on business, and yes, I don't have a marketing background. I'm a marketer, but my background is B2B sales. So all of these things lead to a pretty unique experience and perspective that I give. Everybody has a unique perspective. What is yours? And if you can define that and bring it out in your content, that obviously is going to help you create a more robust personal brand.
Speaker 1:And then personality and I sort of hinted at this at the beginning when I said how would people describe you? What is your? Why? How would others describe you as a person? That will give you a hint as to what is your personality. What are things people have said about you that are unique to you? So I hinted at this when I talked about the brand promise, which is sort of related to this. It's another foundation for your personal brand. But what is uniquely you? How do people describe you? And if you read articles on personal branding, there are people that will send out emails to 10, 15, 20, their closest friends put it on social media give me a few adjectives that describe me, help me out, and that might be something you can try to do as well, and I think you'll be fascinated by the results of what you see.
Speaker 1:I have always been told from a really early age that I am an extremely passionate person, so this is something that I lean into. It's something that I realize and hopefully comes out in my content and makes me unique and stand out with that personality. What is your personality? And then the fifth one is your story. So obviously a perspective also means you have unique experience. But what unique experience is best described? How you got to where you are today. And there's something Pat Flynn, who I'm a big fan of, talks about it on his podcast. He talks about the story bank and these are experiences that he's had in his life that he writes down records, puts away, writes on an index card, a post it no puts away, so that whenever he's looking for a story for speeches, for his content, he literally has a database of stories to call from, because often we experience something, we remember it that day but then we forget it the next day. So it's a matter of documenting these things and bringing them out in your content.
Speaker 1:If you do a search for story bank examples in the PowerPoint that I give at UCLA Extension, I actually have a slide from the University of Oregon, lundquist College of Business, where it says skill, what, how? Outcome. So, for instance, leadership skill what During summer restaurant job, trained three new hires on menu and procedures? How Use knowledge of products and created common customer scenarios for training, outcome positive feedback from manager and new employees said they felt well-prepared after going through the scenarios. Now these story banks in this case might be for someone looking for a job or wanting to buff up their resume or profile, but they can also come out in your content, especially when it's related to everything else that I'm gonna be talking about, these other elements that go into your personal brand. So that's the foundations of you as a person.
Speaker 1:Next, I wanna go into the next five elements as we sort of build upon this foundation, which comes down to your specialty. A few different things here, five different things actually. Number one the niche Niche, niche, niche, niche, niche. I don't wanna, you know, flog a dead horse or whatever they call it, but a niche I would define as a specific area of focus or expertise that will define what you do and who your target audience is. The more specific the niche, the better the niche.
Speaker 1:I am one that is not a good niche here, so I'm not the best one to ask for advice. I tend to go very broad, very general, which is the absolute opposite of niche. But as I'm writing my next book, I'm thinking you know what I really should niche down, because if my fractional CMO clients and my speaking clients and my digital first mastermind you know community and you all if it is gearing more towards content creators, business owners, entrepreneurs, then maybe that's the audience I should be writing for. And that is an example of a niche and saying you know what? I'm not gonna write content for larger enterprises. That's an example of how you can slowly whittle away and niche down something that I am currently. I'm currently a work in progress, but it's deep in my mind as well. If you already have a niche, awesome, you can even further niche down if you wanted to. But the key thing here is, if you want to build a personal brand, you got to have a niche. Normally that's your profession, either industry, what's our role you play, function in a company, et cetera but that is a niche.
Speaker 1:Famous quote here which I think says it better than I can. Apparently this comes from a 15th century, I believe a Roman or English poet Sorry, I don't know my history all that well, but the gentleman's name is John Lidgate and he said and this is a very famous quote, you've heard many people say this, but apparently John is the first to say it centuries ago. Quote you can please some of the people all the time. You can please all the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time Makes a heck of a lot of sense. Next, we have differentiators. So I've already sort of hinted about this when we talked about the foundations, like perspective, your stories In terms of your specialties, what is something unique and different that you will add to the conversation? Visa via niche, right? This all revolves around that niche, around that specialty differentiators.
Speaker 1:The third one is positioning. You've probably heard this term before. There's a marketing classic. I believe it might be a million copies. I know at least 500,000 copies are in print Al Reese and Jack Trout positioning how to be seen and heard in the overcrowded marketplace An older book, but still a classic. And the way that it is defined in the book is the way to communicate the distinctive identity of a product or service to your target audience. How are you gonna communicate your unique differentiators in the same niche with your competitors? So, for instance, apple sells a lot of the same technology that others do, but they position themselves, by the way they communicate in many ways, as the innovative technology company. Nike is positioned as the performance athletic shoe company. Bmw is positioned as the luxury car company. A Subaru is positioned as the family safe car company, et cetera, et cetera. So I think you get the picture that is positioning Once again. If that's a new concept to you, highly recommend you go out and buy that book.
Speaker 1:And then we have expertise. So when you are known as an expert, you establish yourself as a credible and trustworthy source of advice that others will heed. The key, though, to having expertise to be considered an expert is you gotta be out there, you gotta be creating content, you gotta be publishing content online and offline, and this is where speaking one of these old school before social media types of activities really come in handy, as well as an example of an offline activity, but there's a heck of a lot of online content creation that you could be doing to showcase your expertise. And then credibility. So expertise is expertise. Credibility is what makes people believe in you and trust your expertise.
Speaker 1:Often common traits to be seen as more credible a bit of honesty, transparency, consistency, reliability and being helpful. I know these are very esoteric, but if you think about it, you don't wanna be lying. If someone calls you out and they find you're a liar, that doesn't make your expertise credible. If you are not transparent about what you are doing, then that obviously raises some red flags and question marks. If you're not consistent, people don't know if you're just a one-time expert or are you a consistent expert. Obviously, the more they see you, the more credibility that it gives you. Expertise that just you know. The five touches, seven touches, 10 touches, 20 touches around the same subject matter, being reliable, being helpful, always responding to people, giving advice that's truly helpful to them All these things add into your credibility. That's related to your expertise. Obviously, there's more than just that. Just giving you some introductions to my thoughts on the process. I hope to be talking more about this and even have some products and services that can offer you if you wanna go further about this. But I'll stop there in the credibility, because we can go a long time.
Speaker 1:I now wanna end with the third five personal branding elements. So we started with the foundation that we went into the specialty. The last five are the actual implementation of your personal brand. It begins with consistency. Now, in order to have consistency, you need to have a brand voice A brand voice, and this comes from a blog post that I brought in the subject.
Speaker 1:In marketing, brand voice refers to the overall tone and personality of a brand. It encompasses everything from the language used in advertising and social media to the design of the brand's website and physical product packaging. A strong brand voice can help to differentiate a brand in a crowded marketplace and build consumer trust and loyalty. This way, a brand becomes both memorable and consistent, so people know what to expect from them. So when developing a brand voice, businesses should consider their target audience and what kind of message they wanna communicate. It is also important to be consistent across all touch points, from initial awareness all the way through to purchase. Ultimately, a well-defined brand voice can be an invaluable asset in driving business success. So remember the concept of personal branding first of all actually comes from corporate branding, right? So the same important things you need to do for corporate branding in marketing is what you need to do for personal branding, and the brand voice becomes critical because when you implement and you need to be consistent you need to be using consistent language all the time.
Speaker 1:Now there's a great way of thinking about brand voice. Actually, there is a article from Ring Central, ringcentralcom, and I show this. I'm looking at the PowerPoint right now as I'm recording this podcast episode, but they have a great spreadsheet of personality trait description and then do's and don'ts. So, for instance, personality trait of being playful If this is part of your brand voice, because the brand voice is a collection of these personal traits and how you relate them in your language. So, for instance, if you consider yourself playful and you wanna make that part of your personal brand, part of your brand voice, the description of playful according to this article.
Speaker 1:We don't take ourselves too seriously. We're not afraid to joke around. Do's become have fun, look for opportunities to make jokes, use fun, unexpected examples, but don't make jokes when the customer's unhappy or upset. Don't take yourself too seriously, don't use a monotone voice and overused examples. So right there you have a template. It's gonna be a filter that's gonna define when you wanna communicate a message, how you communicate it right. And I think a great example of this and I give these examples in class is certain brands. On Twitter you will see a very, very unique brand voice, because before you only had 140 characters to say something, and so you have different brands that give very, very different brand voices that they're very consistent about, and I think once you hear these examples, this point will be driven home.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, wendy's American fast food restaurant. They're pretty famous for being edgy on social media. So on Twitter, there's an example of them retweeting a tweet from comic book now, which I think was a funny. You know a comic, not real but it said Burger King is testing a sandwich with nothing but French fries. So you see, you know a bun and in between it are just French fries. Now you gotta remember that Burger King and Wendy's are rivals. So the tweet from Wendy's is when literally anything would be better on a bun than their beef. So they're taking a stab at Burger King. But this is sort of what Wendy's does on social media.
Speaker 1:We have Dove, the natural beauty brand, and they have an example. Well, I show an example from Twitter where it says this national selfie day, let's turn off filters and celebrate real beauty, because you deserve to feel confident exactly as you are. Hashtag Dove self-esteem project. So I think you get the feeling that Dove is really being this cheerleader of celebrating the raw beauty of people. Right, and it comes out in the language. And then I wanna show you, or tell you an example from Patagonia, right, the tweet that I found. When's the last time you rolled in the sand? Experiencing the natural world through touch, motion and sight is more fun. A reservoir rich in sensory experiences, right out the front door, the sound of birds and the feeling of sunlight can be found almost anywhere. Man, this love for our planet, right, you get the sense, the description, the luxurious, you know sensual ways in which Patagonia talks about these mundane things, about our planet that we often take for granted. This is completely aligned with their brand voice, right? So hoping that this makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Interestingly enough, I am a big fan of a number of AI tools. One is called Jasper. You can go to neilshaffercom, slash Jasper and sign up for the special offer using my affiliate link, and they actually have a feature that if you upload your own content like I uploaded a blog post and it literally defined the tone for me, it defined my brand voice. So it basically said your content emphasizes an informative, professional and persuasive tone, with practical advice for digital content influence on social media marketing, using rhetorical questions, statistics, comparisons, personalization, clear organization in a strong call to action. That pretty much sums up how I write blog posts right, so using AI to help you find that tone might be an interesting exercise for you as well. Once again, that's neilshaffercom slash Jasper J-A-S-P-E-R.
Speaker 1:But part of this implementation in terms of consistency is not just the tech tool, brand voice, it's also the brand visuals. This is what most people think of when they think of personal branding, like what's my logo gonna look like? Et cetera, et cetera. So, yes, logos, color schemes, props You'll always see my profiles in social media wearing this Royal Blue Brooks Brothers shirt, a dress shirt. It's a prop that I use, right? Social media profile photos, your LinkedIn profile background image that appears at the top of your profile, instagram highlight icons, instagram grids I don't think people are as serious about it now as they used to be, but even your choice of TikTok video covers becomes part of this consistency in your brand visuals.
Speaker 1:For your personal brand, I go out of my way. I actually have a base color palette for all of my PowerPoints that I also like to use for a lot of my visuals online. So I have six different colors one black, two different grays, one blue, which is the LinkedIn blue that you see me use most of the time, a medium C green and a white. I'm actually in the process of asking the people that work for me ideas on how I can make a new brand color palette as I continue writing and prepare for the marketing of my new book. I just want to. I wanna have more fun with my brand colors than just the black, gray, blue, green. Why not some yellow, orange, red, pink, right, purple? But that's an example of brand visuals.
Speaker 1:In fact, it also comes down to the fonts that you use. I tend to use, at least for my logo, open sans, but I also use Avenir often in the fonts for my PowerPoint presentations. In fact, if you subscribe to Adobe Express which I highly recommend you do, they have a forever free plan. Go to neilshaffercom, slash Adobe Express. You can actually create your own brand template. And if you go to where you create your brand template, you upload your logo, you add your colors, you add your fonts and you add your graphics and then it will make sure that every post that you create in Adobe Express is branded. So highly recommend you check that out Once again. It's all about the consistency of your brand voice and your brand visuals. All right.
Speaker 1:Next up, the second element in the implementation of your personal brand is authenticity. I think this needs no mentioning, and it's funny, I actually show two Jiffy GIFs on this PowerPoint. One says I will never, ever stop being me and the second one says less filters, more real, less BS and this podcast does have a A-G rating, so I won't say the actual word, but I think you get the picture. And why do we even have to talk about authenticity is because there was a day in being an influencer on Instagram when everything was just aspirational, right, and then we had COVID and TikTok came around and it's just really raw, right. It's that rawness that people really crave and that's where the authenticity comes in. All, right.
Speaker 1:The third one, or element for your personal branding from an implementation perspective is visibility. Right, visibility. I would also say we can call it digital presence. So with visibility and digital presence, I mean pick your platform right. You have podcast versus blog, versus YouTube versus social media. Within social media, obviously, in addition to YouTube, you have Facebook, you have Instagram. You have WeChat, obviously big in China. You have TikTok. You have Telegram, which is a legit social network of its own. I think it's more popular in Europe, eastern Europe, russia. You have Snapchat, you have Dowing, which obviously is TikTok for China. X slash, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, et cetera, et cetera. Weibo in China. There's tons of social networks you can be on, pick one and run. Facebook, you probably know, has 3 billion monthly active users. Youtube about 2.5, instagram, too, tiktok more than one. You cannot go wrong with any of those, right? All right, the next thing you need from an implementation perspective is the biggest no-brainer, which is digital content.
Speaker 1:In my PowerPoint, I show there's a lot of different ways to publish digital content. There's blog posts, there's ebooks, there's podcasts, there's email newsletters, there's videos, there's thought leadership content, there's infant graphics, how-to guides, social media posts, case studies, webinars. Then, obviously, within social media, different types of content engage people differently. Some content that I found from Sprout Social. They talk about the most engaging types of in-feed social content. That short form video is number one. Images number two. Live video number three. Gifs number four. Text-based posts number five. User-generated content number six. Long form video number seven. Audio number eight. And URL or links to other content number nine A lot of different types of social media content. They're all going to rank differently in the algorithm Pick one, pick two, pick three.
Speaker 1:But you need to be visible, you need to get your content out there, and there's many, many ways to do it. One of my students says Neil, we cause me, professor, professor Schaefer, I don't want to show up on video, I'm not really comfortable. I'm like great, then become a podcaster, right? There's other things you can do without having to show up on video. If you don't want to, if you don't like video, don't do video. If you don't like audio, don't do podcast. If you don't want to write long form articles, don't blog. Right, you need to do what jives with your vibe. All, right, the last part of implementing a personal brand.
Speaker 1:The fifth element here is community a group of people who share your values, interests and goals. I would like to believe that you listeners are part of my extended community, right? People that follow and support you, they engage with you, they help you grow your brand. There are many ways in which you can, I should say, build a community, because the podcast alone doesn't really build a community. It could be in an email list, it could be in a Facebook group, a Discord community, a Patreon, et cetera, et cetera. There are many ways to do this, but it's said that your vibe will attract your tribe and sometimes you need to put it out there. In order to build that tribe, you need to have a call to action to bring people together, and that's why these groups are really, really valuable and they are going to support you whatever you end up doing with your personal brand. Those are the 15 elements that I see when it comes down to building a personal brand. I will give you some homework and I'll put the link and this is the same homework that well, part of the same homework that I gave my students, but I'll put the link in these show notes.
Speaker 1:But there is a great blog post on personal branding on the 99designscom website. It's someone who talks about her personal brand framework and it's a triangle. Her name is Anna Lumberg's. Let's give Anna a shout-out because I think it's really great. She has this triangle. At the bottom are your, or a pyramid, whichever way you want to look at 2D, 3d. At the bottom are your tangible brand elements.
Speaker 1:She puts personal coach, speaker, writer one step outside is a hashtag she likes to use, redefining success, authentic. I'm the same in my professional and personal life. These are these tangible brand elements. Then, just a credibility. She was valedictorian University of Oxford Holy smokes, two master's degrees, seven years of Proctor and Gamble client testimonials, youtube channel videos of speaking, personal and professional blog running her own business. Then, as we go further up, she divides this next third layer in her personal brand framework to her strengths and her skills. Her strengths are being self-motivated, quick thinking, strong, independent, open mining, and her skills are branding and marketing writing, coaching, speaking and facilitating business strategies. Then, on top of that, she has her core values curiosity, courage, trust in myself, balance, self-compassion. At the very top, she has her purpose finding and living my own definition of success and helping others do the same.
Speaker 1:Maybe you could look at it from the bottom up, or maybe you could look at it from the top down, but I think creating your own personal brand framework whether you like the way that Anna's done it in a triangle or you like my way of 15 different elements, five plus five plus five, that sort of build on top of each other, whatever it is, there's never been a better time to sort of brainstorm all these things. As you brainstorm, you're going to look at your content differently. You're going to realize that maybe you should be posting more of a certain type of content. You should be speaking more in a certain type of way. You should be focusing more on a specific niche. You should be showing more of yourself in your content, because the more emotional attachment that you make, the stronger your personal brand becomes. So I'll leave you with that. In fact, I'll leave you with a visual.
Speaker 1:So I often say, whether it is a professional marketing brand or a personal brand, a brand makes a really, really strong emotional attachment. And I give the example and I'd ask you to if you were in my class. You know, when you go to the drug store, there's Tylenol and there's other brands as well, and then there's generic. You know Tylenol, right, generic drugs, cvs what have you? So let me ask you when you go to the drug store and you have a fever or headache, do you buy the Tylenol brand or do you buy the generic brand? And I said, hey, if you still buy the Tylenol brand, raise your hand. And, me included, a few of us raised our hands. That is the actual value add that a brand has. It is the exact same ingredient as a generic, but we just feel more comfortable, we feel safer, we're attached to that brand and we go out of our way to spend a dollar or two more to buy the Tylenol. So when you're competing for the same job for the same business, that personal brand gives you that edge where not only could you give a better chance of winning that business, but you might be able to get paid more for the same work. That is the ROI of a personal brand. So think about these 15 things.
Speaker 1:If you liked this episode, I'd love to hear from you. I'm creating a lot of content around this subject and you know I don't know how much I'll talk about in this podcast. I you know I'm gonna. I'm gonna staff it for a while, but I do think it is one of those central things that in digital marketing, you need to be aware of. And a lot of marketers also wanna build their own personal brand, wanna become more influential. So, and I wanna help you. So please feel free to reach out.
Speaker 1:And, as another reminder, since we're near the end, I am on my quest for 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts. I'm currently at 59, still got a ways to go, but you know, having published 340, well, this'll be number 342,. I do hope that I've been able to serve you and that you've gotten something out of this podcast. If you've gotten anything, it would just be an honor If you could just spend 10 seconds Apple Podcasts. Give it a star rating and one or two sentences, and let me know, give me a shout out, or you don't have to. Let me know if you don't want to, I'll find it and I'll shout you out in this podcast. But I would really be honored. And you know, without asking for it, you don't get it right. That's just a general rule of life, it's a rule of personal branding, it's a rule of marketing. So I'll end there with my humble request for you. And this concludes another episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastneilschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschaefercom to tap in to the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership Community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.
Speaker 1:MUSIC.