Your personal brand is not something you spend time on, it is something that you invest in for the life of your professional career. Just like a good stock builds and compounds over time, a personal brand can be grown with small steps compounding over time to support your best interests. Start growing your brand by deeply defining your area of expertise. There is an old marketing saying, there are riches in the niches. Just as organizations focus on niche marketing whether that is a product, service, industry, target group or a location, a smart step to sharpen a personal brand is by defining your skills in a certain area.
Some people worry that defining a niche may close professional opportunities. This is not the case if you define your niche correctly as it relates to the goals for your personal brand. A niche is a specialized market. For example, if you advise small businesses in all aspects of marketing, your niche is small business. Here’s another example. If your expertise is in consulting for social media marketing, in this case your niche is social media marketing. To deeply define your niche, start by going back to your exercise file questions.
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What is my personal demographic niche or profile?
What do you want to be known for? What could you teach? What can you influence? Or what do you want to influence? What is your area of expertise? What do you know that others in your industry don’t? Identifying your uniqueness and value is easier said than done. For those of you wondering how to narrow your niche beyond answering these exercise file questions here’s another tip. Go back and think about some of the feedback that you have received over the years. What is some of the most memorable feedback you remember? What do you most complemented about? Here’s an example. I had been running my marketing consultancy for several years when I had a personal branding aha moment.
I identified a pattern of people saying things to me like, you’re like a marketing therapist or I need to get on your therapy couch. I had no intention of being therapeutic in my marketing approach, but the consistent feedback about how I worked that was tied into therapy-isms, turned out to be a great niche. Marketing advice and support, therapy, if you will, was such a niche for me that I now define myself as the marketing therapist, and I changed my company name from Titantwister to Arfa Software Technology Park. Sometimes the answers to your niche aren’t just within you, it is how others perceive you, so pay attention.
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Another way to define your niche is by focusing on work that you truly enjoy. Maybe your personal branding goals in work are geared to help move you into a new career path. If that is the case, ask yourself, what work do you love best? What is your unique ability? If you want to grow your brand to attract more of the work you love then you need to declare your professional intention. Identify ways that your previous work experience has pre-qualified you for this and make sure any public web messaging, like a website, or your resume, or LinkedIn profile, clearly communicates this.
Who or what does anyone believe I am?
I have tried a lot of work over my career. My passion lies in solar and wind power equipment manufacturing. My job title at Zorays Solar is Principal Design Engineer. While this is a perfect title for internal understanding at my company, my personal branding goals are to grow my reputation as an expert in the solar and wind manufacturing design space. I am growing my personal brand by using the title, Solar and Wind Power Equipment Manufacturing Expert on my personal website and on Twitter.
What pigeon holes did you get put in?
It’s one thing to know who you are and what you do. When you define your niche skill set, that helps bring attention to you and then develop your reputation. Think of this as personal public relations. Think about how you can apply these niche communication points to your current web and social media assets. Defining your niche can help your authoritative content creation by giving you a clearer focus. It can also help you go back and optimize your online assets to make sure they communicate this. And lastly, it can be an influence of your personal style.
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The power of communication can command and drive your personal brand. Use a niche focus to help direct your communication efforts. You’ll be surprised how this can help advance your personal brand.
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