Establishing and gaining recognition for a brand can be challenging and involves much more than just building awareness of your name, website or logo.
There are various elements of branding that combine to form the perceptions that peers, competitors and clients have about your practice.
A key element of your branding is the opinions and respect held for the key people within your practice, including yourself.
What is a personal brand?
Personal branding is the process of creating a recognised identity for you and the other experts in your practice. Put simply it is how you or your team project your brand and values to the wider world.
While it is important to build a broader brand for your business, many of the interactions that lead to the generation of new work or greater recognition of your practice come from your people.
How your clients, as individuals, perceive you and your team can make a massive difference to their assessment of your entire firm.
A big part of building a personal brand is about standing out from the crowd, becoming recognised for your expertise and commanding confidence among peers and clients.
Achieving requires more than just being present online or at events. It is about being a proactive expert in your field who not only contributes to conversations but builds them.
Why is it important?
Trust is a key element of your brand, especially within the professional services sector. Adobe’s Future of Marketing Research found that 71 per cent of UK consumers say they will stop purchasing from a company altogether where trust it broken.
The latest Edleman Trust Barometer shows that only 61 per cent of consumers worldwide trust businesses.
Of the 36,000 it surveyed, 63 per cent said that they believed business leaders were misleading or lying to them (this was up seven per cent on the previous year’s report).
Establishing trust in your brand is, therefore, critical and the evidence suggest that, in general, people trust people more than they trust brands (although the evidence above may suggest this is changing).
Creating and developing a personal brand can have a massive impact in how trusted you are as a person, and the general perception of your firm and its team. Establishing this trust can have a significant impact on the behaviours and decisions of the audience
Creating a personal brand also gives you the opportunity to share common experiences and stories that strengthen relationships with your firm, by making you as an individual more relatable and your businesses as a whole seem based in reality. This could include admitting mistakes and the lessons that are learned from it.
In the current digital age, people follow people, they do not tend to follow brands as much. They want to learn and, to a degree, be entertained by the people they interact with online.
How can you improve your personal brand?
There are many steps that go into building a successful personal brand. However, to help you make a start, here are a few initial things to consider:
Identify your brand
It is best to build your brand around your expertise and experience. Being too general means you may dilute your message and means you have to target a bigger audience.
Targeting the right audience
Once you know what you want to build your personal brand around you should research the people that are going to be most interested in learning more about you. For example, if you focus on a niche such as Cryptocurrency then you would naturally target investors and developers involved in the industry and create content that is most relevant to them.
Network more
Networking and building connections, both online and in person, is key to building your personal brand and you should be setting some time aside each week to reach out to your audience. This could be through sharing posts on platforms like LinkedIn or attending a local networking event.
Share your thoughts
Your new contacts do not want to just hear the same thing over and over again from multiple advisors. They want unique and valuable insights that come from you. Thought leadership posts and content are, therefore, a fantastic way to demonstrate your experience and expertise. Don’t want to write a post, why not record a video or podcast instead?
Let us help you build a better personal brand
You cannot underestimate the influence of your personal brand as a professional adviser.
However, we appreciate that your time is already in demand from existing clients and your regular work within your practice.
That is why it makes sense to outsource the management of your personal brand and content creation to a trusted marketing team.
We are proud to have helped to develop the personal brands of a number of leading lights in the world of law and accounting. To find out how we can help you, please contact us.
