“For better or for worse, our company is a reflection of my thinking, my character, and my values.”–Rupert Murdoch
Personal branding has often proven its importance, yet it is often overlooked compared to business branding. Everyone already has an existing persona and identity branded on them, but the question is whether or not they cultivate it. Personal branding of a founder, CEO, owner or an employee is a way to boost the credibility of the organisation.
If the customer trusts a person, they are more likely to trust the company they own as well. Personal branding is important in both B2C and B2B business and can be executed with different tactics, such as blogging, social media, email marketing and public relations. An individual can definitely determine how they want the world to identify them and either fail or reap the benefits and succeed. Here are three reasons why personal branding is essential for anyone in any industry.
Related: 5 Personal Branding Must-Do’s For Personal And Professional Success
1. Personal branding boosts sales
One of the most well-known benefits of personal branding campaigns has to be the increase in sales it makes for businesses. It has been proven that leads generated by company social media activities are seven times less likely to convert compared to leads generated by employees through social media activities. It has been said that it takes 5-7 impressions for a brand to be etched in somebody’s mind, therefore personal branding efforts, such as posting on social media is a perfect and non-intrusive way to help guide leads along the customer journey.
Studies have shown that 53 percent of decision-makers said that they excluded a vendor from consideration based on information they did or did not find about someone associated with the company online. This shows that being invisible hurts the company as much as having a bad personal track record online.
2. Personal branding appeal to more customers compared to business branding.
It may sound surprising but one social media post from an executive at a company goes further than one from the company itself. It has been made evident that posts by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than when shared by companies. In fact, a study has shown that a heaping 92 percent of people trust recommendations from individuals – even if they don’t know them in real life compared to companies.
3. Personal branding offers a competitive edge.
People are more likely to trust a company when their founders and CEO are active on social media with 77 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase when the CEO of the business uses social media. Consumer like it when they feel like they know the leader of the business they are buying from. By ignoring this, business allow themselves to be swallowed up by their competition.
Creating A Personal Branding Campaign
It may seem intimidating for business owners and employees to start a proper personal branding strategy, but it is actually a good idea to take time and plan out the entire strategy. To create a personal branding campaign, it is important to first aim for the networks or platforms target audiences already use. They can figure this out by looking at the buyer persona. Next, they should choose just one or two efforts and focus on those. Being in presence on too many platforms can be too much of a burden and end up failing on all of them. Build up followers slowly and consistently. it will take time and huge effort to build a successful personal branding campaign but it will certainly pay off in the end.
Related: 15 Statistics That Prove The Value Of Personal Branding
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