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The Power Of Personal Branding In Lead Generation

Lead generation can be an incredibly powerful tool for business growth. But it is a long, often difficult process. It requires continuous effort to establish and strengthen relationships with potential customers and partners.

Thankfully, there are ways to make this process easier with the help of personal branding.

Your brand is your voice – it speaks volumes without you having to utter a word. Crafting the right narrative communicates quickly who you are and what you stand for, allowing audiences to trust you almost instantly.

Branding yourself as an expert in your field through effective content writing helps establish credibility and attracts discerning customers looking for professionals they can trust. Thoughtfully planned visuals will engage prospects even further and also serve as a reference that resonates after initial contact has been made.

Brand recognition will set you apart from competitors while correctly delivering messaging across broadcast channels ranging from social media, emails and web presence to name tags or even tattoos! A well-crafted personal brand gives customers one consistent image of what they should expect from your services whatever channel it may be on.

Today people are familiar with the power that a business leader’s personality has to influence the reputation of their company. How can you separate the figure of Richard Branson from Virgin, Steve Jobs from Apple, or Elon Musk from Tesla Right? You can’t imagine those names with those products.

However, personal branding isn’t just for business leaders. Take a look at this startling statistic: “93% of people trust product or service recommendations from people they know, while only 34% trust messages from a [corporate] brand.”

Overall, by investing in yourself and leveraging strategic branding tactics, lead generation becomes more organic as customers start coming directly to you instead of being acquired by costly marketing campaigns Designed essential allays any trust concerns and ensure that each offer delivered is actionable value.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the power of personal branding as a lead generation tool.

Personal branding

Personal branding is not about being famous or being an influencer who promotes products. It’s about being known for something – be that expertise, a passion, or a message about the brand. It’s about inspiring your audience, building a tribe and having an impact on certain people.

Your personal brand is your brand reputation online. It’s what people who don’t yet know you but one day will think of you when they will see your product or whenever they wanna buy that category product.

The practice of ‘personal branding’ is not only controlling the narrative of how you’re seen but actively working to be seen as branding in a certain field.

Why Is Personal Branding Important?

In an era where people’s attention spans are getting shorter by a few minutes, the need to make an impression is more important for the brand. And the best way to do this is by creating a solid, powerful and memorable brand identity.

Unfortunately, today most business owners do not realize the importance of personal branding because they think it’s a lot of extra work.

However, the truth is that if you want to create a successful business today, you must create a successful brand first. People who know you and your business will trust you more and will buy more products and services from you which will eventually.

Types of personal brand

1) The Altruist

Altruists are people who are highly recognized for their commitment to helping others. These are people who not only dedicate themselves in terms of actions, but also with regard to being mindful of their personal relationships with others.

2) The Careerist

True careerists are the person who has shown a preference for professional way above all other personal achievements.  More often associated with business-related networks such as LinkedIn-careerists constantly share information with others that will raise their status in their industry.

3) The Hipster

Hipster branding refers to a recognized subculture of progressive people who embrace individuality above all else. Although modern hipsters are usually associated with young millennials who give up mainstream trends.

A hipster is also a person who likes to try things first and share reviews or knowledge with others. Hipsters can adopt aspects of both altruism and careerism as well. For them, sharing is seen as an important part of their existence.

4) The Boomerang

The boomerang brand type refers to people who share content and generate interactions simply to create discord through controversy with others. In many cases, its not important to agree with the content-choosing to pass on the information for the potential of being seen as provocative.

5) The Connector

Connectors are people who have pride in themselves and in their ability to bring people together. These are usually well-connected individuals who openly use their network to unite. Typically creative, they obtain validation and satisfaction through others, and people.

6) The Selective

The selective person is a person that only shares information with certain people. They usually carefully curated information based on the general needs and interests of the specific audience. They are largely known for being resourceful. To determine that often takes careful self-analysis that will let you reveal your values, strengths, and weaknesses.

3 Benefits of using personal branding for lead generation

1) Personal branding helps build trust with potential leads

When it comes to lead generation, trust is a very important factor that can make or break a potential sale. If a lead doesn’t trust you and your business, they’re unlikely to do any business or purchase from you. That’s where personal branding helps you.

Personal branding is all about presenting yourself and your expertise and skills in a way that resonates with your target audience. When you develop a strong personal brand, you’re not just promoting your products or services – you’re also showcasing your personality, skills, knowledge, values, and unique qualities. By doing so, you’re giving potential leads a reason to trust you and your business.

2) Helps in developing a powerful personal brand that resonates with your target audience

In today’s crowded digital landscape, developing a personal brand is important for standing out from the competition and building a good audience. But to be truly effective, your personal brand requires you to resonate with your target audience – that is, the people you’re trying to reach and connect with.

A personal brand helps you to resonate with your target audience, you need to start by understanding who your target audience is, what they want, and what challenges they face. You can involve doing research on your target market, surveying your existing audience list, or simply paying attention to the conversations and trends in your industry.

3) Leveraging personal branding to attract high-quality leads

Personal branding can be a great tool for attracting high-quality leads – that is, target customers who are a good fit for your business and are more possible to convert into paying customers. By leveraging your personal brand, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and build a loyal following that is engaged.

One way to leverage your personal brand for lead generation is to aim at creating high-quality content that offers value to your target audience. This might include blog posts, social media updates, videos, podcasts, or other forms of content that demonstrate your expertise and provide solutions to the challenges and pain points of your ideal customers.

5 key elements of a powerful personal brand

1. Experience

Ensure you’re engaging in impactful and exciting ways to embrace new opportunities and challenges so that you’ll have a variety of experiences to draw upon. And they don’t all need to be good experiences; in fact, being able to share information about times when things went wrong will lend your story authenticity and make you more relatable.

2. Collaboration

In order to demonstrate the relevance of your storyline to your audience of a potential audience, it helps if you can collaborate with your existing audience. Ask their permission to share their experiences to support your narrative.

3. Awareness

While your personal experience and working relationships are very important for building your personal brand, It’s important to be aware of the massive context in which your brand is situated.

You can increase your brand exposure by reverse engineering what a branding and digital marketing agency do for targeting your audience, as you may get even greater results.

4. Openness

It might seem senseless to talk about your weaknesses and failures as part of personal branding but remember: “a personal brand should reflect your actual personality and should not be an idealised or fake version of who you are.”

You must be willing to be open, honest, and vulnerable about your mistakes and disappointments. That’s what will give your personal brand integrity and encourage your customers to trust you.

5. Content – Creation & Distribution

Your experience, collaboration, awareness, knowledge and openness will go invisible if you don’t create compelling content to get these qualities to check assurance. This means once you’ve got the content, you need to distribute it on the right media  channels to be seen by your target audience.

When you come to distribute your content, it’s helpful to identify the timing for your personal branding marketing strategy.

For more immediate results you can choose:

  • Paid social media

  • Paid Google/Bing ads

  • On the other hand, for a longer, slow-burn approach that builds up your brand gradually, you can try:

  • Guest blogging

  • Organic social media

  • Speaking gigs and conferences

How personal branding can be used to generate leads

1) Ensure content quality

The path to grabbing the attention of people towards your expertise goes through providing helpful content.

Start strategizing what you want to convey to your audience. While coming up with content ideas, and keeping a pulse check on the challenges or issues your audience wants the solutions for- how you as a market expert can help them solve those issues?

Having consistent, high-quality content is the beginning point to use your personal brand. Optimize your social profiles and make sure you’re using high-quality images, and videos your expertise is demonstrated, and your copy is crisp and typo-free.

Your goal is to make the audience aware of what you are working for in your niche, your vision relating to your niche, and how you are a problem solver for your audience’s issues.

Considering all these points, you can create relevant and quality content to spearhead your personal branding efforts. It will drive the target audience to visit your page, generate more leads, and create brand advocates.

2) Consider your marketing content as an asset

When you are paving the way to propel your personal branding, it is important to treat your marketing content as an asset. The reason for this is simple: it will help you open up new profit avenues and create multiplied demand for your product markets.

3) Leverage the power of your followers and subscribers

According to the Edelman-LinkedIn study, 56% of decision-makers say they use thought leadership content as an important way to vet business. Incorporate thought leadership in your personal branding marketing strategy, and build and leverage relationships with other thought leaders in your niche.

Why? That’s because you will get advantages from shared branding and augmented exposure while also discovering new perspectives that you might otherwise have missed noticing. For strengthening relationships, fetching growth, and amplifying engagement, you can create shared content aligning with collaborations and fun competitions for your audience.

4) Social Media Platform

Leading your personal branding effort is directly proportional to building a beneficial and strong network. Leverage social media channels and expand your network so you to brand yourself, show professionalism, cultivate more and create more.

Utilizing social media channels makes it easier to connect with your target audience, establish relationships, and even get unexpected opportunities. When selecting social media channels, keep your brand or business goals intact.

5) LinkedIn

Linkedin is a separate use case of personal branding well, which is intentional because Linkedin is completely different from other platforms. Linkedin is the most profitable social media platform if you want to reap the most out of your personal branding efforts.

It has developed a reputation as a professional social platform, giving you ample reasons for exercising your personal branding efforts on Linkedin you can cultivate quality leads, promote your content, and find partnership opportunities.

6) Conferences & Speaking Gigs

Conference and Speaking gigs are a great medium for personal branding. Speaking at workshops and conferences is a go-to marketing strategy for lead generation. Moreover, these are a perfect way to represent your views and expertise while meeting new minds in your niche community.

Speaking gigs or conferences are the combination of two important parts when it comes to personal branding- content production and content distribution. It would be best if you aimed at educating and adding value.

Personal branding strategy

1. Know yourself First

Many people don’t know who they are and what they want to be in their careers. So many out there struggle with personal branding because they don’t understand themselves and their identity.

If you are ambiguous about your aspirations in life and know where you want to take your things in life, there is no way you can define yourself and convey that to others. Thus, before trying to establish yourself, find a clear definition of yourself, your strengths, things that define you, and your vision & mission in life.

2. Test Yourself

After strategizing all your strengths or traits, test your skills and knowledge with your circle online, or offline and arrive at a credibility score. Then start working on improving your score over a period of time.

3. Define your Target Audience

Define and get to know about your target audience which will help you choose the right medium.

4. Establish Presence

In today’s social media world, your online presence contributes 100% to your personal brand’s online reputation. You will be googled by friends, colleagues or target customers, so make sure your online content speaks about the real authentic YOU.

5. Upgrade your Social Media channel

Social Media channel is no longer about posting photos of food and fancy vacations; it has a deeper objective to protect your personal brand image and true skills across multiple platforms. And today Vlogging is one of the best trends — speaking out would give you more credit than a brief ‘about me’ section.

Tips on building a strong personal brand

1. Make those around your marketing successful:

While some personal brands are built at the expense of others, the most highly regarded personal brands are developing on the success they have created for others. Think “selfless” as opposed to “selfish.”

2. Hiring a coach or mentor:

This is something that many successful brand struggle with as their pride can be a barrier to seeking the wisdom and counsel of others. However, this is one of the best investments to build a powerful, strong and sustainable personal brand.

3. Invest in continuing education:

So you already earn a significant income, run your business and you’re busy – the reality is that it is far simpler to reach the C-suite than to remain there. You will only survive in the working environment if you continue to refine and advance your skill sets and competencies.

4. Learn to work the media, or hire someone:

You can be a target for the media channel and while the controversy is not always a bad thing it causes more unnecessary brain damage than you will possibly want to incur. You can hire someone expert to do it for you.

Personal Branding Examples

1) Elon Musk

Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, at least once. He is often associated with his companies’ names across the world. Elon Musk is a great example of careerist personal branding that represents new technology. People will remember his electric cars and rockets.

2) Kylie Jenner

Kylie Cosmetics, which owns cosmetics brand Kylie Jenner into the youngest “self-made” billionaire in the world. Kylie is a member of the wealthy Kardashian family. She could influence people by her own brand and used her face to demonstrate her product line.

She has a strong social media presence and brought excellent results to this young celebrity. Kylie Cosmetics now has 25.5 Million followers on Instagram and customers worldwide.

3) Shaun White

Shaun White is famous for his accomplishments in snowboarding and skateboarding across the world. Today he owns his own clothing brand. The store has everything an athlete needs. Simply put, personal branding is connected with your identity, personality, and expertise.

Summary

Building a powerful personal brand means telling your own compelling story, being open and authentic, designing on your experiences, and staying aware of the wider context. And it means making sure your brand story is heard by the right audience by producing and distributing great content.

The aim of your personal branding activities should be to educate, inform, knowledge and help your audience. Demonstrating your expertise and showing that you understand your audience’s pain points will generate leads as a natural result.

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