The importance of your personal brand
Riona Mulherin
5 August 2024Understandably, some people are hesitant about building their own personal brand. Reasons for this might be the time and effort involved, concerns over privacy, lack of confidence or fear of judgement. However, I feel that as an adviser, you are missing a huge opportunity if you’re not spending time to build your personal brand. In today's competitive market, cultivating a knowledgeable, cohesive, approachable online identity is essential. It’s the key to breaking boundaries and helping your business to stand out from the crowd.
Let’s take some time to explore this further – starting with looking at what actually is a personal brand?
A personal brand is the unique combination of skills, experiences and personality that you present to the world. It is how you distinguish yourself from others and communicate your value to your audience, whether that be your existing customers, prospective customers, industry contacts or peers. Building a personal brand involves consistently showcasing your strengths, values, and personality through various channels. But what’s the point you might be asking? Quite simply, a strong personal brand can help you establish credibility, build trust and create opportunities/generate leads.
As an adviser, you are an absolute expert in your field, and you should shout about it! You can use your platform to demonstrate how knowledgeable you are, share key information about what’s going on in the market, help people to understand how it may affect them in ‘layman’s terms’ and explain the value that an adviser can add to complex financial situations. Doing so will establish you as someone approachable, knowledgeable and reliable when they need advice.
How do I get started?
- Identify your strengths, values, and unique skills and think about what makes you stand out compared to others and your competitors.
- Spend time thinking about what you want to be known for, and what your goals are – for example, do you want to speak to existing customers, or generate leads from prospective customers etc. Once you know your purpose, you should use this as a measure of success and whether this is working or not.
- Create a consistent online presence – you can do this by using social media platforms, videos, your website or blog articles to showcase your expertise and how you can add value. Ensure your profiles are professional and consistent across all platforms... consistency really is key! It’s better to do one or two platforms very well than it is to try and be occasionally using all of them.
- Create and share content that highlights your expertise. This could be through blog posts, videos, podcasts, or social media updates.
- Grow your audience – you can do this by attend local events, joining online communities, connecting with people on social media platforms etc. This will help you to build relationships and increase your visibility.
- Stay true to yourself and your values so that you come across as genuine, and don’t forget to show some personality! Authenticity builds trust and makes your personal brand more relatable and credible.
Here are some steps to get you started on building your personal brand:
Starting with these steps can help you build a strong and impactful personal brand, which can hopefully lead to better engagement from your existing and prospective customers.
When it comes to creating and sharing content with your audience, you should ideally take a ‘fail fast’ approach which encourages you to quickly test ideas, learn from failures, and iterate rapidly. The goal is to identify what works and what doesn’t as soon as possible, minimising time and resources spent on ineffective strategies. What does this look like in practice?
Example scenario:
You decide to start building your personal brand and to do this you have been writing some lengthy blog articles, producing short ‘selfie’ style videos and sharing social media updates on the market. After a month, you look at the analytics and notice that videos you’ve created are getting the most engagement and are resulting in clicks back to your website or email enquiries. You haven’t seen any real interaction with your blog articles. As a result, you then shift your focus much more on to creating video content. You can still occasionally produce articles and social media updates to keep a diverse content mix.
Put simply, by taking a ‘fail fast’ approach, you quickly learn what your audience prefers and can allocate your resources more effectively to produce content that drives engagement and growth – meaning less of your valuable time is wasted.
In summary...
I believe building a personal brand is crucial for advisers as a means of demonstrating your knowledge, experience and the value that you can add to a customer. By showcasing your personality, you can build trust, rapport and credibility that can otherwise be hard to establish online.
Make sure you avoid some of the most common mistakes listed below, and you won’t go far wrong!
- Inconsistency – whether that is in the frequency of posting, the format you use, or the message of the content you’re sharing
- Lack of authenticity – this can make you seem insincere – make sure your messaging aligns with you and your business values
- Not understanding your audience – focus on what they want and need, not just what you want them to know.
- Ignoring analytics – failing to do so can mean you’ll possibly be wasting time on activities that don’t work, and is a missed opportunity to refine what you’re doing.
- Too many platforms - It’s better to shine on a few key platforms than to be average on several.
- Being too salesy or scaremongering - constantly pushing products or services, or scaring people into thinking they need help, can lead your audience to switch off. Focus on providing value and building relationships first.
Avoiding these mistakes can help you build a strong, authentic, and engaging personal brand. Good luck!
