INTHEBLACK December - January 2022 - Magazine - Page 56
Personal branding
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
56
DEC 2022
JAN 2023
Above: Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, is said to have
built his company’s brand based on personal values.
TAKE THE FIRST STEPS
Social media is an effective means of
communicating your personal brand.
However, Ford believes that nowadays
less is actually more.
“You don’t need to be on every single
social media channel. What you really need
is a thoughtful way of helping a specific
market. You almost want to be a little
bit discoverable. You want to be like that
restaurant that doesn’t have a huge sign
outside, but people go there and then tell
others about it.”
Ford suggests starting out with blogging,
as blog posts are straightforward to
produce and cost-effective. Create regular
content that will be helpful to your target
market. That builds goodwill and, in turn,
makes potential customers more likely to
support your business.
When blogging, Anderson recommends
being conscious of the way you use language.
INTHEBLACK CAREER, ELEVATED SPECIAL EDITION
“One thing to avoid is making it all
about yourself. Don’t have too many ‘I’s’ in
the content. Change your pronouns, so that
they’re either removed, or where possible
reframed over to ‘you’,” she says.
She also encourages everyone to use
video. “It is easy to feel like you’re being
self-promotional by putting your face on
things, but that’s not the case at all – the
fact is that you’re dealing with people’s
hard-earned money, their life savings, and
they need to trust you. They want to know
who they are dealing with.”
Better still, go and meet people face-toface, she says.
“Identify where your ideal clients or
referrers hang out. Then, get up and
talk in front of them. That is where you
differentiate yourself from other people
– by unpacking that expertise for them.
Don’t wait for them to do a Google search
and hope they find you.”
