The Motivation (and Guidance) To Build Your Personal Brand Now
This week, I will attend Mark Schaefer's Uprising event for Marketing leaders in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I'll help moderate a panel on the importance of personal branding. Though my personal branding journey is just ten months old, I'll have the opportunity to share my experience and the reality of why building a personal brand is important to me and what it takes to build one. Here is what I'll share:
Why Having A Personal Brand Is So Important Today
Of course, there are many reasons for creating a personal brand, but let me share two urgent ones with you. Firstly, deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to detect, with estimates showing over 500,000 deepfakes on social media as of 2023. According to some estimates, up to 10% of all content on the internet may already be AI-generated! It’s getting harder to tell what’s real. And that is why human insights and connections are more important than ever.
Second, not only is AI content adding to the noise and making it more difficult to know what's real, but AI capabilities are threatening entire professions. According to MarketingHire, 40% of marketers expect their roles to be reduced due to AI. For marketing professionals in particular, being known by way of a personal brand helps validate us and allows us to compete better for new clients, positions and promotions.
In fact, my mentor, marketing futurist and personal branding expert, Mark Schaefer contends, "The personal brand is now everything, it is our only hope of transcending AI and remaining relevant. It is the ONLY thing that can save us and keep us relevant in a content world about to be dominated by Artificial Intelligence."
So, how can you leverage personal branding to distinguish yourself from the competition and develop greater influence and trust with your own audience?
Building Blocks of a Personal Brand
In his best-selling book, ‘Known,’ Mark Schaefer offers these key building blocks for establishing a personal brand:
1. Identify your sustainable interest. Your sustainable interest is the thing you are motivated towards and uniquely equipped to offer an audience that they need right now.
2. Pay attention to click moments. These are those moments in life when your interests align with an opportunity. Click moments can give you a first-mover advantage.
3. Find seams. These are important trends and opportunities or, as Mark calls them, "fractures in the status quo."
4. Settle on a natural content format and channel, then show up consistently. For content to stand out, it should be "Resonant, Interesting, Timely, Entertaining or Superior."
With these building blocks in place, Mark recommends consistently working on your brand for at least 18 months to determine whether you're filling a need and becoming known.
Sounds easy, huh? Well, not exactly.
Honest Questions
In advance of the Uprising event, I asked some of the leaders attending about their challenges and concerns related to building their personal brands. While I won't address every concern in this article, I wanted to share these concerns with you to highlight some of the obstacles that prevent many from getting started.
Mike Chirumbolo, Recreation's Chief Strategy Officer, said, "As for personal branding, there is no arguing the need to do it. But what does it take to move from the analog to the digital way of doing it while also silencing the inner voice that says no one cares to hear about you or your content?"
John Kowalski, Head of Marketing for BYK-Gardner Instruments, is concerned about managing it all. "How can you balance your personal brand along with the professional brand(s) we already market?"
In addition to these two common obstacles, I reached out to a few more experts with solid personal brands to learn about what their clients struggle with.
A. Lee Judge, founder of Content Monsta with over 21,900 followers on LinkedIn says that he often hears this challenge from his clients: "With multiple talents and interests, how can I figure out which to focus on?"
Evelyn Starr's clients echoed this concern. Evelyn is a respected author and the Chief Brand Strategist at E. Starr Associates. She explained that her clients struggle to "Pick a niche and stay with it." The reason, she says, is that there is a "Fear of missing out or leaving money on the table, missing opportunities, and curtailing potential business."
The truth is, I also had concerns about how to manage it all, where to focus and whether what I have to contribute will be worthwhile. While I am just ten months into my personal branding journey, I believe I can offer a valuable perspective using my own experience as an example.
My Personal Branding Journey
After reading Known, hearing recommendations from people I trusted, and witnessing the successful personal brands of people who had attended the class, ten months ago I decided to attend Mark Schaefer's Personal Branding Masterclass. The lectures, Q&As and small group sessions were powerful! The best part was getting to meet one-on-one with Mark for personal guidance. The course was just the catalyst I needed to launch my personal brand.
Now, let me walk you through my discovery process by way of the tenets:
Identifying my sustainable interest.
Earlier, I shared Mark's concept of identifying a sustainable interest. The way I'd describe this is finding that focus that allows you to bring your best self and show up consistently for those who need your help right now. To do this, I had to answer the questions: What do people need from me right now that I am uniquely equipped to assist with? What is my superpower? And who exactly can I help? To answer these questions, I had to take a step back, look at my own origin story and consider why I do what I do in the first place.
I became passionate about marketing twenty years ago and made my way into it rather unconventionally. In 2004, I had no degree, direct experience, or prospects. I decided to found an advertising business, which I sold to a competitor a few years later. Then, in 2007, I was able to talk my way into my first marketing job. Once in the position, I had an insatiable desire to learn and be the best marketer I could be. I devoured books, sought out mentors, and completed my degree.
My first marketing role was a success (we doubled the company's revenues in a year), and it led to greater successes as I learned important frameworks for helping other founders grow their emerging B2B companies over the next 18 years. Because of this experience, I am determined to help other B2B marketers work with their founders to grow their businesses.
Finding seams in the market that I can fill.
Mentioned earlier, seams are timely opportunities or “fractures in the status quo” (as Mark puts it).
As my career went along, I noticed changes in how B2B businesses leveraged marketing. CMO tenures hit an all-time low, and sentiments like the one from a recent Gartner study were concerning. Gartner states, "55% of C-suite leaders feel Marketing has an inflated view of its importance in cross-functional initiatives." In my interactions with clients and conversations with other marketing leaders, I noticed that many B2B CEOs and CFOs were questioning their marketing team's effectiveness and budgets. In fact, marketing had lost so much influence that at many B2B companies, marketing was now responsible for just one out of the 4 Ps of marketing (Promotion). Marketers were in danger of losing influence and a seat at the decision-making table. In my experience, a marketer's influence with the C-suite is often determined by their revenue contribution, credibility, business acumen and strategic leadership.
In response, I started to focus on the central role of trust in marketing and how to build it internally (with the C-suite) and externally with customers (to help marketers get better results). I also focused on the importance of strategic marketing leadership and approaching marketing from the business owner's perspective. These were things that had been keys for me throughout my career. I started publishing content using my unique experience as a founder, turned B2B marketing leader, and offered helpful guidance in the form of articles on topics like 'Extreme Marketing - getting results when everything is on the line and there is little time or budget.'
Determining my space
Determining your space is essentially figuring out where you can best get the attention of your audience in a format that also plays to your strengths. This meant choosing the content formats that were most natural for me and distributing that content via channels I felt I could master. In a choice between audio, video, visual and written content, I gravitated to recording video interviews for YouTube, writing articles, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, and regular social posts that included leveraging my graphic design skills to create visual summaries of my articles. These formats best reflect my capabilities and where I am most comfortable. On the other hand, I debated, but ultimately chose not to, add a new podcast to the enumerable shows already out there because I didn't think I could continuously deliver something of quality and value to my audience.
In his article, '5 Lessons from teaching personal branding classes for five years,' Mark Schaefer says, "To stand out in this world, you have to be great. And you can't be great in nine places. My strong recommendation in my class is that you focus on one content form (out of four possible choices) and master it." At the end of 2023, LinkedIn had over 310 million active monthly users, 65 million of which are corporate decision-makers. That makes LinkedIn one of the largest and most influential social media platforms for professionals. For my main channel, I chose to optimize for LinkedIn alone because of my limited time, and because that's where I could best reach my B2B audience.
Commit to publishing content for your audience for 18 months.
During the Personal Branding Masterclass, we were challenged to come up with at least 48 topic ideas that we could develop over the next 18 months. Now ten months in, I've shown up consistently, posting and commenting an average of 2-3 days per week. I’ve also regularly published a newsletter and added new blog articles to my website in addition to guest writing for other websites.
With a newfound clarity and commitment, I was ready to build an audience and make an impact. But how would I know if my personal brand was resonating?
How To Know If Your Personal Brand Is Resonating
The reward of doing the work and making the commitment to your personal brand is the payoff you get seeing your audience grow and your content resonate with that audience. To determine if this is happening to you, I suggest looking for positive growth in the number of subscribers, responses, mentions, reposts, thought leadership invitations and (the holy grail of content creation) new business opportunities.
Here are my results since June:
LinkedIn shows that every day for the last ten months, at least one of my posts received engagement and impressions on the channel, totaling 5,981 engagements and 224,061 impressions. Content views on my website added another 5,800 views, and I was encouraged to learn that visitors spent at least 4 minutes reading my content.
While this is interesting, I had to know:
Did my audience grow as a result? Yes. 1126 more people began following my content (+20%)
Were they the right audience? Yes. Those most tuned in were Senior Managers or Directors (42%), VPs (8%) and CEOs or CXOs (17%) at Small Business (36%) and Mid-Market (13%) companies.
For my weekly newsletter, 'Business with Humans', I published 47 weekly editions. The newsletter now has 949 subscribers who read my articles 17,706 times. It also helped me pick up an incremental 58,922 impressions and 1,412 engagements (not too shabby!).
So, which topics resonated most? The answer? Those that closely connected to my purpose and focus, including:
Extreme Marketing: 6 Campaign Essentials for Delivering Results
A Well-Tested Method for Jumpstarting Your Inbound Growth Engine
Beyond the stats above, there were some other really great (and maybe even more encouraging) outcomes:
I earned a 'Top Brand Development' voice badge
I've had dozens of offline conversations with pros in my network
I was asked to guest on 9 podcasts
I was asked to present 6 times
I was asked to guest-write 3 articles
My company, Aaron Hassen (AH) Marketing acquired 2 new clients with the help of LinkedIn
A Final Word of Encouragement For Those Getting Started
If you're like me, you have a lot going on in your life. I’m a father of four kids; run a business; mentor college graduates; and actively volunteer at my church. Therefore, there may be times along the way when you feel burnt out or lose sight of your impact. This happened to me about a month ago. I was backed up in multiple areas of my life and I hit a point of fatigue. That is when I reached out to my online community for feedback and support.
Many in my marketing community (called RISE) are building their own personal brands and so, they reminded me that what I was experiencing was normal and encouraged me to stay the course. The following week, five members of my audience mentioned to me that they had read my articles and appreciated what I was doing. Next, one individual and a client of mine approached me asking for guidance on leveraging LinkedIn. How is that for encouragement? These responses meant more to me than the positive stats and it gave me the boost of confidence I needed to keep going.
I hope my experience and the wisdom discussed will motivate you to get started building your personal brand. I hope that it will help you overcome the inevitable challenges and doubts standing the way of you becoming known.
