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Building a strong brand means being available and always visible to the people you seek to influence, impact and impress. But that can be exhausting. You don’t want achieve brand visibility at the cost of being overwhelmed.
Well, relax. There are some strategies that will help you build your brand 24/7 without your having to be omnipresent. The virtual world affords you the opportunity to display your personal brand passively. Of course, it means you need to be deliberate about how you construct your brand in a world that is available 24/7 365.
Here’s are 6 ways to ensure that your personal brand is being expressed and advanced while you sleep.
1. Polish your profile.
Your LinkedIn profile is you when you aren’t there. When people want to learn about you in a professional capacity, they’ll likely head over the LinkedIn and put your name in the search. When your profile is authentic, compelling and current, you can be sure that you’re delivering a powerful impression even when you have no idea who’s checking you out. Three features will be the most helpful to you. These are your Headline—it communicates relevance. Your headshot—it makes you real in the nebulous world of the web. Your About—it’s the place where you tell your story and introduce yourself to those who seek to learn about you.
2. Practice strategic visibility.
All strong brands are always visible to their ideal audience. So having a regular cadence to your social media posts is key. It can also become a chore. To give yourself more flexibility, create batches of content in one sitting but spread out the posting over weeks or months. Come up with a series. It will give you bites to feed your audience over time while creating an opportunity to convert viewers into rapt followers, or even subscribers. Also, share the same content using different formats and media. Just be sure that your creations have a long shelf-life. You don’t want them to go stale before it’s time to drop.
3. Build a sales force.
The ultimate goal in personal branding is to become a brand in demand. That means you have followers who become fans and evolve into promoters. In other words, they are touting your brilliance on your behalf without your even being aware of it. The key to building a team of promoters is to commit to delivering real value and exceeding expectations in everything you do. After all, it’s the things that stand out that make people take note. We never tell friends about the adequate dining experience we just had. We do, however, gush about experiences that are exceptional.
4. Customize your email signature.
You never know when people are going to read your emails. It could be at 3 a.m. when you’re deep in REM sleep. Provide more content and resources in your signature. You want to give readers round-the-clock opportunities to get to know you better or to be directed to your latest insights.
5. Use QR codes.
Creating QR codes for your LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel or other places where you have content online makes it easy for people to find more info about you. You can add these QR codes to your email signature, hard copies you distribute in person, or slides in presentations you deliver and publish online. But you don’t need it if a hyperlink will do. For content that someone will read on their phone, it won’t make sense to ask them to point their phone at the code to access more content; a simple finger tap on a link is the efficient way to go in those situations.
6. Use Warmly.
When we see people on a meeting invitation whom we don’t know well, we want to learn about them before we get to the meeting. But do we have time to do the research? When you complete your profile on a great innovation called Warmly, a little snippet of who you are shows up in the Zoom invitation, helping you convey your personal brand in your own words. By the time the other meeting participants hit “join” they already know a little about you—specifically, what you want them to know.
To stay visible and valuable to your target audience without letting it to take over your life, adopt these 6 habits.
William Arruda is a keynote speaker, co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and co-creator of the Personal Brand Power Audit - a complimentary quiz that helps you measure the strength of personal brand.
