More and more people talk about the importance of personal branding, both in the search for a career and in professional development. Effective personal branding not only makes you stand out from the crowd to employers and recruiters, but it can also increase your job security by communicating your value as a leader and team member in your organization.
What is personal branding?
Personal branding is the process of identifying the unique and differentiating value that you bring to an organization, team and/or project and communicating it in a professionally memorable and consistent manner in all your actions, both online and offline, to all current and potential employees. stakeholders in your career.
The Lighthouse Personal Brand Model
The lighthouse is a great template for breaking the marking process down into four key steps: the foundation, the beacon, the tower, and the beam.
Base:
Their basis is their indisputable strengths and their experience in the chosen area. To identify your own foundation, write down the strengths that set you apart from the rest, and ask your friends, family, and colleagues/managers to do the same for you. Identify the top three to five overlapping strengths that support the career direction you want to pursue.
Beacons:
Your beacon is memorable and consistent communication of your strengths and experience. Now that you’ve identified your foundation, it’s time to create your beacon by finding a word or phrase that represents these strengths and can become your brand. Develop a short pitch that can follow your brand, describing your strengths in more detail. Make sure your word or phrase is versatile and can change with your direction.
Tower:
Simply put, your tower is the visibility, range, and presentation, both online and offline, that support the beacon. This is really all you do to proactively build your personal brand. The higher you build your tower with your efforts, the more visible you will be to potential career takers. Here are some ways to proactively build your brand and credibility in front of your target audience:
- Create a LinkedIn profile and follow the suggested steps to complete your profile 100 percent, making sure to include your personal branding and introduction in the caption and summary sections.
- Create a Google account and profile to improve search engine optimization.
- Include your personal brand on your resume, cover letter, business cards, email signature, voicemail message, and on your other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
- Consider creating a personal website/blog where you can store all of your information, including experience, education, skills, honors, business endeavors, and more.
- Start your own blog with a unique point of view on your industry/area of interest.
- Provide value in your book or product reviews, your tweets, your comments on other blog posts, your own blog articles or articles for print publications, your discussions in LinkedIn Groups, and your advice through LinkedIn Answers or other forums .
- Start a company full time or on the side with relevant and valuable products/services/resources to the industry.
- Publish and offer printed and/or electronic publications.
- Get quoted in the media by joining HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and providing advice, experience and insights to writers and journalists seeking expert sources.
beam:
Your beam is your career direction and a more active personal brand and career search strategy. It involves you gaining and projecting a solid understanding of where you want to go, what you want to pursue, and how you will do it. First, you need to determine which functional area, geography, and industries/companies you want to target. Then you need to actively connect your brand with potential career stakeholders. Here are some ways to get started:
- Join associations or networking groups within your industry and attend events to meet new contacts and build your target network. Be sure to share your personal brand with those new contacts.
- Conduct informational interviews with your target network contacts (whether you’re looking for a job or not) and share your personal brand with them in your presentations.
- Find ways to bring other industry thought leaders together for a project or event.
- Find ways to contribute to the projects or events of other industry experts.
- Receive recommendations on LinkedIn and display testimonials from customers, clients and partners
personal request
I used this model to help develop my own personal brand during my MBA career search. Having identified my foundation as my boundless energy, out-of-the-box creativity, relationship-building, and problem-solving, I searched for a word that could bring all of those strengths together into a memorable brand message. The lighthouse I chose was “generator” since I generate energy, creativity, relationships and solutions to problems. I was pursuing a career in marketing and brand management and thus became a brand and marketing builder. I proactively built my tower by incorporating my brand directly into my online profiles, resumes, and business endeavors. I then took a more active approach, honing in on the “spoke” by incorporating my personal brand into my interview responses, networking introductions, and interview reporting reach. It was this process that helped me successfully secure my current employment, and this model continues to help guide all of my professional and entrepreneurial adventures.
As you create, build, and improve your personal brand, keep the lighthouse in mind as your visual blueprint and guide to personal brand success.
