There is a lot of talk about how to do personal branding but until a couple of years ago I almost didn't know its importance. When I was employed in the company, I didn't care about promoting myself or my skills. I thought it didn't concern me at all. After all, I thought everything that could come to me in terms of career and opportunities was almost “due” for having done a good job. But no.
If I wasn't the first to believe in my potential, then certainly the others couldn't. My communication was totally absent within the company but also on social networks. Those who worked with me knew how I operated and the characteristics that distinguished me. But what did I do to build a personal brand that went beyond the four people in my office? Nothing. It was obvious that without this I could not expect more than what I had.
Thanks to some personal branding professionals, from whom I have learned a lot, today I know that making known one's competence, experience and thought serves to create relationships, networks and opportunities. All the more so today that I am a freelancer. The tools that can be used to do this are different, including the podcast.
Before talking to you about how to do personal branding with the podcast , let's start from the beginning: what it is and who it is for.
Doing personal branding means promoting yourself by building a professional image that can identify you for who you are, your values, your competence, experience and credibility. It is the art of knowing how to create a personal brand on the basis of which we differentiate ourselves from others by our distinctive traits.
The ability to know how to communicate what characterizes you will position you in people's minds. It will be on the basis of the perception that others will have of you that they will choose you, in any field, whether they are customers, collaborators, employers or business partners.
In our digital age, the goal is to create your own web reputation by becoming recognizable and credible as a brand.
Quoting the words of Riccardo Scandellari in his book Tell me who you are ,
"The branding game is easy: you are what you say and what you show to appreciate"
Tell me who you are
True, the game is easy but creating a brand image is a real activity, an investment in terms of time and energy that requires perseverance and work. Reputation is an important element of personal positioning and the expectations of others are not to be underestimated.
Everything hinges on credibility and the resulting trust. But it works if you know how to communicate it. You may be the best in your business but if no one knows who you are, then there's no match either.
Unless you want to be a commodity, if you want to break into people's hearts, you need to make the value you have to offer evident . We are in a historical moment in which anyone before buying a product is informed, reads reviews, evaluates the characteristics and compares it with other similar ones. Regardless of the price, what we buy is the value we perceive.
In personal branding we are the product and this is what we need to communicate. The goal is to be able to value yourself to make you choose and prefer as a freelance, as an employee or partner for your differentiating characteristics.
Personal positioning defines how you count on competing and winning and therefore knowing how to stand out. Betting only on the price is not winning in the medium to long term. Think about why we are willing to spend hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars to buy a product of our favorite brand. To it we attach an emotional or self-actualization value that, more often than not, goes beyond the intrinsic one.
The same thing happens between people. We choose those who attract us by affinity, by shared values, by the perception of trust we transmit. Our strengths perhaps relate to the way we manage a project, the precision in the details, the ability to understand the client's needs, creativity or perhaps meeting deadlines.
Not sure everyone will like our features. And it doesn't have to be that way. We will attract people for whom these strengths will be important to them.
So the first step is to understand what your value is, your mission and what makes you unique. The second is to communicate it. But before talking about communication, let's take another step.
In the introduction I told you about my experience in the company as an employee. During that long period of activity my personal branding was non-existent. Today as a freelancer I changed my communication register but if I look back I realize the mistake of not having built my own brand back then.
Personal branding is important for everyone. Do we give some examples?
If you were an employee or a top manager and aspire to make a career and change segments, you should strengthen your skills or even retrain professionally to be more attractive on the market. If so, you will need to do some repositioning work to access new opportunities.
An entrepreneur , on the other hand, would have another goal: to strengthen their credibility in the company to increase the visibility and reputation of their business. Everything you communicate will affect the choices of potential customers or suppliers with respect to competitors.
But even a young person who has just finished his studies would need to make himself known to enter the job market, for example by using Linkedin in the best possible way and making himself known for his skills or achievements.
For freelancers, investing in personal branding is practically necessary.
Personal promotion does not depend on the type of profession or position we have in the work. It is linked to our goals.
What tools can we use for self branding ? Social media, for example, but also blogs, videos, offline events and even a rapidly growing media such as podcast .
The personal branding podcast has so many benefits. It is worth exploring this new fast-growing media precisely because it has different potentials than others and manages to enhance the personality of those who use it well.
I have already mentioned the advantages of the podcast talking about Content Marketing and Podcast : its so flexible mode of use is a strong added value to your communication. The listener decides when, for how long and where to do it. Being on demand it attracts a targeted audience who spontaneously choose what to listen to. Not only that, devote precious time. A much longer time than the use of a post on social media or a quick reading of a blog post.
But what I want to make you think about is that with the podcast you express all your personality through your voice , the way you approach the topics, the logic of content development and all your experience. Even if you tackle the same theme as someone else, your style will always be different. This is the differentiating lever. The authority and credibility will be evident from the empathy of your voice.
Being an expanding media, it is still a blue ocean compared to other personal branding tools. There is little competition . And we know that whoever starts first is better positioned. It doesn't have to be your only goal to use podcasting, but it's an advantage to keep in mind.
With the freelancers I had the pleasure of working with to create podcast content, the goal was their personal branding, communicating the value of their product: themselves. But even in this case, nothing should be left to chance. We design, analyze and choose the best way to communicate.
If you are thinking of enhancing your brand image , you may find the answer in the podcast and I will be happy to help you do it. Let's start?
