There are six reasons why you should build your personal brand. When you have an established profile, you open yourself up to the following outcomes, both online and offline:
1. Generate leads and enquiries
When you build a profile, sites such as WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and Slideshare become powerful tools for generating leads.
Social media allows you to give enormous value to the world for free and it comes back to you in the form of leads. Additionally, a lot of referrals these days happen through social media.
How many times have you heard someone say, ‘Google Fred Smith Limousine Hire’ or ‘Look in my Facebook friends for Mary Brown’.
You want to make sure that you get found when someone is recommending you. Traditional media also builds your profile, ends up online and gets people calling, messaging, emailing and tweeting.
2. Convert leads and enquiries into sales
Imagine you go to a website for an accountant. When you get there, you find videos to watch, audio downloads, photos, slides and blogs to read. Imagine you see a list of publications this business has been featured in and links to the stories.
Is that going to make you more likely to do business with them? It sure is.
Without a doubt, the more time a potential client sees you’re a trusted person already, the more likely they will buy.
3. Increase the average spend
When people know more, they buy more. After years in sales and business I have discovered that, when you add it all up, a buyer will spend about seven hours deliberating over a substantial purchase.
Whether it is a big TV, a training course, a car or a holiday, consumers can invest several hours researching before they buy. If that’s the case, you want to occupy as much of that seven hours as possible.
You want them to be listening to your podcasts, watching your videos, following your Twitter feed and reading your blogs.
As they do this, they’re getting better educated on how you can help them. Normally, people start out thinking about getting the cheapest solution, but with the right education, they see the value in spending money on a higher quality product.
4. Increase the frequency of purchasing
In this busy world, people can simply forget about you. But not if they read your blogs, see your Facebook updates, follow your Twitter feed and subscribe to your YouTube channel.
Keeping people up-to-date results in more purchases per client per year.
If you email people every week they will unsubscribe and feel pestered by you. If they subscribe to your social media profiles, they look forward to your updates.
5. Reduce costs
A strong profile saves you a fortune in the cost associated with chasing business. You’ll reduce your marketing, printing, communications and customer service costs for a start.
Without a profile, you might end up advertising to readers who aren’t remotely interested in what you offer; you end up paying for a lot of ‘eyeballs’ that don’t care.
6. Improve your overall brand
Having a great brand isn’t only for big companies; your small business can benefit too. A consistent message that is all over the internet is a valuable thing when it comes time to making sales, raising investment or selling your business. It’s also great for your team to see, as well as suppliers and joint venture partners.
If ever you are criticised publicly, it helps to have built up a strong reputation to put any critique into a broader context.