Start Your Brand with a Goal
When coaching a new expert, our first conversation is always the longest. And where I say the least.
I’m listening to what the subject matter expert is working on, what they are trying to achieve, who they are trying to reach, and general career or growth plans. In short, what matters to them.
It’s this conversation that becomes the basis for their custom branding strategy. Here is where the pieces of the puzzle are dumped out. It’s my responsibility to turn them face up and put them together to form a roadmap. Then I’m writing out the directions; turns we need to take and overlooks where we can sit and reflect.
It is important to know where you are heading. Without direction, you miss out on attracting the right audience and securing opportunities. You’ll waste your precious time and effort.
By narrowing in on a desired destination, you can better focus your efforts on specific targets and milestones. Here are five steps to provide direction for your personal branding efforts:
1 — Determine Your Desired Outcomes
Your personal branding goal should be an extension of your larger career goals. If you haven’t identified the goals you are trying to achieve with your work, a few questions to ask yourself are:
- What are you currently working on?
- What are you creating?
- What do you want to achieve with this work?
- What do you want to be working on in the future?
- How do you want others to see you?
- Where do you want to be in 3–5 years?
- Another helpful exercise is to break up your career ambitions into long-term and short-term visions.
Make sure you are setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. Make sure to write them in such a way that it is clear if you did or did not achieve the outlined goal.
2 — Translate Your Goal to Brand Building
Once you’ve determined your destination, it’s time to ensure your brand goals support your career goals.
This clarifies how you’ll present yourself online, and how you need to meet your goal. It also has important implications for determining your target audience and methods to activate them.
For example:
Your career goal is to see a better mutually-beneficial trade agreement between the US and the UK. This agreement allows for certain specifications outlined in your research.
You believe you can accomplish this by presenting your ideas to influential leaders. Your branding goal is to become the premiere researcher and commentator on US-UK trade relations.
Assuming that you’ve determined these to be SMART goals, it’s time you devise a branding plan. Certainly, positioning yourself as such an expert will be important. You can do this through PR and media relations efforts, as well as branding yourself online.
With these tactics in mind, you’ll have to describe yourself and your work in a way that clarifies your goal. All your content to your audience will then reflect this message.
3 — Identify Ways to Measure Your Performance
How will you keep track of your progress? Once you have a goal narrowed down, it’s important to measure how close you are to reaching it. Start by determining what measurements determine if you’re making progress. It may be:
- audience growth
- engagement
- op-ed placements
- media appearances
- meetings with key stakeholders, etc.
Next, break up your goal into segments. The segments may be time or performance-based. What do you need to do in the next allotment of time (week, month, year) to get closer to your goal? What steps do you need to do to get your work in front of new audiences? By breaking your larger goal down into steps, you will have a clear game plan.
Don’t forget to celebrate the milestones along the way:
- When you produce a certain amount of content.
- When your audience reaches a certain size.
- When you land a major media appearance.
Celebrating will help give you that little motivational push to keep going!
4 — Communicate Your Goal to Others
Transparency is a valuable trait in today’s society. Making your motivations clear with your online audience can take you far. It allows others to better understand you. And it allows them to decide if following you will create them value as well.
For example, a trend I see on social media is experts and entrepreneurs highlight goals in their bios. Take a look at Dan Go’s profile. He has highlighted his specific and measurable goal with his audience. He wants to help 1 million people transform their bodies by 2027. This is a completely transparent and accountable goal — he will either reach it or not.
You can highlight this goal explicitly to your whole audience by featuring in your bio or weaved into your other written content. Or, keep it vague publicly, but share specifically with a small network of people who can help keep you accountable and encourage you.
5 — Reflect on Progress
Reflection may be the easiest part of the process to forget. But to follow through on your goals, you must check in regularly on measurements, progress, milestones, and next steps.
This part of the process allows you to see what is and isn’t working and make adjustments to your game plan. Take your findings and optimize your work to improve performance. This may mean reaching out to others who can provide feedback or advice. It may mean checking in with someone who can help you where you are stuck.
This is where the growth happens. Learning and changing course as needed to reach your final destination.
Following these steps will help you identify your destination and chart a course to reach it. It will require adjustments and tweaks along the way, but with your roadmap in hand, the journey will be much easier.
For more personal branding tips, connect with me on Twitter: @marketingmollie.
