How to build a go-to-marketing strategy for your personal brand.

Building a personal brand may seem easy, and this is because we only see the surface work and don’t see the hard work that goes to make it popular and profitable. Most people want to build personal brands, but building a personal brand and then making money from a personal brand is a totally different ball game. Building a personal brand is great, but nothing beats making money off your personal brand. So why don’t more people do it? One guess is because they don’t know how to, that’s what this article is about, read on.

1. Define your target audience.

Focus is key.

Everyone is not your customer. I see several personal brands making this mistake, trying to reach everyone. Who exactly is your message/product for? You have to define who you are serving.

There are two steps to this. Defining the demographics of your customers and defining their psychographics.

• Demographics consists of their Age, location, gender and so on. It is the hard facts about your customers.
• Psychographics go deeper, they define who your customer is as a person, their desires, their hopes, their challenges, their values. This goes deeper to examine the problems your customers have and how your products solve their problem.

2. Build a sales funnel. Your customers won’t buy the first time they come across your product or advert. You need to build trust, and that is why you require a sales funnel to move your customers from strangers to ‘friends’. There are 4 basic levels to this

• Awareness: At this stage, your prospective customers are getting to know you. They have a problem and are researching for solutions and you are part of the solutions they see online.
• Consideration: At this stage, due to the content and value you’ve provided, your customers believe you can solve their problem. This is the stage they sign up for your email list or download a report from your website or contact you.
• Decision: To move customers from the previous stage to take action is a bit tricky because even though people know their problem and know you can help them, procrastination won’t allow them to make that decision, you have to offer them a product, attach scarcity or deadline, offer them guaranties and they are put in a spot to make a decision.
• Delight. Happy customers spend more. If you are just concerned with selling, you are going to go out of business quickly. Satisfying your customers should be a top priority because they would spend more and become unofficial evangelists of your business.

3. Define your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

• Write out the benefits of your products — Don’t confuse this with the features of your product, i.e what your products does/offers. How to do this is to list the features of your product (what it does or how it works), then write how that helps to make your customers life better. By defining your target audience, you will know the features your target customer values and the benefit of the features.
• Your values — What problem do you believe you are solving? This is introspection, where you state what problem you are solving and why it is important to you. You must get as personal as possible.
• Promise — This is a bonus where you make a bold promise to your customer. It is this guarantee that makes you stand out. For example dominos pizza’s promise — “Pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free”

4. Attract eyeballs — Once you have settled the three steps above, your next step is thinking about how to attract your prospective customers (of course from the target audience already defined) there are a few ways you can do this

• Social media — this is the easiest and the cheapest way to start attracting eyeballs. Create an account on Facebook, Instagram or twitter and start creating helpful content.
• Ads — This is important because engagement on social platforms are on an all-time low, you have to leverage the power of ads on these platforms to get people into your sales funnel.
• Contact blogs, TV channels, other business in your space and ask to feature on their platform. This is easily the hardest because it depends on the other party acceptance of your request. But it is a great way to leverage and acquire customers and build greater brand exposure.

Conclusion:

Your attempts at marketing your personal brand is going to fail if you don’t pay heed to the 4 steps above. The 4 step framework provides a template which you can use to make money from your personal brand. If you need something more detailed (aka you want to work with me to build a profitable personal brand) send a mail to aliemeka7@gmail.com

Cheers!