Why You Should Develop Your Personal Brand in 2020
By Ido Lechner, Co-Founder and Head of Strategy @ Magic Media
As the decade comes to a close, social media has become the standard marketing tool for businesses to reach their customers. Online platforms help brands stay in constant dialogue with their audience, increasing brand awareness, loyalty, credibility, and insight generation as a result. Indeed, social media’s ROI is clearcut, and brands that don’t capitalize on a few channels sacrifice tremendous growth.
Now that the landscape has shifted such that social media marketing is no longer considered a modern practice, (rather, its now an absolute necessity), what we’re starting to see are highly saturated spaces where people compete for visibility, not just quality. When eyeballs matter as much as the substance of your content, businesses will naturally start to look for new ways to gain visibility.
Its for these reasons that developing a personal brand is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition for founders and executives looking to distinguish their company’s brand. There’s a natural dynamic between the perception of a team and its players, and when you’re able to strengthen a player’s brand than the team’s brand looks better as a result.
In 2020, the new whitespace for businesses to capture is — perhaps somewhat counterintuitively — the personal brand.
As the next decade shapes up to become more automated and interconnected than ever before, it’s not enough to be more tech-y than ever, companies need to be more human than ever before as well. No longer can founders and execs afford to hide behind their brands when their competition is on the frontlines, building their online presence and winning through individual social exchanges.
The key to a strong professional brand is establishing oneself as a thought leader. One must create meaningful conversations — as opposed to posting for the sake of posting — that glimpse into the future, encourage thoughtful discussions and ultimately serve to strengthen one’s connection with their network.
This is all to say: have presence, and add value with it, and you will be rewarded with better business.
According to Forbes contributor Francois Botha, over 50% employers won’t hire potential candidates without some online presence and more than 50% of consumers have chosen to do business with individuals or companies because of a strong, positive online presence as well. Moreover, executives around the globe attribute an average of 45% of their company’s reputation to the reputation of their CEO; clearly the depth in leadership’s online interactions is directly tied to the company’s success.
Of course, the dilemma most people face with social media is not in establishing their reputation, but in their inability to create high-quality content at scale. Creating content that looks and feels professional is quite difficult — especially at the individual’s level — and simply isn’t feasible for most business leaders who have to prioritize their main line of work.
The solution? Hire people! If you’re a founder or executive of a successful startup/organization, allocating resources towards professional creators who can produce high quality, customized content at scale allows you to focus on your business directly while garnering the exposure provided by the media work that’s being taken care for you. While you double down on the product and customer relations that drive revenue, a team of writers, video editors, strategists and creatives can develop content to solidify your brand’s digital marketing.
Magic Media helps founders and executives take their online presence to the next level with custom thought leadership content. If you’re ready to build a strong personal brand, click here to learn more.
