3 Steps for Positioning a Strong Personal Brand
Often unnoticed, brand positioning is one of the most important techniques behind brand strategy. It’s all about thinking critically: where does our brand fall among others? How can we position it in the marketplace as such?
Practiced and preached in traditional marketing, positioning is a critical component of brand strategy because it’s important to know where your brand fits among competitors. This allows for strategic placement when it comes to advertising, whether it be magazine ads, store shelves, shopping malls, or online. The goal is to maximize the brand’s relevance to the customer markets it aims to serve.
Not all of us are brand strategists, but the strategy behind brand positioning can be applied to one of the most important brands that you manage every day — your personal brand.
Personal branding is the practice of marketing yourself and your career in the way that you would a brand. Utilizing various channels such as social media, a personal website, your resume, or word of mouth (never underestimate this one), the goal is to try and highlight your areas of expertise and relevant skills to others.
No matter what stage you find yourself in, whether it be applying for a job, starting a new one, establishing yourself in your respective industry, or even the beginning stages of personal branding, you can use positioning strategy. It might take a bit of thinking, but positioning can really strengthen your personal brand by showcasing what makes you stand out. Here are three steps that you can follow to help position your personal brand, along with examples from traditional product marketing and my personal experience starting my career in community management.
1. Setting yourself apart
One of the first and most important positioning strategies is to identify a few things that set you apart from your competition, or others in your field. What makes you different? This does not necessarily mean you need to find random skills or obscure adjectives to describe yourself just for the sake of being different. Think about relevant aspects of your personality, experiences, viewpoints or passions. What is something that you feel strongly about? Think of how this might relate back to your aspirations or goals.
In traditional product marketing, a brand’s story and personality are ways that it differentiates itself from others. Often time brands that sell the same products will have different personalities. Think McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. Though their product offerings are similar, their use of clever marketing creates distinct brand personalities that make them feel more different than they are to customers.
My personal brand is something that I am still working on but has helped me find a career in community management. For those who might be wondering what community management is, according to Jenn Pedde, co-founder of The Community Manager, the goal of this role is to “create a community where people feel that they belong”. This is done by building relationships within a community, creating value for members who participate while also acting as a liaison between the community and company behind it.
In college, I decided to major in Communication Studies because I liked to communicate with people (not even kidding). Searching for a practical way to set myself apart and satisfy my craving to understand the analytical side of things, I added a second major in Marketing. The topics of my studies became my passions. The rise of social media’s role in my two disciplines fascinated me. I found myself choosing research topics that blended my interests together, like “Twitter’s Effect on Audiences of Mass Global Sporting Events” and “Social Media in the Airline Industry”. Helping my friends set up their social media accounts while balancing multiple social media handles for organizations that I was involved in were things that I enjoyed.
2. Checking out the competition
A foolproof way to evaluate the characteristics you possess is to look at your competition, or others in your field, to see if they would be able to say the same about themselves. If you’re applying for a job in communications, saying that you have good communication skills is probably not enough. Why? Because everyone else applying for that job can probably say the same thing. Imagine McDonald’s and Burger King trying to market themselves to customers by saying: “we sell burgers!”. This would not work, I can go anywhere to buy a burger. I’m looking for the burger that appeals to my senses more, or features a special sauce or good deal. What’s your special sauce? Be sure to highlight this over the qualifications that you know the competition will surely have.
While preparing to interview for a role in community management, I thought strategically about how I could set myself apart from other candidates. Saying that I had communication skills or that I liked social media was not going to make me stand out, since community management is likely to appeal to people with skills in these areas. I made sure to mention my past community management experience, along with my experience analyzing and interpreting data. Showing that I was comfortable working with numbers paid off.
3. Cultivating your passion
Once you’ve identified and highlighted what makes you different, it’s important to be proactive in maintaining your personal brand position. If you have a special passion, make sure you continue to be involved and informed about the subject matter. If you have a certain skill, make sure others know that if they need help, you are the one they should call. Carefully cultivating your position is important to building up your reputation and experiences. Relating back to fast food marketing, the payoff of brand positioning is evident — I know that if I am craving a frosty, I should go to Wendy’s, and if I want chicken fries I should go to Burger King. The same type of payoff applies for when I need social media help, brutally honest proofreading, quality video production, or tax consulting.
When I began working with the Community Team at Health Union, I quickly realized that everyone had specially carved niches of expertise. Whenever there was a question about something, there was always a person that everyone knew to ask. At first, I felt intimidated and unsure of what I might be able to offer to the team. My supervisor and mentor, Susan, has helped me get involved in my areas of interest, which she remembered me mentioning in my interview. So far, I’ve taken on projects in social media experimentation along with data recording for our communities. To continue working on my expertise in this area, I even signed up for online courses in Excel and social media business strategy.
Change is expected
Defining your personal brand takes time, and it is inevitable that its position will evolve. Your brand position might change as you develop new interests, take on new roles or new jobs. Even the best brands have come a long way from where they started out.
Take Starbucks for example. It might be hard to believe that in 1971 the company started out with the name, “Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice”. The Starbucks we know today is a result of the brand’s evolution and positioning toward gourmet espresso drinks and coffee.
Though being the “social media person” may not seem so special or unique at first, it’s turning heads in industries like public health. I didn’t expect to end up working in the health field, so my personal brand has been adapted to my new career. While community management is so much more than “just” social media, this is one of the areas I’m moving toward in terms of my personal brand. Now, in my role as a community manager at Health Union, I am able to use my knack for social media to bring new ideas to life to engage patients with chronic health conditions.
But it can’t change who you are
It’s important to remain true to yourself above all else — positioning your personal brand cannot make you into something you are not. If used effectively, a positioning strategy can help you realize your points of difference which if leveraged, might get you where you want to go.
Positioning my passion for social media and knowledge about working with data toward the field of public health has created a combination that I intend to cultivate in my job and in my future. I’ve been learning more and more about how I can use my skills to contribute to my job and I am loving it so far!
