According to PersonalBrand.com, a personal brand can be summarized as “…a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.” In other words, how the public perceives you. Personal brand is as important now as it ever has been, and that goes for just about any industry.
Using one of my mentors in marketing, Scott Mann, as an example, I will attempt to explain the importance of personal brand as I currently see it. Scott Mann is an Emmy Award winning digital marketer who runs the HighForge marketing agency. But he didn’t start there. In recent years, he shared with me how he has had to shift his business model and how his personal brand helped him accomplish this, allowing him to be even more successful now than he was just a few years ago.
One thing I have noticed about Scott is that he uses his name as personal brand, when he could just as easily have used an alias or nick name. He uses an illustrated image of himself, along with his photograph. He is active in conferences and local meet-ups, having developed his public speaking skills through the years, which has opened up even more doors for him to promote his brand. On social media his color schemes appear to be very similar to each other, boasting a royal blue and grey theme. He is active on just about every major social media platform, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and many of his posts offer value to the person who reads them. A co-worker once told me that when you post on social media you should tell a story. This story should be your own and is one of the few places where you are able to control the narrative.
When Scott Mann’s agency began to suffer a few years ago, he simplified his business model to one that took care of every area of a marketing firm, to specializing in one area. He then outsourced the rest of his work to other experts in different areas. For instance, if he focused on designing the logo, he would outsource the website to an agency, and then outsource the client’s social media management to another. This allowed him to scale down his business, work with experts in every area of his marketing campaigns, continuing to use his brand. In this way, he was able to retain clients while empoying other agencie sto give these clients the best product available. Prior to the pivot, people knew him as integral, knowledgeable, talented, and among other things, having the ability to get things done.
Since this shift in their business model, he has almost doubled his revenue. This put him in a position to thrive during the pandemic, which wouldn’t have been possible unless he had previously developed a strong personal brand.