So You Have a Professional Brand? Now Sell It!

By now, I’m certain that you’re familiar with the concept of a personal or professional brand; it’s a concrete identity by which you can quickly and accurately describe yourself as a professional, and it’s a great way to efficiently sell your skills and abilities to potential employers. Once you’ve devised your professional brand, however, the question becomes, how do I go about selling this brand effectively? After all, a great brand is nothing if people don’t know about it– at least not if the right people don’t know about it.
With the on-going interest personal/professional branding, it’s become more important to not only come up with an attention-grabbing brand, but also to market it creatively and effectively. Perhaps some of these ideas will be the right choice for you and your brand.

• Brand your Facebook profile. Employers are becoming increasingly interested in what their employees and potential employees are doing on social networks, so why not take advantage of their interest by putting your brand’s best face forward on your profile. Use your profile and cover photos to illustrate your brand and keep the content that you post professional, consistent and relevant to your brand. The Timeline feature makes outlining your experience easier than ever.
• Use video or video features. This technique can be used independently or in conjunction with any number of other marketing tools (i.e.: Facebook, LinkedIn, website, blog, etc). Create a video resume using a storytelling technique or just touching on highlights; provide video footage of presentations you’ve made, or events you’ve put together or hosted; ask colleagues, clients or mentors to give testimonials on video. These are only a few ideas, but the possibilities are endless. You could set up an entire YouTube channel to your brand!
• Start blogging. Create and maintain your own industry-relevant blog, or offer to write guest posts for other blogs that you read, which is a great way to put your name and ideas out there while also building your network. Think about what issues keep industry leaders up at night, and address them, and invite readers to ask questions– thought-leadership will be a major asset to your brand and your job search. Consider integrating your blog with other social media or video components.
• Create a website. The personal website could be falling to wayside while personal blogs are on the rise, but integrating the two could be the best way to provide stable pages with unchanging information plus new, up-to-date content. A website, as opposed to a blog, may allow you to more easily include tabs for “About Me,” “Resume,” “Testimonials,” “Blog,” “What I Can Do For Your Company,” etc. so that some content stays constant, such as “About Me” while your blog content can be updated regularly.

While you don’t have to take advantage of every single personal marketing tool there is, and while this list only provides a few possibilities, you and your personal/professional brand will benefit from being available to those who may be interested (i.e.: industry leaders, potential employers, etc). And remember, many of these tools and techniques can be used together, one complimenting the other(s) to be represent you.

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Careerminds provides scalable, strategic solutions to organizations seeking affordable, web-based outplacement services. Using a Web 2.0 e-learning platform that delivers affordable, online career transition services, Careerminds provides a high-tech and high-touch blend of on-demand career transition education supported by senior-level career consultants to help displaced workers reenter the workforce quickly.