Prefer to listen to your content? Caz talks about personal branding in this podcast from the team at Marketing Labs.
If you’ve not got the money to spend on executing a full-blown marketing strategy, but you have people within your business, you could be missing a trick if you’re not utilising personal branding.
Why personal branding beats business pages on social media
You see, social media is free to join; you don’t need a budget to sign up to LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram (or any of the others). You also have people within your business who could share in a way that really connects with your ideal audience, driving trust and visibility for your brand through their social media.
Individual accounts get a significant algorithmic advantage – personal profiles generate up to 5x more engagement and 2.75x more impressions than company pages, and when employees share content from their own profiles, reach increases by as much as 561%.
So before you start a business social media account, you should really look into sharing some of the messaging through your own or your team’s accounts. It will get a lot more traction than posting graphics through your business page.
The science behind why personal content converts
Because people are being sold to so much, we all have our guard up, especially online. We’re bombarded by sales all day long, and so a wall goes up. We scroll straight past a business post, and corporate-looking graphics turn us off, because we know there’s a sales pitch coming.
But when a friendly face pops up on a personal platform, we’re intrigued. It stops our scroll. We dive in to read what the person has been up to and what they have to say.
When someone shares through their personal account, it reads more like storytelling. They take us along on their journey, and we buy into them. They share their opinions, expertise, and their humanness, and we’re gripped.
Over the long term, we form a connection with the people we follow. We want to support them and cheer them along.
What is a parasocial relationship (and why it matters for your brand)?
Personal brands form something called a parasocial relationship, and it’s one of the most powerful forces in modern marketing. It’s a one-sided bond where your audience genuinely invests in you, your story, and your success. They feel like they know you. They’ve watched you show up, heard your take on things, seen your wins and your wobbles. By the time you make an offer, the hard work is already done. There’s no pitch to survive, no wall to climb. The trust is already built. That’s why people buy from personal brands without hesitation, not because they were sold to, but because they wanted to say yes.
How to multiply your reach with your existing team
Imagine you have five people in your business, in addition to you. And each person is encouraged, supported, and, if needed, given guidance on how to create a personal brand. Maybe even incentives are offered for any leads generated through their personal brands. You’d then have 5x the power to generate interest in your business.
Not to mention the empowerment that gives your team. When they generate a lead or a sale and are praised for that, they feel like a real contributor in the business – that’s empowering. Empowered teams stay, they work hard, and they’re happier.
Three tips to make personal branding manageable
Now I know that many business owners will read this and think great, another thing for me to add to the list of tasks I need to do! So, let me leave you with some tips to make personal branding easier.
- Get clear on your messaging, who you’re talking to, and what makes you you. Your uniqueness is what makes you stand out and attracts the right people to your personal brand strategy.
- Choose a posting cadence that works for you – you don’t need to pick five social media channels and post five times per day on each. Pick one or two, maybe even link them if you can, for example, Facebook and Instagram. Pick platforms where your ideal audience hangs out and start creating a manageable amount of content for those platforms. Two posts per week are plenty for personal branding on LinkedIn when shared consistently.
- Use a scheduling tool like Buffer. This gives you plenty of scope to create content in advance and schedule it for when you have time to sit down and think about what you want to say. I always find that if I post as I go, my message drifts well off, and I often forget to post at all. Scheduled posts can also be set to go out when your ideal audience is online, so they actually see it.
Ready to build a personal brand that gets results?
The best time to start was yesterday; the second-best time is today.
Personal branding isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s one of the most cost-effective, high-impact strategies available to any business, and the businesses that embrace it now will be the ones people are talking about in two years’ time.
You don’t need to figure it all out alone, either. Whether you’re a founder looking to show up with more confidence and clarity, or a business owner who wants to harness the power of your whole team through employee advocacy on social media, we can help.
At Marketing Labs, we offer personal branding consultancy and workshops designed to help you and your workforce build brands that cut through the internet noise, attract the right people, and generate real interest in what you do.
Book a discovery call with me to learn more about how we can help you harness the power of personal branding.
