How to upscale your career with personal branding
When you are in a professional career, personal branding is pivotal. Your public image effects how others in your organisation see you and can also help you build your portfolio as a professional.
On the other hand, it does not mean that personal branding is everything. When you put your heart and soul into a job, you put your personality, knowledge, skills, and expertise into achieving these goals. You are not only using your image but you are also upholding your values and principles as a professional. The key to unlocking the mystery of how to use personal branding to advance your career is to use it in conjunction with all of your other skills to create a pleasant, reliable, but honest public image of yourself as a professional.
So, how can you upscale your career with personal branding?
We will give you the 5 best tips to help you advance your career with personal branding.
1. Find your target audience.
If you aim your personal branding to a general audience, you will most likely end up with no results. When you are targeting a large audience, your message can get lost in the ether. Do not forget, there is so much information out there already and the average attention span of an adult is around 8 seconds. This means that if your message is not target-oriented, goal-driven, precise, and straight to the point, you will lose your audience. Your messaging could be concise and well thought-out, but if you cannot capture the right people at the right time with the right type of content, you will be wasting your time and efforts. That is why, always research your audience, do market research (including hashtag and keyword research) and adjust your personal branding accordingly to advance your career with the relevant people in mind. You will see results that are right for you and your target market.
2. Become a thought leader in your chosen field.
Becoming a thought leader means that you become an expert in your specific role or industry. For example, if you work as a Digital Marketer, you can become an expert in one of the many areas of digital marketing. If you have a great knowledge and understanding of TikTok content creation, advertising, and analytics, you can share this knowledge with your professional network. You can offer to mentor other colleagues in your organisation, host webinars or in-person workshops, run group sessions or one-to-one training sessions, write insightful articles, and share them with your network or create online tutorials, vlogs, or other videos then post them on your social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. The point is to create a positive public image of someone who is an expert in TikTok management so people will come to you for advice and guidance in relation to this topic.
3. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.
Take some time away from your busy schedule and think about what your individual strengths and weaknesses are in your career. When you identify your strengths, think about your professional accomplishments as well as your personal attributes. However, do not generalise your achievements – always quantify your performance – for example, if we follow along the previous example of being a TikTok expert, you can check your TikTok analytics and use the metrics to showcase that you raised your content’s engagement rate by 67% in the last 7 days and your most successful videos were in the topic of graduation anxiety, entry-level jobs in marketing and best interview tips. These elements along with your soft and hard skills will help you highlight your strengths and positive contributions in your organisation or professional career. On the other hand, you should also identify your weaknesses, areas of your field that you could work on or get additional training in. For example, as a TikTok expert, you could get additional training on how to overlap videos in TikTok and use different-angles cuts to make a super-quick and to-the-point video.
4. Network carefully and build relevant connections.
