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.

Networking virtually or in-person is an amazing and time-efficient way to meet new people and build more significant connections with other thought leaders. Whether you network through social media (mainly LinkedIn) or through other third-party organisations (Chambers of commerce, Federation of Small Businesses, Trade unions, professional clubs and groups, or other networking organisations), the best way to start is to reach out to other colleagues and see whether they can recommend you a place to start. Begin with small steps, do one or two events a month, then you can start building your networking portfolio to include weekly meetings including networking breakfasts, lunches, dinners or walks and business fairs. You can also network during business expos, trade fairs and jobs fairs, so make sure you always have your business cards ready just in case. The next step would be to create a sales pitch or elevator pitch which would help you stand out from other professionals in the same field. You do not need to say many things - be precise, straight to the point, but also friendly, approachable and knowledgeable -, make sure to leave your contact details or business card so people can contact you, but also create your own collection of contact details and business cards of relevant people.

5. Create a positive social media presence.

If you are already on social media, great, but always make sure to clean up your online presence on all platforms because organisations and businesses will look you up and if they see any signs of inappropriate behaviour, your personal branding and professionalism will plummet. Needless to say, whatever you say online, stays online! What you post on social media can be archived or deleted, however, it can never be completely erased. As soon as you post something, it can reach millions of people in seconds, then you have to deal with the consequences of your words. Always share knowledge, kindness, and positivity online, whether you post on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube or LinkedIn or any other platform. Actually, the best way is to use one or two platforms and concentrate on posting diligently on those channels. You do not have to post every single day – but consistency and quality are the key ingredients to a good engagement rate! Share your expertise in blogs, articles, images, videos, video essays, webinars, podcasts or whatever you find gets you the most engagement. It may not be something you particularly enjoy, but once you get into the rhythm of posting good quality content regularly, you will reap the benefits of your hard work and it will make you more motivated.

Personal branding is only one of the many ways you can build your professional career. You can also learn new skills and improve your expertise by attending different training courses, workshops and other CPD (Continuing Professional Development) sessions.

You can find more information on CPD courses here: Top Tips to Help You Stay on Top of Your CPD (Continuing Professional Development)

In our webinar series, we often cover topics regarding job search and career development. You can watch our webinar series on our YouTube channel: Jobjar Employability and Career related Webinars or access them through our website here: Jobjar Webinars