Personal Branding Basics: 3 Easy Steps To Advancing Your Career

Personal Branding Basics: 3 Easy Steps To Advancing Your Career

I googled “personal branding” today and got nearly two million results. When I started my personal branding business, Reach Personal Branding, almost 15 years ago, few people knew what personal branding was, and even fewer were interested in building their brand. Today, as Google results reveal, there’s lots of talk about personal branding, and virtually every career-minded professional understands its importance. Personal branding helps you find a new job, get promoted, open clients’ doors, increase business success, and enhance your happiness at work every day. And it helps you do your job better – regardless of your role. Today, most major corporations have programs to help their employees uncover and build their brands to increase engagement, performance, satisfaction and retention. Yet, despite this high awareness of personal branding, misconceptions persist. In this article I share with you the personal branding basics from my latest book, Ditch. Dare. Do! – what you need to know so you can use the power of personal branding to fully energize and maximize your career. Personal branding is as easy as 1-2-3: Read more about the 3 easy steps...
Four Important Steps To Align Celebrities With Your Startup Brand

Four Important Steps To Align Celebrities With Your Startup Brand

It goes without saying that having a well-known celebrity endorse your brand or product can do wonders for a startup. The problem, however, is getting celebrities to give you the time of day. Recently, we’ve been lucky enough to have a number of high-profile celebrities (especially celebrity athletes) join us in our quest to build the world’s largest private coaching service. We’ve learned quite a bit about aligning celebrities with our brand as well as how to get them to join, and we’d like to share our tips with you. 1. Start with your brand. Who are you? What is your mission? What problem are you trying to solve? Before looking outward to see what type of celebrities you want associated with your company, you really need to be clear about your own brand. Start by really defining how you want to represent your company to the world. This is important to understand so that you can make an educated decision as to which celebrities are best suited to amplify your brand. Asking the wrong celebrity to represent your company can be costly and end up damaging your brand in the future, instead of helping it. Read more about it...
Five Tips in Building a Personal Brand in your Media Career

Five Tips in Building a Personal Brand in your Media Career

I’ll be speaking next month to a large group from all over the country of radio sales people, programmers, and managers on helping them build a personal brand.  It has done wonders for me in taking my career to the next level. Here are five tips I learned after launching my Personal Brand I wish I knew before I did!  I hope they help you jumpstart your journey in creating separation points from the competition in your career. 1) Decide on a niche target of who you want to help and start there.  (I chose “marketing”.  It’s extremely difficult to just write and create content and value about “marketing” in my eyes.  It’s too broad and my writing was all over the place.  Now my focus is on helping companies or individuals build out and market their community project or idea and turn it into a reality.) Read more about this topic of building a personal brand for your media career...
3 Ways Every Brand Can Use Social Influence to Drive Business

3 Ways Every Brand Can Use Social Influence to Drive Business

Even as we get ready to usher in 2015, PR pros and marketers alike continue to struggle with the best ways to use social media in a successful campaign strategy. Social is now (hopefully) considered crucial for any business or brand that wants to be seen — after all, it’s where your audience heads for information, to ask questions and to be heard. But that’s just your own shared media. So how can you make social work for your brand using influencers outside of your organization? Make the Pitch: We’re in PR, right? There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to the influencers you have developed relationships with, and letting them know of the great new products or services your brand has to offer. Tell them why it matters to their audience and give them all the information they’ll need for a write up or an interview. Pro tip: Consider giving them a couple of pre-written tweets with pertinent information included, which they can easily share. The easier you make it for them to help you, the more likely they are to do so. Read more about it...
5 Tips on Rebranding from a Billion-Dollar Expert

5 Tips on Rebranding from a Billion-Dollar Expert

The decision to rebrand should be weighed carefully, as it can be a complicated and challenging overhaul for any company.  Before you even think about altering your current brand, make sure you ask yourself: Who are you as a brand? What are you best known for? Does that mesh with your expectations of how you want to be perceived? Rebranding isn’t a “fix” if you don’t know what is broken or why. Once you’ve decided to take the plunge, there’s both an art and a science to getting it right.  Here are a few tips from my experiences branding and rebranding several billion-dollar companies that can help companies of any size, miniscule or mammoth, successfully tackle the process: 1. Rally the internal forces to win the external war. Although rebranding typically focuses on winning over the outside world, it’s just as important to capture the hearts and minds of those within your organization. (It is my belief that brand ambassadors start from the inside.) Read more about it...
How The Top Brands Use Social Media for Marketing

How The Top Brands Use Social Media for Marketing

Top brands receive high leverage from social media marketing and internet companies are getting highly interested on how they pull it off. By social media marketing, a brand or business is able to build its popularity by increasing its website presence and growing the number of its followers using the social media. There are many marketing tricks employed by many businesses in order to increase their website traffic and ranking by using the social media influence. Here’s how top brands are able to use social media for impressive marketing and profitable leverage. 1. Red Bull Social Media Campaign Social media is responsible for the profit earned by Red Bull in 2012, selling about 5.2 billion cans of its energy drinks. It launched a marketing campaign that leverages on its buyer persona. On its website, thrill seeking athletes were featured, including race car drivers. Its social media campaign kicked off by launching on its Facebook page the upcoming thrilling events of playing addicting games and featuring on its Twitter page a photo of the week contest that gets the viewers talking, sharing and engaging with the Red Bull brand. It also featured the experience and adventures of heroes on an adrenaline pumping action on the Red Bull TV that is optimized by an app to accommodate more viewers and followers. What makes this top brand fare well in its social media marketing campaign is knowing their target audience to be likely engaged with their brand and will be interested in using their products. The social media campaign is not all about the Red Bull drink, but leveraging on the interest of...