One question on many marketer’s minds is:
Why is personal branding so important in the consulting industry?
Whether you’re a consultant in a particular niche or an internet marketer, you are selling yourself and you’re charging premium prices (assuming you really know your field), you’ll want to command top dollar. You obviously need to communicate regarding what makes you different from all the other consultants or marketing gurus out there.
Consultants and people marketing online are a dime a dozen, especially today. There are so many different people out there claiming to be experts in their particular field which makes it difficult to compete.
So why should someone pay you for your advice or your information products or your services over all the other people in the same field as you?
That’s why personal branding is so important. You’ve got to put yourself out there as ‘the definitive expert’ and convince people you know more and have more in-depth knowledge than anyone else.
Number 1:
Know your stuff, know what you’re talking about so that’s that’s the first thing
Number 2:
If you want to get top dollar and want to be able to get paid multiples of what the average consultant in your industry makes, you’ve got to ensure that your target market sees you everywhere. A perfect example of this would be Gary Vaynerchuk. So however you feel about Gary Vaynerchuk, he is just prolific, every single day he puts out content, he’s everywhere to the point where you might even be sick of seeing him! That being said, no one can dispute that he is just everywhere and because he’s done that he’s built himself into a celebrity so in your personal branding that’s really what you should be aiming to do – almost turning yourself into a celebrity in your niche. Your target market should be seeing you everywhere, on different mediums, for example, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, on Facebook, retargetting banner ads. They’re seeing you everywhere!
Remember, this process doesn’t begin from day 1, it takes time to build up a media presence, however, the more you can get yourself in front of your target market with your branding on all these different mediums and and turn yourself into a celebrity the more money you’re going to be able to make.
As people begin to see you more and more, they’ll be thinking about you, whether they like it or not and you will begin to stand out from other competing consultants in your industry.
One other reason why personal branding is so important is because if someone’s going to pay you for your expert advice, your time and your expertise, they need to feel comfortable working with you. If they are constantly seeing you and your brand in videos and on social media, they begin to get to know you, your style, the type of advice you give and what type of person you really are. They get a taste for your expertise and this is really important. Your audience get to know, like and trust you and feel comfortable with you. On the other hand, you can actually start to repel the people that wouldn’t be a good fit for you or don’t resonate with you.
Your goal is to consult with people or businesses that you know you can actually help. Depending on where you are at in your business, you want to work with businesses that have reached a certain level. For example, if someone is going to pay for one hour consulting session with you and they have only just started their business two weeks ago, that would not be money well spent on their part because you may be a lot more expensive than a lot of other consultants out there.
Your fee may be a minimum say of $5,000 an hour and if someone just started two weeks ago they don’t need to pay $5,000 an hour to learn basic things like setting up a Facebook page or driving traffic. Instead they can go and find someone who honestly would be much more hands-on in doing that, who’s actually teaching that particular topic at a cheaper price.
If you’re running an established consultancy business, it makes more sense for both parties to consult with people who have more mature businesses, for example they may be doing a million dollars a year in gross sales and want to learn how to scale this to five or ten million dollars or even more. These are the people who you can really help and that can afford to pay your prices.
In summary, in your personal branding you want to be attracting people that you can genuinely help, people you would want to work with in the first place. On the opposite side of the coin, you want to be repelling businesses or clients that you’re not going to be able to help or who are just not going to resonate with you.
This is why personal branding is so important.
Some people do have concerns that if they build their business around themselves and their name, then later if the business becomes a huge success and they want to sell it, the fact that it’s branded to the individual could end up being a disadvantage. There are pros and cons of building a business around yourself and your name and yes it does make it harder to sell later down the line but you can still build a very big business by being the central focal point in your marketing.
There is no reason you can’t be the focal point in your marketing. You can have the personal branding just focused all around you and you can still scale a business to a million dollars a year, ten million dollars a year, 50 million dollars and even more with you being the focal point.
Once again we come back to guys like Gary Vaynerchuk who is probably doing over a hundred million in gross revenue at this point and everything is based around him personally.
Personal branding is so so important, don’t ever under-estimate the value.
Personal Branding Online is critical to your success. When people start seeing your brand on different mediums, you will begin to stand out from the crowd and attract clients who resonate with you. Watch this video to understand why personal branding is so important.
