As a CEO, business owner or senior executive, you have an opportunity to build your career, create new opportunities and support your business’s growth by having a unique and compelling presence online. Whether you’re positioning yourself for a new move in your career or looking to become a trusted investor, you need an established presence online and a track record of sharing insights and ideas that matter in your industry.
In many ways, building your personal brand is just as important as building your company’s brand.
Using social media platforms like LinkedIn is a great way to build your presence as an executive. Being more personal and passionate about specific topics on these platforms allows you to gain deeper connections with your audience and bring value to your business.
According to Forbes, brand messages shared by employees on social media obtain 561% more reach than the same messages shared by the brand’s social media channels. On average there is also eight times more engagement on these posts.
As we’ve been increasingly asked to support executive brand building programmes across the globe, we’ve put together six recommendations for building your personal brand.
- Give Yourself a Cause, Theme or Purpose
You need to be fighting for something, correcting something that is misunderstood in the market or trying to drive change. You shouldn’t be just sharing content. You should have a purpose behind everything you write or post. This way you can be recognised for a specific topic that you can own.
- Using the Global Trade Media to Tell Your Story
B2B tech and telecoms businesses should be pitching interviews or byline articles to global media publications. The interviews can be conducted via email to give you maximum control over the content. These articles should be pure thought leadership and not promotional. For example, you could draft an article about your chosen topic and place it in an industry publication that your peers read.
- News, Milestones and Industry PR
Whenever possible you should be associated with the company’s news or milestones. When a PR is distributed quotes should come from you and a photo of yourself should be shared with the media. You want the company’s news to be shared with your photo online and a strong bond built between the successes of the company and yourself. This positions the executive as a leader with the ability to execute on a vision. The more consistent the news is the better it is for your personal brand.
- Industry Event Presence and Speaker Ops
You should participate in as many industry panels, keynote speeches and webinars as possible. Ilex always prepares speaker notes for these events to ensure that you are delivering key messages. It is important to use every opportunity to get the same consistent message across and own a topic. Online or offline these are all touch points for influencing your audiences.
- Corporate Social Responsibility
Time permitting, you should identify charitable causes that match your areas of interest. A cause should be relevant to the business and something that you are passionate about. Entrepreneurship, promoting ICT skills or mentoring can all be used to illustrate the value that you bring to the community, beyond the office. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a way to do good while benefiting from new networking opportunities and demonstrating personality. CSR is an amazing content generator and very powerful when shared across social media platforms.
- Social Media Amplification
LinkedIn should be used to amplify all of these opportunities with a post at least once a week. They should not be promoting your work. These posts should be sharing content, industry research and other thought leadership. It is great to recognise the work of your team, acknowledging successes of peers, and show support for the business community.
At Ilex, we can offer advice and communications programmes focused on building your personal brand. We offer consultancy around messaging and brand narratives and collaborate with you to develop your presence. Our team develops executive brand building strategies and supports execution across social media channels and global media. We manage content creation, editing and posting with a seamless and simple model. The team helps to mine stories and create angles to best represent you. We help you achieve objectives and maximise your personal profile.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss executive brand building, and how we might help you or your corporate team.
