Personal branding expert Claire Bahn, founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based boutique strategic communications and marketing outfit Claire Bahn Group, says she got into the field professionally after learning to market herself as an actor and model.
“I found that the people who marketed themselves the best were able to get the jobs they were best suited for,” she says. “If you think about your headshot and all the materials that you have—your reel, all that stuff—that helped me get jobs, as well as my social media presence.”
It’s not an uncommon story. Many people are inspired to bill themselves as a go-to expert in their field after years spent working precisely in that field. They have accumulated knowledge, and now they want to share it.
But how do you go about getting your name out there? What are the steps to go from brand idea to thought leader? Here, Bahn explains some of the key stages of branding yourself and finding your audience.
One caveat: Bahn says it’s essential to have a backup plan at the start. “You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to quit everything, do this and my personal brand is going to work within a month.’” It takes time and consistency, so keep your day job or work through gig platforms that take a cut—just while you get started.
1. Ask not what your client can do for you
A common misguided approach when branding yourself is to focus entirely on what you’re selling. Bahn suggests instead to think about what you can offer people or what unmet need you can fulfill. “What are you an expert in, and how can you help people?”
“It’s a different way of looking at it. Instead of what you want to talk about, it’s what people want to know,” she explains. That’s the crux of how you begin building trust with your potential audiences and clients. Bahn says it’s a crucial step many people skip.
How do you know what people want to talk about? How do you determine those unmet needs? Bahn suggests starting with websites such as Answer the Public, Keyword Tool.io and Ubersuggest to collect insights into what consumers are searching for online. You can also see what your competition is doing.
“I find out what people are actively searching for that I can answer in my area of expertise,” Bahn says. Those search results can also help you figure out where your ideal audience consumes content and “where you fit in and where you can differentiate yourself.”
2. Write a personal brand statement
Based on this information, you can then craft what Bahn calls a personal brand statement—or “simple information that tells them who you are, what your background is and why they should stay there, why they should follow you.”
Other elements to gather when branding yourself and launching a website and affiliated social media accounts are professional-quality photos and a cohesive look and feel across platforms.
But, Bahn notes, regular original content is ultimately going to be more important than even the world’s best brand statement. “It’s the content that’s going to bring people to you and keep them coming back.”
3. Help people discover you
Using the search information can help position your brand to appear in similar searches in the future. Bahn strongly recommends optimizing your website with SEO terms using software like Yoast. She also suggests being strategic about which social media platforms you want your brand’s presence on and how you use each.
Bahn suggests focusing on originality and fulfilling a need—helping people—over perfection, AI-generated content or paid ads. The key is to get in front of your audience and make them think. “You want people to think, ‘Wow, that was really interesting. I really like the way they broke that down. I really like the way he or she thinks.’ And then they follow you.”
“It’s about building trust with them so that they ultimately want to find out more about you or they talk about you to somebody else.”
4. Create conversation and community
Bahn calls social media “a discovery platform.” When branding yourself she suggests using social for snippets and sound bites that drive traffic to your website for more depth. The goal is “actively engaging with people in your niche as well as creating content and asking people for feedback. What are your thoughts? What do you think? Did I miss anything?”
Videos and snippets with SEO done well have natural longevity. “When people [search] for you, they find that content and consume it.” She warns against getting caught up in perfectionism and advises focusing on being consistent, even if that’s just one post per week to begin.
“Ultimately, you do want to get to a point where you are creating content more regularly than once a week, but you just need to start. And that’s usually the biggest hurdle, starting—to just start and then be consistent and don’t stop.”
5. Give more than you take
Once a brand is solidified, manage your reputation by regularly measuring your results, expanding your content pillars and, if appropriate, considering a media relations component. Most importantly, keep evolving and stay a part of the conversation.
“Stay attuned to what’s going on in your industry. If you’re actively listening and engaging and learning, then you’ll always find new content to talk about and new things to pique the interest of your audience. That’s going to be really key, because if you’re constantly just rehashing the same thing, you’re going to lose interest.”
Don’t be worried about giving away your ideas for free, she adds. “There are so many people in the world that need services, if you think about it. Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to gatekeep this,’ just tell them how to do it. Your ideal clients will come to you.” Though this may feel counterintuitive, “it truly is what makes people believe that you are an expert.”
She also advises against the hard sell. “I’m on social media all the time because it is my job,” she says, but her favorite accounts are the ones that “constantly give. I call it 80% give, 20% ask. You’re giving great information and helping people 80% of the time. And then you might be able to say, ‘Hey, go sign up for this free webinar I’m doing’ or ‘sign up for a consultation’ or something like that.”
The best way of branding yourself, Bahn reiterates, “is through helping people and creating content that helps people.”
Done right, crafting a personal brand can generate results in a matter of months. “Trust the process,” she says. “Keep your eye on the prize, and keep going.”
Photo by Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock.com
