Personal online marketing for career & business growth: An executive guide

Connectivity is the 21st century electricity, data centres are the new rail tracks, and targeted advertising platforms such as Google AdWords are the new engines that pull our intentions, needs and wants and haul them across to businesses.

In this hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, how you are seen and perceived in your own professional world is fast becoming an essential ingredient to survive, not just to thrive.

Personal marketing is not vanity. Rather, it makes pure business sense to create and nurture a brand of ‘You’. Furthermore, just like in product markets, ‘you’ as a brand would be more highly valued and compensated as compared to ‘you’ as a commodity who is trading skills and time for monthly wages.

Personal marketing has been of great interest to me for years. I felt there was a gap in material, resources and guides on personal marketing available on the Web. While channels of promotion are covered in most available resources, there was little material on building a strategy that preceded promotion.

I believe that the strategic thinking in the beginning of a new marketing project is the most important phase. That was the blueprint I was missing whenever I reviewed any resource on personal online marketing.

In this guide, I have tried to fill that gap. This material should help you connect your strengths, passions and interests and link them to market opportunities in identifying your market segment and positioning yourself as a professional.

So, before you write your first blog post, register in your first social network and speak at the first conference, read this guide to draw a blueprint for your success.

Why personal marketing and branding?

Marketing yourself is essentially planning, communicating and highlighting your personal strengths, knowledge, skills, competencies, achievements and the benefits that you can provide for employers, clients, employees and other stakeholders, for their benefit and success, and of yours in such a way that your messages are closely matched to the needs of the audience and have taken into consideration your objectives from prospective relationships.

Building blocks of a personal marketing strategy

Clarify the 4Ps of marketing – Product, Place, price and promotion. Assuming yourself to be a product in the employment or business market, answer:

1. What are the essential features and benefits of myself as a product;
2. Where am I located or willing to locate;
3. What are my objectives in terms of compensation or profit expectations from business; and
4. What channels of communication am I using currently to promote.

In other words, what are my strengths, weaknesses, interests, passions and expectations?

Identify opportunities: Identify a niche or a market segment that you would like to own after carefully matching your insights from the 4Ps to the opportunities that you have identified in the market.

• Ensure that the identified area is small enough for you to build a reputation in a reasonable period – 1-3 years. Draw boundaries in your area by defining it in terms of geography, functional area, vertical, product or market;
• The identified area may often be the same as the business or market that you have been engaged in for years.
• If the identified area is different from your existing occupation, assess if you have the resources necessary to re-orient yourself to a new area such as by investing in training. You may have to go through a learning curve in the new area or climb the career ladder all over again.
• If you are a student or a fresh professional or want to change careers, ensure that the area offers long term opportunities and your assets, capabilities and strengths are well-suited to it.
• Determine your positioning: What specific aspect in the chosen area would you specialise in, where would you operate (geographical area) and what would be your promise to your future employers, employees, business partners; and finally

Finalise your marketing objectives and targets

Execute your strategy with focused content and promotion programmes

• Build online content that establishes you as a thought leader. Build a professional blog and gradually upgrade it into a professional Web site. Aim for the Web site to be eventually considered a comprehensive resource in your niche.
• Syndicate your content. Be a guest blogger. Write for magazines, journals and make yourself available for long-running columns.
• Publish newsletter regularly following best practices in building mailing lists and promote your newsletter.
• Use a limited number of social networking platforms in a targeted way to build a quality network of colleagues, competitors and followers.
• Use social networks in conjunction with content sharing – books, articles, bookmarks, audio, video, presentations and other media.
• Speak frequently at conferences
• Publish a book.

Read the full text to know more about the strategy, execution and resources on personal online marketing.

- See more at: http://www.simplogy.com/2013/05/personal-online-marketing/#sthash.UdEaoC8T.dpuf