Achieve Best ROI by Investing in YOUR PERSONAL BRAND

Have you thought of investing on yourself?

Your personal brand is a great asset!

It will very likely appreciate if you invest with passion, persistence and a strategic plan.

Very often, we see people buying luxurious outfits and accessories to make them look more professional and/or superior than others. They are essentially leveraging various consumables and product brands to increase their self-worth. This prompted me to question - how about investing in our personal brand?

PERSONAL BRANDING IS A PERCEPTION CREATION PROCESS

Personal branding is a strategic concept, it is about creating a desirable perception on yourself, then communicate it to your target audience in a clear, concise and consistent way. Defining our personal brand starts from asking ourselves who we are, what stand for, what we value and how we want to be perceived.

A strong personal brand can build trust that nurtures following and customer loyalty. It helps us generate rapport, win more clients and drive revenue growth.

To build an impactful, successful personal brand, we need to invest on ourselves, not anyone else!

Your brand is an asset. An asset generates value overtime. Personal brand equity is defined as the value that derives from others’ perception of your brand rather than your actual performance. Therefore, your commitment matters in this “investment”. Building your personal brand equity is like increasing your leadership and credibility. According to Inc., “when people speak of ‘brand equity’, they mean the public's valuation of a brand.” In other words, brand equity is essentially a concept that acts as a framework for individuals to understand the power of their target customers’ emotions in relationship to their brand positioning.

A GOOD PERSONAL BRAND CAN HELP YOU OVERCOME BAD TIMES

It is important to develop our brand equity with sustainable efforts. If we have a strong personal brand, the brand equity that we banked can potentially help us fight against others’ personal attacks, mitigate reputational risks and make us less vulnerable to competition and career setbacks even in times of recession. In other words, investing in our brand equity can help reduce the chance of business failure, lead to a bigger success in a long run.

A STRONG PRESENCE IS CRUCIAL TO SUCCESSFUL PERSONAL BRANDING

Our online presence plays a crucial role in determining our brand equity. You may be amazed that many business owners and startup founders do not even care that their customers/investors/staff would regularly ‘Google’ them before making any buying/funding/working decisions. We are now living in an interconnected world, information cost has become incredibly low. People across continents can check each other out by a click or two.

A positive brand equity helps generate good rapport, build trust to anyone you want to work with or anyone who wants to work with you. What people can and cannot find about you would then form their opinion on you, even before you get to know them.

INVEST YOUR TIME AND ENERGY IN YOUR BRAND BUILDING

Needless to say, strategic personal brand building takes time, energy and resources. People often wonder how they can measure the ROI (i.e. Return On Investment) of their brand.

You can only manage something that you are able to measure. It is very true that, if we want to manage our personal brand well, we need to measure the output versus the input. There is, unfortunately, no simple personal branding formula as in “If you pay $X, you will get Y”, or it can’t be guaranteed one’s income/revenue would be increased by how much percentage after establishing his/her brand. A common misconception is that you could track your ROI on personal branding like every dollar you spend on Google Analytics or Facebook Advertising.

There is no short-cut to personal branding success. To measure the ROI of your personal brand, we must look at it with a long-term view by regularly monitor whether the perception has been formed as desired, through self reflection, talking to your primary contacts, measuring traction on your website and social media channels, etc.

Wait no more now. Invest in your personal brand and track your ROI. If you nurture it with persistence, it will be the best long-term investment ever!

Take control of your brand now and make it the best investment you’ve ever made in a lifetime!

You have the opportunity to establish your brand and tell your own story. If you leave it to chance, or allow others to frame you, then you are putting your own success at risk.