Building a profitable executive brand can feel like extra stress that you don’t need. This is especially true once your business and brand take off.
However, your executive brand can lead to the prosperity of your business brand. It can also introduce new aspects that can build your company. All of this comes from you putting just a little bit more of you into your brand.
Building a Profitable Executive Brand in 3 Steps
These three steps will make it easier for you to balance your executive brand and business goals. You will be ready to build your executive brand while generating an online presence that will boost your business.
Step 1: Define Your Executive Brand
How your brand is represented in the digital space is what separates you from the competition. If you’re in a saturated market, you may be viewed as a commodity. When your brand blends in with all the others, you might lose potential business.
Using your uniqueness to position your brand will get you more customers. But what sets your brand apart? This is why defining your digital brand is so important. How you position your brand image will determine how your consumers think of your business.
Without a defined digital brand, you won’t be able to generate a profitable executive brand.
Creating your executive brand can be both an art and a science. You will need to showcase your uniqueness and creativity, which is an art. However, it will need to be done in a strategic way that will position you as an industry leader, which is a science.
Create an Elevator Pitch
Creating an elevator pitch will help you define your digital brand. This short and concise pitch will help your target audience quickly understand exactly who you are and what you offer. Your elevator pitch will be referenced everywhere online. This includes:
- Your social media accounts
- Your website
- Review sites
- Wherever you appear online
A solid elevator pitch will allow you to summarize exactly who you are and what you offer. Clear focus can help to set you apart from all the competition.
The Perfect Elevator Pitch
If you are wondering how to make your elevator pitch perfect, use this list as a guide. When your pitch has all of these elements, you are on the right track:
- Your name
- Your company
- Available product
- Who your target customers are
- What makes you unique
- A call to action
These elements will make it easy for your target audience to know they’re in the right place when they read your name.
Create a Slogan
Your brand slogan should be a big part of your digital presence. It lets readers know who you are, what you offer, and that they’ve come to the right place instantly.
It’s very important to have a brand slogan in the digital space. This is because we don’t spend that much time doing research online. There are so many options that if we extensively researched every choice we made, we would never get anything done.
Branding is how you get people’s attention. So, you must establish your brand slogan and make it known to gain the attention of potential customers quickly.
Again, this is important because in a world where people are surfing the Internet–bouncing off pages–you’ve only got a few seconds to communicate your brand message.
This slogan by Denise Morrison, CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, is an excellent example of a transparent motto that still relates to the brand she is working for.
To serve as a leader, live a balanced life, and apply ethical principles to make a significant difference.
Find the Intersection
If you were to make a ven diagram with customers and products, that sweet spot in the middle is where you have the opportunity to make the most significant impact on your following.
You take their needs, and you overlay that with your product or service and at that intersection is where you can make an impact.
Again you can look at Denise Morrison for a great example of how to show the intersection in between your customers and products, and between you and your brand.
She outlines her goals:
- To serve as a leader
- Living a balanced life
- To apply ethical principles
Campbells, her brand, says on it ‘Made for Real, Real Life.’ You might wonder how these intersect. They aren’t the same, but they both deal with being real and making a difference in small ways.
When defining your brand, find the intersections between you and your brand.
Step 2: Build Your Executive Brand
Before making purchases people almost always look products and brands up online. This means that in most cases, your target audience will interact with your digital brand before they associate with your physical brand.
So how do you make your executive brand ready for digital searches?
SEE ALSO: How to Build Your Executive Brand
Build Your Home Base
To ensure that your audience gets the right information the first time, you must focus on building your home base. Your home base is usually your website or blog.
If the purpose of your home base is just to showcase your brand or to allow people to get to know who you are, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or about.me are viable options.
If you are serious about your legal branding, then you should use a self-hosted WordPress website.
SEE ALSO: Navigating the Web Design Process
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, created a blog that combines his interests with causes he believes in. He uses this blog to promote the work of his charity and to publicize causes he’s passionate about, like energy technology.
Build Your Social Media Accounts
Creating social media accounts can be a great way to promote your executive brand. It allows for more intimate communication with your followers and can make your brand feel more authentic. Social media is where many executive recruiters and hiring managers will hang out when searching for candidates.
If you have limited time or resources, it is important to pick just one social media site to work on. You don’t want to get overwhelmed. Many executive brands start with Twitter, but you might want to focus on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Remember: It’s better to have a significant presence on one social network than a diluted presence on several.
If you choose to work with LinkedIn, be sure to join LinkedIn Groups. This is where hiring decision makers and prospects are active. It is where you can demonstrate your expertise by starting discussions and contributing content.
Find out where your clients are spending time online and focus your efforts there.
Step 3: Monitor Your Executive Brand
This is a part of your digital brand that will remain a part of your day to day work. Sometimes it can be in your best interest to find digital branding services that can help to manage this work for you.
SEE ALSO: Monitor Your Digital Brand
Leverage Other People’s Property
There are many executive blogs floating around on the internet that you can get involved in. These blogs have the great benefit of already having an audience that you can take advantage of for your brand.
Finding blogs in similar spheres as yours are a great start. Just start by participating in the comments section and see if you can be a guest blogger for them later on.
This is an excellent opportunity to show the value of your executive brand by sharing information that your customers and prospects need.
This is still true even if your data isn’t directly related to your products or services. In fact, doing this will build more trust in your audience by sharing information outside of your organization’s offerings.
Guest Blogging
Nothing can grow your executive brand quite like guest posting. Guest blogging is also great for search engines, because you get back-links from those posts on somebody else’s site, back to your site. It will introduce you to new communities and will allow your ideas to spread more freely.
Repurpose Your Content
You don’t have just to keep pumping out brand new pieces of content for your clients.
If there are several ways to say one thing, why do we continue to struggle when creating content?
-Juntae Delane
You may feel the pressure to create more and more content to stay relevant for your clients. This can be an overwhelming feeling.
Instead of creating more and more new pieces, you can take apart pieces of old content that were popular and turn them into new pieces. Figure out how to link several areas of expertise in your business brand with vital personal attributes from your executive brand and then shuffle them around a few times.
If you have several different problems that tend to come up that are similar to solve, you can repurpose the same content to address the various issues. This will make content creation simpler for you while giving your target audience access to the answers to their problems.
SEE ALSO: Using Content Roundups to Build Your Digital Brand
Practice Batching Content
Batching is doing a lot of similar things at the same time. For instance, you wouldn’t make a single cookie at a time. You’d make a whole batch of them. Right? Well, the same is true for writing.
Half the challenge is just getting into that creative writing space where we can produce. Once you figure out how to create valuable content that will position your executive brand efficiently, that is the time to create several posts.
You’re going to save a lot of time by knocking out multiple posts in one session.
Final Thoughts
Your executive brand is where you connect the business you with the personal you. This can feel like a complicated process and may leave you more vulnerable than you would like. However, this is where you will begin to truly connect with your followers.
Showing them who you are through your executive brand will create a profitable brand that will increase the popularity of your business. You need to define your brand, build your brand, and monitor your brand for maximum success in the digital world.
What are some of your favorite executive brands?
