Grow Your Business Brand With Your Personal Brand: 3 Key Strategies

A personal brand isn’t an extra cost you have to outsource as another business development investment. It can start from within the company, starting with yourself. As written in an article by Sunil Solanki, “84% of consumers believe that a company’s reputation is influenced by the personal brand of its employees report by Forbes.” While personal branding is increasingly interlocked with influencer marketing and content creation, it is also key to achieving growth in your own business. 

The best part about this strategy is how accessible it is, not only from you but from anyone that works for or has a connection to your business. By leveraging yourself and your credibility, the connotation you have with your business will lead to more awareness and traffic (which we will lead into later).

But if you’re still just beginning to create a personal brand, check out our blog page for articles on brand strategies. If you’re newer to branding, your personal brand is the culmination of your reputation, perception, characteristics, values, and talents that set you apart from everybody else. Personal brands are most commonly seen through social media, but can be extended through traditional media and marketing as well. A business brand is similar, except this portfolio applies to your business as a whole instead of an individual.

Read below for three ways you can leverage your personal brand to grow your business brand, as well as understand how each are related and feed into each other.

 

Positioning yourself and your business

 

Branding is a tool to help you position yourself or your company to fit a niche, and therefore provide more value to those that are already within the niche. Your personal brand simply relays the skills you’ve already learned to your business brand. Through using your personal brand, you can increase the trust and credibility that trickles to your business’s brand.

A large motivation and outcome of personal branding is thought leadership. This is the theory that through building your reputation and credibility, you become viewed as an expert in your niche. Think about all of the Reels or TikToks you watch that you take genuine advice from; those pages have solidified their standing as a thought leader. When your audience views you as the “expert”, they listen to what you have to say and use it to better their lives. This is where your business comes in. By having shaped yourself as a thought leader, by association, your business will also be roped in as a solution-provider. Subsequently, you can use your content to show how your business provides thought leadership in your field, since it is related to you.

Another way personal brands grow business brands is through emotional intelligence. People want to work with and listen to other people, not an idea or a cold corporate screen. Your personal brand shows your human side, that you are empathetic and aware of the world around you. This trickles over to your business brand, as your audience now has a face to put to the graphic label. Additionally, there’s more room for personality instead of adhering to strict branding guidelines that represent an entire company.

 

Raising Awareness

 

Growing your personal brand grows your business brand by juxtaposition. Your career is part of who you are, so your business gains awareness merely through association. 

That being said, a strategy for raising awareness of your business’s brand through your own socials is content. I know we hear that word multiple times a day now and it’s become overused, but strategized content is really what will make your business shine. It’s important to balance publishing content surrounding your brand pillars, as your personal brand differs from a professional brand. However, what you can use to direct others to your business in a natural way is by highlighting values that overlap. That way you can post content that corresponds with your business brand without redundantly advertising it.

For example, Maureen Kelly (the CEO of Tarte) posts pictures on her Instagram about her travels around the world, talking about empowering communities, as well as business endeavors and accomplishments. From her page, we can clearly see her interests (family and travel), values (female empowerment and giving back to the community), as well as what her business is up to. By association, we know more about Tarte as well as Tarte’s values.

Another effect of content that is simultaneously another strategy in itself is building relationships with your audience. When you build personal relationships with people viewing your accounts, you become more than a name on a digital screen. This direct interaction also shows off your emotional intelligence. You’re real and trustworthy. With the association you’ve created with your business brand, your brand has heightened awareness and trust. 

 

Added Value

 

Building off of our last pillar for using your personal brand to grow your business brand, strategize your content and audience interactions to ultimately provide the most value to your viewers. Once you’ve gotten into the swing of making content, it’s easy to make content that just serves to promote your business. To say, “If you need help with x, check out our company!” But that’s not exactly valuable to a viewer.

Instead, create content that helps your viewer’s lives in some way. If you are a financial advisor, you could make videos sharing tips on investments, or short graphics that explain financial concepts in a simple way. Or maybe you own a fitness company, in which you could post tips on the best exercises for certain muscle groups, or nutrition suggestions. There are countless ways that your profession can be of value to others for free. By segmenting yourself as a thought leader and a valuable content creator, people will think of you when they actually need a service that falls under your niche. Then by association, they will funnel to your business.

Valuable content doesn’t just attract people, but it attracts the RIGHT people for your company. You won’t just generate leads, but you’ll generate leads that have more potential for retention, and therefore, profit.

 

Using your personal brand to grow your business brand is similar to the concept of a marketing funnel, just throughout the concept of branding. You can still link your audience’s conversion to data metrics, but there is more of a personal aspect as you also delve into relationship building and thought leadership.

Branding is a strategy and an end goal, and I hope this blog has helped you see how you can make it both. Your personal and business brands are separate entities, but linked together, can bolster growth in both areas.

 

Enthuse Creative Can Help

Enthuse Creative can help your business to develop and deploy your personal brand. Reach out to us today for a free consultation.