Catherine Kaputa is a personal brand strategist and author of the book “You Are a BRAND! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success.” In a recent article which appeared online at www.cio.com, she writes that zeroing in on your unique value and communicating it consistently is a surefire strategy for attracting employers’ attention. She describes four specific personal branding tactics that can be effective in a job search.
Brand yourself in a sentence. Effective brands are defined succinctly and competitively in a single sentence. The sentence should declare what’s different about you and why it matters. It should be short enough to write on the back of a business card and definitive enough to describe the brand’s purpose. For example, Google defines its brand this way: “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful.” When you are composing your brand sentence, think of how you can label or position yourself differently.
Get feedback on your 60-second elevator speech. Brands hire experts to create their ads, then test them to get feedback. There’s an easy way for you to get feedback: Just grab a video camera and record yourself giving your elevator speech or your answer to the most popular interview question, Tell me about yourself. Then sit down and evaluate your performance. The only way to get good is to practice, make a video and rate your performance.Your personal commercial should elaborate on your brand sentence in an interesting way. Take another page from the branding playbook and include a memorable phrase that embodies your brand purpose, like an ad slogan does for a brand. Try an analogy: Put two different ideas together to express who you are, such as “I’m a cross between X and Y” or “I’m like A meets B. Even though you’ve practiced and videotaped your delivery, your elevator pitch shouldn’t seem wooden and rehearsed. The key is to practice, but to avoid memorization so you don’t sound like you’re scripted.
Create branded marketing materials that break through the clutter. Every brand has marketing materials: advertising, a website, brochures, business cards and other collateral that are all designed with a distinctive look and feel and a message focused on the brand vision–the best brand story possible. You should do the same. Your marketing materials are your personal website, social media profiles, blog, business card, cover letter, email address, voicemail message and résumé. Make sure that all your marketing materials have a similar look (they should use the same fonts and colors, for example) and tell your best brand story. You can take another page from the branding playbook and get endorsements or testimonials in your marketing materials.
Develop an e-mail “Stalking” campaign. CNBC “Street Signs” Anchor Erin Burnett got her start on television after writing what she called a “stalker letter” to anchor Willow Bay. Of course, Burnett wasn’t literally stalking Bay, but a clever email and letter campaign to companies and hiring managers can brand you as someone with initiative and get you noticed.
Kaputa suggests that once you get into the branding mindset, you’ll want to reassess your personal brand regularly just like any brand manager would do–not just when you’re in transition. After all, Brand You is a journey that will last your whole lifetime.
