25/10/2012

By Alexia Leachman, Founder of www.headtrash.co.uk

Personal marketing

Once you’re clear on your personal brand (strategy), you’re ready to move on to the intricate task of marketing yourself; the bunch of activities you do to attract people to you and make people want what you offer. In bars it’s called dressing sexy and flirting, but professionally-speaking this is going to include things like;

- How you describe who you are, what you do and the value you add

- The touchpoints you choose to use to engage with others. A touchpoint is a point of contact that you might have with someone and these might include things like personal website, your social media avatars, your CV or bio etc.

- If your touchpoints are visual in nature, how they look (design of the blog, business card etc)

- The visual nature of these toughpoints

- Figuring out who you target market is, where they can be found and how you’re going to reach them

- Packaging up what you do to make it attractive and palatable to your target market

- How you choose to deliver what you do (in person, online, via a job, as a consultant, through a book)

- Pricing what you do to take into account of both the market rate and your position in that market

- Personal PR activities; all those things that spread the word about you. This might be blogging, tweeting, speaking, articles (by you or about you) and events.


As with business marketing, personal marketing will require that you consider the world you live in (your environment) and any relevant trends. This process will feed from the work that you did as part of discovering your personal brand and in turn feed the more tactical aspects of any activities you choose to undertake. Activities such as those involved for the next term I’m going to explore, personal impact.


Personal impact

This is sometimes referred to as personal presence, or at least for me I see these two terms as being interchangeable. For me, this is about how you come across in the real touchy-feely world, like when we’re both in the same room and we can both smell the same pot of coffee. In the real world, your presence and impact is going to be down to a number of things;

- How you dress and your grooming

- Your posture and your body language

- Your voice

- The way that you speak and your use of language

- Your mannerisms and habits

- Your accessories

- The way that you interact and respond to people


Now, if you wanted to strengthen your personal brand, you could start here, but this is outside stuff. If you haven’t done the work on the inside, then at best it’s a sticking plaster with a limited lifespan, or at worst, you could come across as fake and inauthentic. And whatever will people think of you if you come across fake and authentic. Aah! Well that’ll be your reputation and that’s next!

Alexia Leachman is a Mojo-hunter and helps business leadersto find their mojo by helping them to clear their head trash, tell their story, raise their profile, build their digital presence and manage their reputation. Alexia is also the founder of www.headtrash.co.uk, the home of the most powerful head trash clearance technique in the world. She regularly speaks and writes, and recently authored a chapter on Online Reputation for a book on Internet Marketing due out in November 2012. You can follow her on Twitter at @AlexiaL.

Alexia is speaking at our forthcoming Internet Marketing event @ Google Campus.

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