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branding, content creation, Content marketing, Personal Brand, personal branding goals, writing

3 Reasons Why You Are Not Achieving Your Personal Branding Goals

November 12, 2017

Your goals are unique to you.

But you have to think through your progress with your [dynamic] goals more closely.

Whether it is to become a thought leader in the automotive industry or author an e-book detailing the latest trends in content marketing, ensuring every incremental step you take should be in alignment with your branding purpose.

From a continuum of plain surviving to thriving, here are 3 reasons perhaps why you are still at a loose-end.

  • You don’t focus on things that don’t change. By focusing on things that don’t change as mentioned in this post, you will be able to solidify your personal brand more concretely. For Jeff Bezos, it is low prices, exceptional customer service, etc; what is it for you? Answer this question and multiply your efforts in that direction. While playing catch-up with new trends is a never-ending process, but you can always control what’s in your reach – and that’s the point.

 

  • You don’t have stretch goals. Reverse engineer your stretch goals – ones that challenge you to progress relentlessly and proactively. Don’t take comfort in achievable goals – try to go beyond your limitations and create a new benchmark for yourself. For example, don’t just limit your writing for your own blog; reach out to online publications that can increase your reach – wide and vast – by contributing articles for other online mediums.

 

  • You are in the intention stage. Get rid of your ‘gonna’, and go do – as rightly said by Gay Vaynerchuk. Start to put your intentions into action. Create exemplary content on a consistent basis – which as an emerging thought leader, you need to slowly build your content momentum. Don’t just create a content calendar; start writing real-time and execute your personal branding strategy. So whether it is to interview more people on your podcast, or exploring more PR opportunities to communicate more about your solutions/ services – go and pitch – and then go to the next one. Don’t stop. Keep pace with your audience’s expectations for the long-term, and eventually, you will have an implicit control over your personal branding activities.

How do you cope up with your personal branding goals?

branding, Career

Unemployed? Do These 3 Things

October 22, 2017

Feeling unemployed is really frustrating, and sometimes downright melancholy. It’s only you at the end of the day who has to traverse this period in your life with a renewed hope to turn things around in your favor, again.

But how?

Not that connecting on LinkedIn doesn’t work, or an occasional e-mail to entrepreneurs hiring on an immediate basis bounces back rather indifferently on you. But somewhere psychologically you feel insecure and episodic when you are moving on from one job to the other.

And although there is nothing called permanence in the corporate world, you still need a job to hold on to something, which frees you up to chase your passions as well as enjoy your work. Figuring out this perfect straddle can be difficult.

But hold on.

There are still many ways to actually get back your mojo into your work – and live a life you have always dreamed of.

  1. Learn to sometimes surrender. It’s not always your fault if you are not landing a job. Sometimes, it’s best to let go and let your energies do the work. Whatever you intently send out to the universe, believe it or not, it does come to you. This sounds philosophical, but it’s predicated on your reality. You are what you think, most of the times. Believe in your strengths and let the revelations happen. And while you are introspecting, start reaching out to people with a goal in mind: get connected with people who share similar career outlook like yours. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for a job; it can be for a gig or a writing engagement, or maybe help them in their area of business problems that can best be leveraged through your solutions.

 

  1. Connect with your work alumni. You never know, maybe that last job that you left still needs a talent like you. Sure, everyone is replaceable in the corporate world. But it doesn’t hurt to check in with your previous employers if they need a skill that can solve a problem they are looking to fill. Every job has a mixed bag of problems and opportunities attached to it, maybe you could be the perfect fitment for that at that given point of time? If nothing else, you could be onboard with them on a project basis or a freelancing basis. And the association could be longer than you anticipated – but at least try and connect!

 

 

  1. Start developing your passion portfolio. We live in a ‘sharing economy’ which also means sharing information/ knowledge with your ecosystem via a platform or a blog. Think Airbnb. Think Uber. Think Amazon. The examples abound but one common motto: to establish a [multi] platform in order to connect with the world for whatever bespoke reasons these companies may have. As is the case with your personal brand; rack up some credibility by writing for publications in your field as well as start building more ‘owned’ version of content – bit it via a blog, or even by being a passionate Instagrammer – it’s totally your prerogative based on your career aspirations. But via building your work portfolio can help you sustain in an imbalanced career journey – and will solidify your presence online for employers (especially startups) to take notice of. If nothing else, good writing – business or creative – always scores you extra points when you are looking for a job, better yet, career.

 

What’s your way for going through career bumps of unemployment?

blog, Brand Experience, branding, Business, Business-Of-One, Digital Leading World, Digital PR, PR

The Role Of PR In A Digital Leading World

October 7, 2017

Digital and traditional PR – both are needed to grow your business.

PR is not a one-off event that happens only for making specific announcements to your public/ business stakeholders. It’s a continuous process that slowly builds your brand and carves a certain perception in the minds of your customers, consumers, and the general public.

However, the PR charm is changing quite fast for businesses – particularly for marketers and digital leaders. Reason? Well, we see a mesh between traditional and digital communication channels to communicate a holistic story of brands. PR doesn’t operate in siloes; it operates across various divisions and sub-divisions of a company – understanding your brand’s voice in granularity and coherently.

And what we are witnessing is how businesses at large are harnessing the power of digital capabilities and digital leadership to make increased profits, better business models and operations, as mentioned in the book, ‘Leading Digital’ by George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee.

But how is this related to PR?

Communicating your brand message isn’t just a print affair; it’s an audience affair – it’s all about your audience. While print reaches out to masses, your digital channels can constantly iterate your message and make them more bespoke for your target customers and audience in general.

Cross-pollinating ideas among content marketing professionals, to search, to social, to customer support, to digital masters – and to sales as well – determines the most ‘qualified, pertinent and logical’ narrative for your company.

PR is both qualitative and quantitative – giving you the right scoop of what, where and how your customers are responding to your message. Through data-driven communications, you can collect meaningful information about your customers (trade bodies, Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet, etc) that will make you a more informed marketer/ decision maker.

After all, isn’t PR supposed to provide you business results eventually?

The’ actual’ quaint perception of PR is to create a meaningful business impact whilst building a promising thought leadership: that happens only when you marry traditional PR with the new age digital investment (like analytics, social media, embedded technologies, mobile computing, etc), and create real-time PR content.

Your snazzy bylines, press releases, and compelling op-eds can be repurposed into useful blog posts, social media posts, an interesting primer on Instagram, a vlog, an exciting podcast episode, or simply an update on LinkedIn (another big channel for businesses to build their brand imagery).

With digital channels, your public relation activities will be more focused, real-time, right and fast – and responsive – which will ultimately give your business the right boost to grow in numbers as well as build market insights, to have a sustainable competitive advantage over your competitors.

So understand PR from the digital lens – and your business will thrive!

 

Brand Experience, branding

Don’t Always Differentiate; Be Better

September 24, 2017

You have been hearing a lot of business-speak on product differentiation – to stand out from the competition and being able to serve your customers via leveraging your key product/ business differentiators.

While I am not going to suppress any of the ‘differentiation proposition bit of marketing’ – and it holds weight by a large margin even in today’s marketing realm. But with every company bringing in the nearly same set of value proposition, how do you match up to what your customers are expecting from your brand?

The book – Simply Better – communicates the message clearly: focus on being better than always being able to differentiate. Your customers are not looking for your USPs; they are looking for category benefits – a reel of benefits that fit in with their overall general expectations of making you their autopilot choice.

And although differentiation never dies – you, your product and your market have only ‘your’ kind of business impact on your customers. However, the better way to transition broadly in the minds of your customers from mere difference to value impact is to be simply better than your competitors.

And so, how do you get better?

  • Focus on your customers’ experience – their buying journey to ultimate advocacy for the brand they’d like to be associated with
  • Bring in the consummate set of benefits that your customers implicitly look out for
  • Work on your business marketing fundamentals – for the better use of the word, basic – that provide you with your customers’ purchase intent and psychology, and then target their moments of maximum emotional impact (as mentioned in the book, The Growth Director’s Secret)
  • Understand your competition – what are they doing better than you – and get intense with your set of basic benefits that you can offer to your customer
  • Showcase your category benefits with exceptionally useful content that your audience like to consume, to help them make the right decision. Your customer journey should be your content journey: that eventually builds a ‘better’ perception of your brand as compared to your competitors

Try being better; it will help!

 

branding, Career, competitive advantage, content

What Makes You Tick?

September 10, 2017

No seriously – what makes you tick?

When your job doesn’t take out the best of you but gives you some comfort of a decent paycheck, why do you have a disconcerting feeling?

Truth be told: nothing remains the same – be it in your career or personal life. The only constant thing is change.

But your sense of experiencing change hinges on one thing: what do you really love doing?

Because doing what you love, in the long-haul, helps you in embracing change more diligently. You don’t have to depend on the next job to prove your mettle, you can instantly start creating amazing content for your audience and build thought-leadership with your constant drizzling of meaningful content snippets.

You are living in a knowledge world, where most business decisions go way deeper than just a fancy presentation and deliverables to achieve; you live in a world in which people still read long-form content, watch vine videos, check out Instagram posts’ captions and deliberate on your LinkedIn summary – now this line is a bit disjointed. But people practice logic and emotion in the way they comprehend your message/ content.

When you do what you really love – all the time – you reach an epiphany: you become a memorable brand and an autopilot choice for your audience to consume your content and contact you for business.

To do what you love and doing it regardless of the fact that you are able to monetize or not will settle at one point: your willpower. If everything else fails, but you still love what you do, your willpower empowers you to still chase it and make you thrive at a certain point.

So keep ticking – hustling – and moving forth your passion: something which your inner longing beckons you to do.

 

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    Hello there – I’m Aditi, the founder of Let The Muse Flow.

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