Personal Branding - the First Rule of Solopreneur Marketing

Why is it that so many people just don’t ‘get’ how to market a small business?

Well, I’m sure there are many reasons but here’s one example that I want to share with you of an entrepreneur that just doesn’t get it.

The other day I was chatting with an acquaintance of mine who has a medium-sized business. I spent some time quizzing him about what sort of business he owned and how he went about marketing it. And, not surprisingly, he went on and on about the services and how great they were (it was an education and training business) and naturally, after about ten minutes I was ready to doze off. To top it off, he started going on and on about the importance of selling and strategies he uses to make customers buy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with talking about your products and services – of course, it is necessary to be able to describe your products and services to people who are interested in them, just as it is important to understand something about sales strategies and what makes customers buy but the whole time he was talking to me, I just got this impression of somebody who had just graduated from business school. It wasn’t until he said, ‘Trust me, I studied economics’, that I suddenly realised what was happening……….he was suffering from ‘graduate-speak’ and regurgitating all of these theories that he had learned over ten years ago and was trying to apply them to his small business today. Now here’s the thing….

Marketing over the years has changed……and the biggest agent for change is the internet. But many business owners haven’t caught on to how to leverage the internet to market their small business. And there’s one concept in particular that passes just about everybody by and that is for small to medium-sized local business owners, the most important thing is PERSONAL BRANDING.

Look, the stuff that was taught to at university is designed to make you become a part of the corporate machine. It’s great but it just doesn’t work for small business. There are better models out there that are designed to help you do what small business owners should be doing:

• trying to be percieved as a trusted authority

• giving great value, and

• reaching out and connecting with people on a more personal level

I will talk more about the first two points in later posts but firstly, I want to share some tips and tools that will help you to connect with your customers on a more personal level.

1) Blogging: this my favourite and I think it is the no.1 way to get your message across on a more personal level. Blogs work because they send out a personal message from the owner of the business and your topics don’t have to be purely business-related. It’s your story. You write it any way you want.

2) Use social media to interact with your community and customers: this is so simple yet so effective, I’m surprised not everyone is doing it. Go to some of my other web posts to read up a bit more on how to use tools like Google +, Linked In and Facebook to reach out and interact with your target customers.

3) Take advantage of some of the newest web 2.0 tools available. Here’s one that I reckon everyone can use. I found out about it at a teacher development day I attended and I love it. It’s called animoto and you just upload pictures of yourself, your family, your business, your pets….whatever, onto the application, make some text modules, arrange them the way you want them by a simple ‘drag and drop’, select some music and you have yourself a moving advertisement that you can upload onto your facebook, twitter and other social profiles or use as a welcome message on your blog. Here’s a sample of one I made for my business:

 http://animoto.com/play/WnkDIEqAcFyPmDT6Rd9fcg?utm_source=lindapaull.com&utm_medium=player&utm_campaign=player

So small business owners take note.  Make the most of the fact that there is nobody else out there like you and use it as an advantage. The more human you are, the more your customers will relate to you and recognise you as someone who stands out from the crowd. And for a small business owner, there’s nothing more important than this.

If you would like to know more about how to leverage the internet to get more leads for your business, then click here for the free webinar ’100 customers in 100 days’ or click here to download my 21-point checklist.

And don’t forget to ‘like’ and ‘tweet’ this post.

Thanks

Linda