I'm writing this in a hotel in Hatfield, which is a town outside North London. We have run our first #DLAIgnite conference, which is where our Associates and Partners fly in from around the world to share experiences, network and hear from our clients.
One client gave a great presentation where they said "the days of throwing corporate content into crowds is over." It is.
They are a traditional "IT" company, where they did all of the things we did in the past. Cold calling, senior people just don't take calls anymore. They had an email list, this was hit hard following GDPR but response from this has tailed off.
They get little response from events and conferences.
It was them that came to us and said "Marketing isn't working anymore". We talked yesterday about the fact it takes a brave marketer to admit this to their management team. After all, you have to admit that the money you have spent isn't actually generating anything. I'm pleased to say that many marketers are starting to realise they need to have a clear conscious.
They have moved to social and immediately have seen a difference. Now this isn't spamming people with corporate content and inmails or using templates. This is about social selling.
Creating a personal brand, building a network and sharing and creating content.
More and more businesses realise that the 1990s are over and they need to update their marketing. Saying you are number one, the best, the biggest etc, does not wash with people anymore.
We are also not interested in your products and company. Sorry, I know you are really excited about what you sell, it puts food on the table and pays your mortgage, but nobody else is.
That realisation is a great place to be.
Your only unique are your people.
Each of your people have a unique set of experiences and a unique view on life. The trick is to empower them to talk about their experiences, talk about your clients business issues, how you solve them. In an interesting, insightful and educational way.
Personal branding strategy is simply a fact of business life these days. In fact, as traditional PR and advertising becomes less relevant (who is seeing these ads any more?), I could argue that increasingly, the personal brand IS the company brand, especially in smaller companies. Branding strategy is about creating an emotional connection to your product or service. It’s a lot easier building a connection to a person compared to an ad or a piece of company content. Personal branding will undeniably have a more important role in marketing strategy because it can create a permanent and sustainable competitive advantage based on emotion. There is only one you. That can be a legitimate point of business differentiation!
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