Why Personal Branding is Important for ALL Employees

January 5, 2012

While it is key for CEOs and founders to have a strong personal brand in order to develop credibility and thought leadership for the overall organization, this responsibility should not only fall on only one or two sets of shoulders.  Every employee in your organization can contribute to the cause!

Why CEOs Should Push Every Employee to Brand Themselves

The benefits of personal branding include:

  1. Attract attention to your company – In an interview with Jesse Thomas, personal branding guru Dan Schawbel explained that the best CEOs are able to leverage their personalities to increase awareness and draw attention to a company brand.  Why not increase this behavior across the organization in order to multiply the effects!
  2. Build a loyal following – Ann Handley of MarketingProfs is the perfect example of this.  She is the figurehead of the MProfs organization and she has a devoted following as a result (over 100K on Twitter alone).  Over time she has created a mega brand around herself (rightfully so) and is consistently listed as the top influencer in marketing/social media.  The MarketingProfs brand benefits as a result.
  3. Position as a thought leader – For this point, I will highlight Schawbel’s example of Richard Branson using personal branding to build credibility and thought leadership not only for himself but for his companies.  “The more you publicize your ideas, the better you can position yourself to capitalize on them.”

Quick Content Marketing Tips for Building your Personal Brand

As you know, I am a firm believer in using content marketing to develop a company’s brand within the marketplace.  Companies that have rocked this include Hubspot, Mint, and slurry of other B2B and B2C companies recognized by bloggers at the Content Marketing Institute.  But content marketing can also be adapted to individuals and used to create personal brands to realize the benefits I’ve written about above!  Companies develop corporate blogs, publish whitepapers and eBooks, and engage on social media.  Obviously individuals can do the same!

  • Consider writing a personal blog in addition to contributing to your corporate blog.
  • Get active on social media including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Instagram, etc.
  • Engage with your influencers by sharing and commenting on their content.
  • Attend relevant workshops and networking events.

Late last year, I shared 9 manageable personal branding tips.  Read on if you are looking for some more ideas!

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.