Your Personal Branding Strategy | Establish Yourself as an Authority in Your Niche

Hi everyone. I’m Cecilia Elise Wallin from Inventicity – the channel where we combine inventiveness with felicity. In this video, I will talk about your personal branding strategy – how to position yourself as an expert. So I am going to give you my very best tips for how to brand yourself in the long run. In the long run, giving a good impression and making people buy from you is all about adding value to their lives, to be genuinely helpful. But I also have a great tip if you want to position yourself as an expert.

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My very best tip – I have seen so many successful entrepreneurs using this – my best tip is: look at what everyone is saying and find out how you can say something – and do something – which is the complete opposite but which makes much more sense. That is being inventive. To be successful in the market you must find new inventive ways to either produce your product, or in the product itself, or in the market. All of the best and most successful entrepreneurs find new different perspectives.

There are so many misconceptions that just get reproduced. Find those misconceptions, find such a misconception, in your niche, and find out how to say something which is the complete opposite but which makes much more sense. That way you will not only be perceived as an expert – you will genuinely be an expert, and you will be able to genuinely help people. There is a lot of talk about personal branding as a way to talk about your history; what you have been through; the education you have; the diplomas you have and so on. I don’t think that personal branding is about such things as education and experience.

How to plan your personal branding strategy? I think that your personal brand – that is the sum of what you are giving to your audience, what you are giving to your customers, how much you help them, if you make your customers feel happy about their lives. If you make your customers love your brand then you will have a great brand. How do you make your customers feel great about your brand? How do you make your customers love your brand? Well, it is easy to say. It is just to be genuinely helpful. If you add a lot of value to your customer’s lives – if you genuinely help them – then they will feel good about your brand, they will love your brand, and they will talk to their friends and people about your brand – and you will get a better reach and your product will reach a larger audience.

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What you do is much more important than the impression you give. The impression is important initially, but how people will perceive you and your brand, in the long run, is dependent on if they see results. If your products and advice fundamentally help them, and improve their results, then they will find your brand helpful and they will advise their friends and family to use your products. So building a brand is not so much about building the perception of authority and expertise – it is about delivering genuinely helpful products and genuinely helpful advice. And branding is not about … branding is one small part of … branding is of course how you design your website, the use of fonts, the use of colors, and so on. But that is just one part. Another (tiny) part is giving a great first impression. And that’s something else.

You can have awesome products – but if you don’t give a great first impression then people will never know, and they will not buy from you. So the first impression is of course also important. People must from the start feel that you are an authority, that you are an expert, that they can trust you. And to give a great first impression it might be useful to talk about what you previously have achieved, about your education, and to use testimonials from previous, and so on. So I think that building a brand has two completely different parts. One part is giving a great first impression – which is necessary to move on till the second phase where the customer experiences how helpful your products are.

We all know that in rhetorics it is very important and useful to use the rule of three. Something in the human mind make us remember things better if they are grouped in groups of three. And that is true also for brand building. So on your website start first with how you can help your audience, how you can help your customers. Don’t talk about yourself on the very first page over the fold on your website. Talk to your customers in a conversational voice. Talk about how you can help him or her. And do so using the rule of three. You could start saying that what your expertise is – is helping these and these people – for example entrepreneurs or creatives or writers – the category your target audience is. And then describe what specifically you do, how do you help your customer, and then start talking about your product, and here mention your brand.

And then in three steps describe exactly how you will help your customer. For example, tell your customers what to do to use your product successfully. For example, if I’m selling a course I can write: step number one get access to the course; step number two go through the different course modules; and step number three implement what you have learned in the course. So specify exactly what the course modules will contain, and what to implement. So after you’ve talked about how you can help your customer and which different steps your customer has to take to achieve his goal then there start to talk about your expertise – why you are qualified to help your customer.

Yeah, so now I’ll show you how I am doing this on my website. My website is inventicity.com. So if you look at the website here, yeah, so what I am selling is my marketing planner and if we click here we can read about my marketing planner. But I think that when someone visits my website for the first they will first briefly look at the menu here, and Inventicity™ here and then they will start reading here. “Marketing Made Easy

I have built the Inventicity Marketing Planner, to help you make your message concise and inventive. So that you can attract a larger audience, and grow your business. And I’d be happy to send you some FREEBIES! Get my new course “Advanced Copywriting Made Easy” It’s 100% free!” So this is what the customer will see here over the fold (above the fold is here, the first part of the page which you see before you start scrolling). What you see here over the fold is what’s most important on the website. This is made to make the visitors stay on the website, and of course I want the visitor to leave his or her email address here so I can send my course videos and my newsletter to the customer. If we scroll down here we have the authority section.

So first the audience learns how they can benefit from using my marketing plan, and my freebies, and my free videos. And if they scroll down they will learn more about me and my background.  “My name is Cecilia Elise Wallin. In my younger years I studied literature, languages, economics, and marketing at Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics – resulting in top grades and a Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and a Degree of Master of Education. I started working as a teacher, journalist, writer and novelist, and that’s what I still do today.” So here is some information about me. It is important to give a good impression here and of course to be honest, to be genuine, and to be modest. To give a great impression you must be modest and honest. Don’t try to give the impression you are something you are not. Ok … and here we have a video “Do Less Live More”. If you use my marketing planner you will be able to market more efficiently, and you will be able to achieve more doing less. If the visitor on my website wants to learn more about me they can watch this video where they will see me in action talking about how to achieve more doing less. And then I have, here, more in-depth information about my products, about my marketing planner.

So you can see that the website starts with a conversational brief introduction about what I can do for the customer, and then we have the authority section which tells the customer who I am and what my company is about, and what we have we achieved previously. Below the authority section I suggest that you have more in-depth information about your product(s). Here I have information about my marketing planner. “Software and guiding modules built by Cecilia Elise Wallin – Economist & Writer. Inventicity™ Marketing Planner is built to help you with your marketing and branding strategy. The modules are continuously updated to give you the advantage of utilizing the newest features on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. All course materials are downloadable. Bonuses: 12 month group coaching. Checklists and cheat sheets.” So here we have more in-depth information about the product.

And if the visitor isn’t ready to buy yet they have the option here  to write their email address, and to get freebies – to get my free templates for social media, to get my free courses. And that is of course because I want to be genuinely helpful, and also so that the customer can see if the products are something for them. Yeah, so this is my website – and you can probably make a much better website! The website is where you must give a great first impression.

Thank you for watching this video about how to outline your personal branding strategy and how to establish yourself as an expert. See you in the next video.