Bradley H. Smith >

17 personal branding tips (from my Instagram)

There are eleventy kabazillion “personal branding” tips out there and I am currently evangelizing the best 17 I found. Authenticity is the top advice that truly matters: everything else trickles down from authenticity.   

Below are the points, and memes, from my Instagram account. 

1. Be honest and organic. 
2. Be visible and accessible.
3. Identify your unique value proposition.
4. Understand how others see you.
5. Identify your goals to guide your messaging.
6. All of your content should have the same personality.
7. Update your resume to assure it aligns with your brand.
8. Understand your industry inside and out.
9. Speak in your target audience’s tongue.
10. Become a trusted source of information. 
11. Be consistent across all publishing platforms. 
12. Share your expertise without expecting direct ROI.
13. Don't spew marketing: have a conversation when possible.
14. Demonstrate confidence.
15. Promote your content directly.
16. Write and publish. Publish and write.
17. It’s OK to be human and have fun.

Why do we personal brand? Simple...

...because everyone that you meet - especially in B2B - is absolutely going to Google you at some point.

You should try to own what they find.

(No matter how large your baby melon head was.) 

 

8 wicked pissah smart marketing tips for startups

These past few months, I have been meeting with Boston based incubators and VC firms. We’ve shared ideas and tales of success and woes of failures. Transparent insights to help startups.

As a startup, the biggest mistake you can make when building your company is failing to develop or implement a clear marketing strategy. As you probably already know, you can’t build a profitable business by simply conceptualizing, creating, and launching a great product. It takes much more than that to succeed. You have to connect with your audience, tell your story, build trust, nurture leads, and ultimately convince people that your product or service can help make their lives better or their jobs easier. To do it, you have to invest serious time, energy, and money into developing effective marketing strategies. 

You don’t need to be Boston-centric genius-savant to work these wicked pissah smart marketing startups tips. 

WP Smart 1: Set goals that are hard to achieve. Easily achievable goals are great morale boosters for your team, but they won’t help you scale your startup.

WP Smart 2: Know and listen to your audience. Let your customers guide your marketing strategy. Know what matters to them, where they spend their time online, what problems they need help with, what they think about your company and the product and services you provide, etc.

WP Smart 3: Don’t do what everyone else does, do what works. It’s tempting to go where every other startup is going and implement the same strategies as everyone else, but don’t do it. Instead, implement strategies that work. If Facebook isn’t right for your business, don’t sweat it. Invest your resources where they’ll make the most impact.

WP Smart 4: Hire people who are smarter than you. It’s the best way to build an amazing team of marketers. As a founder, you can’t do it on your own. Go out of your comfort zone and learn to trust people who know more than you do.

WP Smart 5: When you see an opportunity, don’t miss your chance to double-down. You might be presented with an opportunity to spend $10K on a marketing campaign, and that can be scary. But if you have the budget and you think you’ll get the return you’re looking for, do it. Don’t hesitate—when it comes to growth hacking, content marketing, paid advertising, and PR, opportunities can often disappear as fast as they arrive.

WP Smart 6: Alway go lean first, then spend time and money refining. When it comes to marketing a startup, the key is to spend as little resources as possible when testing tactics. This allows you and your team to launch more tests in less time in order to land on opportunities that can move the needle and spark growth. Once you have proven a tactic or idea to be successful, you can then invest more resources and time into refining and doubling down on your efforts.

WP Smart 7: Don’t be afraid to fail. Marketing moves fast. Each day there are new ideas and strategies being introduced and written about by companies everywhere. As a startup founder, it’s important to understand that testing a lot means failing a lot—and that’s OK. The key is to walk away from every test—successful or not—with learning that you can apply to your overall strategy going forward.

WP Smart 8: Be authentic and show people that you actually care. You can launch all the marketing strategies and tactics you want, but at the end of the day, if people don’t trust you or think you’re being genuine, you’re never going to get anywhere. Become a master marketer, but never forget the golden rule.

Remember: I am Good Brad (job) Hunting. www.iBradley.com 

“How the heck did you become the first blogger at Nasdaq?”

I stammered at this question during a recent job interview. I had never really considered it “an accomplishment.”

It was just “the job to do.”

However, my blogging quickly became a differentiation strategy that evolved into a couple thousands blog posts.

1. I had to sign a social media policy. This was especially essential as we were a public company. Of course, I knew Reg FD better than the average blogger, so even though I was not subject to RegFD, I would follow its guidelines to the letter.
2. Selecting the platform was a no brainer. We just introduced our own integrated blogging platform. Transparently, this was my driver and sneaky leverage to get permission to blog. “Promoting our own product.” 
3. Setting a content calendar. This was a simple task, as I was the sole blogger. I worked a rotation based on products-topic drivers: IR, PR, governance, board communications.
4. Create a voice. I went for humble, fact full and a little humor. It worked well for me – especially as the niche is a little dry.
5. Begin writing with authenticity to goal. Mine was educate and sell.
6. Write with absolute relevancy to your company’s products and services… and connect the dots for your audience. It’s how you become an authority. I blog about marketing and corporate communications – not baking or home improvement.
7. Send the blog links to the sales group email.

That last point turned out to be an indispensable action.

Our dramatic growth meant we kept adding sales people at a fast rate. Filling the void from  not having a corporate L&D strategy or direction, my blog became the continuous education portal for sales. Many would pass he blog articles on to their clients and active prospects as a simple touch point. This was all before I dove headfirst into automated demand generation. 

Of course, there are a zillion blogs on how to blog – and you will get hundreds of tips.  If nothing else, retain this: once you start, you cannot stop. Set a pace you can keep.