Personal Branding Strategy: A Roadmap for Professionals, Experts and Executives

Have you ever wondered why certain individuals in your field rise out of nowhere to national prominence? These experts get all the media attention, deliver keynotes at top conferences and attract the best clients. Are these men and women just smarter than the rest of us? Or are they privy to some magical personal branding strategy that the rest of us don’t know about?

A few years ago, Hinge embarked on a research project to learn all we could about these industry stars (we call them Visible Experts®) and their personal branding strategies. Our researchers interviewed over 1,000 Visible Experts and buyers of their services to figure out what was going on and exactly what they did to develop and market their personal brands. We published our findings in a groundbreaking book, The Visible Expert Revolution.

Today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: most of these Visible Experts aren’t much different from the rest of us. In fact, many of them admit that they aren’t the smartest or most knowledgeable people in their fields. They weren’t born writers. They weren’t born orators. And most weren’t born with exceptional charisma.

Instead, they developed their personal branding strategies the hard way, through trial and error. That means each one of them followed a different path, trying and discarding a host of tools and techniques along the way.

By the end of this article, you will have an advantage that these experts didn’t: a research-based personal branding strategy that we have proven will increase an expert’s reputation and visibility. Even better, I’m going to give you a detailed roadmap that you can follow, step-by-step, as you take your own Visible Expert journey.

Before you jump in, however, ask yourself if you have the determination to see it through. It’s not something you will achieve overnight. It’s a long-term process of personal and professional growth. That said, building a successful personal brand — one that propels you to prominence in your field — is actually easier than it looks.

Think about it this way: From the bottom of the mountain the summit always looks unattainable. But if you focus on the process of getting there — taking one small step at a time — you’ll find yourself looking down with amazement at the smaller world you left behind. It’s a journey well worth taking, and it can change your life!

Who this Strategy Is For

I’ve developed this roadmap for any service professional, expert or executive who wants to build a personal brand but doesn’t know where to start. It’s also for marketing directors at professional services firms who are tasked with making their organization and people more visible.

Whether you are a solopreneur or work at a Fortune 100 firm, the process I lay out is the same. There is, however, one fundamental I can’t teach you — you have to have bona fide expertise in your field. There’s no faking expert knowledge. That’s not to say you have to know everything (no expert does) or be the best at any particular thing. But you do need to have attained a reasonable level of proficiency in your field — even if you have more to learn.

What Is Personal Branding?

A personal brand is the product of an individual’s visibility and reputation in the eyes of their customers and peers. Personal branding is a set of activities designed to elevate a person’s visibility and improve their reputation. As they become better known and respected, these individuals grow in eminence and earning power.

What Is a Personal Branding Strategy?

A personal branding strategy is a plan to take your reputation and career from relative obscurity to high visibility. It describes where you stand today and what level of visibility you want to achieve in the future. Then it lays out in detail the tactics, tools and skills you will need to attain your goal, including the daily content calendar that will guide your daily journey. A carefully planned strategy takes the uncertainty out of your quest for Visible Expertise so that you can concentrate on carrying it out.

A modern personal branding strategy is strongly rooted in content marketing. In fact, most of the skills and tools described in this roadmap are components of content marketing — but as they apply to building your personal brand. If you are new to content marketing, or if you just want a refresher, I suggest you read over our free Content Marketing Guide for Professional Services.

The Five Levels of Visibility

In our book, The Visible Expert Revolution, we identify five progressively more visible levels of expertise:

Level 1: Resident Experts. These experts are well respected within their firms and by their clients, but they have little visibility outside of those audiences. Most Visible Experts start their journey here.

Level 2: Local Heroes. These individuals are beginning to become known outside of their firms. They are more active in their local business communities, often speaking at business functions and blogging. They may even bring a little new business to their firm.

Level 3: Rising Stars. These experts have developed a regional reputation. They are fairly well known among peers in their area, and they speak and write frequently on their area of expertise. Rising Stars tend to bring in higher-quality business and charge higher fees.

Level 4: Industry Rock Stars. These names are well known across the nation for their niche areas of expertise. They attract premium clients and fees. As a result, they become significant assets to their firms.

Level 5: Global Superstars. The world’s elite experts, Global Superstars have broken out of their niches and become recognized more broadly in their industries. They command the highest fees, and firms around the world want to be associated with them.

Your first job is to figure out which of these levels describes you today. Then you need to decide what level of expertise you would like to achieve.

Before you jump immediately to Global Superstar, keep in mind that each successive step requires more effort and time than the step below it. For instance, it’s generally easier to move from Resident Expert to Local Hero than from Industry Rock Star to Global Superstar. To become a global household name, you will probably need to invest much of your free time. Are you obsessive and dedicated enough to pull it off? Only you can answer that.

The Benefits of a Strong Personal Brand

Apart from pumping up your ego, what tangible benefits can a powerful personal brand deliver? For starters, Visible Experts make more money. Often, a lot more. The chart below shows the relative billing rates for each Visible Expert level.

As you can see, buyers are willing to pay much more for highly visible experts. And even Level 1 experts hold a significant advantage over the average professional.

The reason Visible Experts can charge more is that many buyers are willing to pay a premium for experts they believe in. They are willing to shell out extra for the confidence that a Visible Expert will bring more knowledge and experience to their problem, solving it more quickly, and with greater precision. Higher billing rates aren’t the only benefit. Here are a few others:

• Highly visible experts attract more media attention. When a reporter needs an authoritative quote, they reach out to the experts most closely associated with the issue at hand.
• Well-branded experts also are able to secure valuable partnerships more easily, and with more desirable organizations.
• And as I mentioned earlier, they attract better quality clients, too. In many cases, clients will seek out an expert — often cutting out the competitive proposal process entirely. That’s when you know it’s working!
• Experts with strong personal brands also benefit their firms. As a result of the halo effect, an expert’s reputation often spills over to the organization he or she works for. This relationship can have very real effects on a firm’s brand and business development prospects. According to our research, about two-thirds of Visible Experts on average have this remarkable effect on their firms.

What about buyers? What benefits do they get by working with Visible Experts? In the following chart from our research on Visible Experts and their buyers, we learn that there are many ways that Visible Experts benefit their clients.

As you can see from the data, Visible Experts not only solve problems more quickly, they make their clients better, too. They teach clients new things, bring new ideas to the problem at hand and increase the credibility of the teams they work with.

7 Critical Tools for Personal Branding

One of the most important things we learned from our research was which marketing tools have the greatest impact on an individual’s personal brand. Without this data, we’d have to select our tools based on unreliable anecdotal evidence, trial and error and intuition. But you’ve got a better option: hard data from scores of real-world experts.

Here are the most impactful marketing techniques Visible Expert use to raise their visibility and build their reputations in the marketplace:

What can we learn from this data? Here are my takeaways:

• Public speaking is the most impactful marketing technique Visible Experts can use to build their personal brand. Not only do experts benefit from the various conferences and speaking opportunities they attend, they can use their history of speaking to build their credibility over the long term. They can place a list — and even video clips — of their previous speaking engagements on their bio page. This record makes it easier to get more speaking activities in the future.
• Writing a book is an effective way to demonstrate your expertise and build visibility—this has been true ever since we began studyings Visible Experts over a decade ago. And if you look around at the highest profile experts in your field, chances are most of them have written one or more books.
• Every expert needs a platform to publish written articles, videos and other expert materials. That be a personal website or their firm’s website. What’s important is that there is a centralized place where all this great content is organized and accessible.

So let’s review what we’ve learned. Here are the seven critical tools you will need to include in your personal branding strategy:

1. A book. Whether you do it yourself or enlist a ghostwriter, consider producing a book that addresses your area of expertise. A book is a critical credibility builder. Your book can be traditionally published or self-published. Traditionally published books can deliver instant credibility, but self-published books (for which you can set the price or give away for free) offer more flexibility. Either way, you will also need to promote it, since even well-known traditional publishers rely on their authors to do most of the marketing. A book can be a heavy lift, so don’t feel like you have to tackle it right away. But set a firm goal to produce one in the next couple of years, if not sooner.

2. Speaking engagements. Public speaking is an important platform for building your reputation and personal brand. Audiences are predisposed to trust anyone who stands at a podium, so just getting there is half the battle.

3. A website.If you are part of a larger firm, you’ll want to focus first on your bio page. It should present sufficient credentials to convince people that you really know your stuff. Here are a few things it might include:

• Detailed personal bio
• Academic degrees
• Certifications
• Awards
• Publications
• Presentations
• Important projects
• Associations
• Affiliations
• Speaking videos

To see an example of an effective bio page, check out Katrina Christakis’ bio on her law firm’s website. Or take a look at my bio page on Hinge’s website.

Once you begin cultivating a regional or national reputation, you may want to consider developing a personal website, too. You can use this site as a platform to promote your books and public speaking.

4. A blog platform.Every expert should be blogging. It’s the most accessible way to demonstrate your expertise. It’s also one of the easiest ways to start building a loyal following. And when you apply search engine optimization (SEO) principles to your posts, you open up a whole new world of prospective clients who, for the first time, will find you through online search (see number 6 below). A blog is an essential tool if you want to spread your wisdom quickly and widely. Your blog can either reside on your firm’s website (this is preferable for SEO performance reasons), or you can create a stand-alone blog.

5. Email marketing service. If the purpose of your blog is to attract new audiences and educate them, email marketing is how you turn many of those readers into loyal followers — even raving fans. By placing offers in your blog posts to download valuable educational content, such as relevant executive guides and whitepapers, you can entice your most interested blog readers to opt into your mailing list. You can then use email to feed these followers a steady diet of free educational goodies, as well as additional offers that deepen their engagement. I’ll explain the mechanics of all this in the Roadmap section below.

6. Search engine optimization (SEO). If you think SEO plays no role in your line of work, think again. Every year, more and more organizations use online search to find and vet their service providers. But even more relevant to your journey up Mount Expert, business people today instinctively fire up Google whenever they encounter a thorny business problem. In many cases, they research the problem and possible solutions themselves — before they seek out professional help. In other situations, professionals use search to find thought leaders in their field. SEO is the tool that connects you to the people who are intensely interested in the problems you solve. And you would never meet 99% of them without it.

There’s one additional tool that you will need, one that will save you a lot of time and headaches:

7. A media kit. Experts get requests for bios, speaking samples and photos all the time. So it makes sense to have those things ready to go at a moment’s notice. Even better, put them up on your website bio page where interested parties can find them without asking. Every time a last-minute request comes in, you’ll be glad you have it at your fingertips. Wondering what one looks like? Here’s the media kit of Hinge’s Founding Partner, Lee Frederiksen.

This list, of course, just scratches the surface. There are dozens of tools that you can use to engage your audience. Think webinars (which are just a different take on public speaking), advertising, public relations, SlideShares, video and web analytics, to name just a few. As your personal branding strategy begins to reap dividends, you may want to introduce new tools and techniques.

There is a great deal to say about each of these tools. Unfortunately, I don’t have space here to address them in detail. So I recommend that you download our free book, Online Marketing for Professional Services, which describes many of these tools and how they fit into an overall marketing framework. Don’t worry that the book is written for firms — there’s plenty in there that applies to individuals. It lays out a content-based strategy to grow your brand, very much like the one I describe in this roadmap. Also, be sure to check out the Additional Resources at the end of this piece.

Skills You’ll Need for Your Journey

Now that I’ve introduced the seven critical tools, let’s explore the fundamental skills you will need to learn along the way. You may have at least a rudimentary understanding of some of them already. If so, you’ve got a head start!

Before I get into the specific skills, however, I have to pause and discuss a larger issue, a “master skill” that will encompass your entire Visible Expert journey. You may be good at it already, or you may have to acquire it like the rest of us — the hard way, making incremental improvements over time. I’m talking about your role as a teacher.

You see, your reputation as an industry leader will be built to a great extent on your ability to translate complicated material into easy-to-understand language. While not all experts are teachers, all Visible Experts and thought leaders are excellent teachers.

What I mean by this is that you will be dedicated to educating your audience. Your driving impulse is to be helpful. You will be a teacher first and salesperson a distant second.

If you follow the roadmap below, you won’t have to sell your services at all. A steady flow of business will emerge naturally from your relentless pursuit of helping your audience.

With that out of the way, let’s talk skills. You can tackle the list below on your own, or look for help from outside professionals or members of your team. Either way, here’s what you will need to get started:

Writing. You may be a good writer or an indifferent one. But if you want to be an effective teacher and build a compelling personal brand around your expertise, you must be able to produce clear, nontechnical prose that’s a pleasure to read. If you aren’t an excellent writer already, you have two options:

1. Learn to write clear, plain English.There are many readable books and online courses that will get you up to speed relatively quickly. (One of my favorite books is The Plain English Approach to Business Writing by Edward P. Bailey, Jr. — it’s a quick read and very practical.) Learning to write in plain English can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.
2. Work with an experienced writer or editor.If you don’t have the time or inclination to work on your writing, that’s okay! You can always hire a writer or editor to turn your subject matter expertise into sparkling prose. Experts work this way far more often than you might think — in fact, at Hinge, we provide this service to many of our own clients. Just think of all the successful ghostwritten books out there. It works for blog posts and anything else you need to write, too.

Public Speaking. Most experts are comfortable speaking to their target audience and fellow professionals. If you have a fear of public speaking, you should at least try to conquer it. Like all skills, mastery comes from doing, and in most cases the fear will fade quickly. (That said, it’s perfectly normal for even an experienced speaker to feel nervous before delivering a speech.) If you are new to public speaking, start by addressing small groups — at the local chapter of your professional association or chamber of commerce. Or try a peer support group, like Toastmasters. You’ll need to build up a speaking resume before most national conferences and trade shows will consider you.

Blogging. Either you or a colleague will need to handle the mechanics of getting your posts online. It’s not difficult to learn, so don’t be intimidated by the small amount of technical knowledge you will need to get into the backend of your website or blog

SEO. Search engine optimization is an entire discipline in itself, but you can learn the fundamentals in a day or two — enough to begin thinking more strategically about what you write. While there are technical aspects to SEO that may be beyond your capabilities (for instance, building your website and blog in a way that Google can easily discover your content), the basic mechanics are very straightforward. The most challenging part will be learning how to research keywords that are relevant, attract enough search volume to be worthwhile and not too difficult to rank for on the first page of Google’s search results page. It’s as much art as science. Hinge University can be a good place to learn the basics, though there are many valuable online resources available through Google, too

Outreach to blogs and publications. There’s more to SEO than keywords. To get the most from your blogging and SEO investments, you’ll need to generate outside links to your posts. A common way to do this is to write guest posts on other people’s blogs — or articles for online publications — that include one or more links back to your blog and/or website. To find these opportunities, you will need to research these online publications and reach out to their owners or editors. Various techniques can make this process more efficient and successful. Try Googling “link building strategies” to find out more.

Email marketing. Email marketing is very different from sending personal emails. First of all, you will need to subscribe to an email service provider. You may have heard of MailChimp or Constant Contact, but there is a long list of other providers offering different features and price points. More sophisticated marketing platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft also include powerful email delivery services. Whatever service you choose (and, no, Outlook will not work for this purpose), you will need to learn how to use the tool to send out a basic email broadcast and understand its analytics. Later, you may want to try out more advanced features, such as personalization, segmentation and automated drip campaigns.

If you have the resources to enlist helpers, you may not necessarily need to master all of these skills. But the more you know, the more you grow. So it would be wise to at least familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of each skill.

Your Personal Branding Roadmap

Now it’s time to bring everything together into a coherent plan of action. If you have made it this far, I assume you are committed to a long-term program to build your personal brand and are ready to turn the roadmap below into a formal plan. That means writing it down, mulling over your answers and updating the plan as you think of new ideas or decide to make course corrections.

This roadmap is a general outline. It’s up to you to color between the lines, fill in the details and make it utterly, wonderfully yours.

Phase I: Your Strategy

Step 1: Determine where you are today. Before you can begin your ascent, you need to know where you are starting. Are you a Level 1 Resident Expert or a Level 3 Rising Star? Use the descriptions in the section above titled Five Levels of Visibility to determine your baseline position, or read Chapter 1 in The Visible Expert Revolution for a more fulsome explanation of each level. 

Step 2: Identify your specialized area of expertise. You are already an expert in something, but is that “something” fairly broad (family law, for instance), or is it very specialized (such as, child custody law)? The more niche your expertise, the easier your rise will be. If you aren’t specialized already, consider narrowing your focus. It will make your Visible Expert journey far easier. But if you can’t pare down the services you offer today, you can at least plan to narrow what you write and speak about. Just keep in mind that eventually you will need to follow that intended focus with action.

Step 3: Define your audience. Who buys your services? Who influences your buyers? What industries do you serve? What roles (CEO, CTO, HR Director, etc.) buy your services? The answers to these questions will be the audiences for whom you craft every blog post, every speech, every book and every webinar. When writing, always keep your target audience in mind. It will help you stay on point and attract the right kinds of prospects to your business.

Step 4: Find your angle. This step isn’t absolutely required, but it can really help your personal brand stand out. If you can become associated with an issue, or if you take a controversial or counterintuitive point of view, it’s often easier to gain notice. Having an angle also gives you an anchor — a unique perspective — that will mark each piece of content you develop as yours.

Step 5: Decide which tools you will use. Go back and review the 7 Critical Tools section above and figure out which ones you will tackle first. And don’t be afraid to consider other options, as well. If you have experience with webinars or video, for instance, go ahead and make them part of your plan.

Step 6: Assess your skills. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the program if you are doing it yourself. Not because it takes a great deal of effort. But because it is so hard to be objective about one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Go through the list in the Skills You’ll Need section above and try to honestly evaluate your proficiency in each. Are you as good a writer as you think you are? Are you a strong public speaker? Which skills do you need to work on most, and which would benefit from a refresher? Develop a prioritized list of these skills and try to figure out which you can work on alone, and which will require a qualified teacher. And this brings me to…

Step 7: Determine who is going to help you. Most of us will need at least a little help along our journey, and many will need a great deal of it. So the first thing you need to do is to decide if you really want to try to make a solo ascent — or if a little supplemental oxygen, a band of Sherpas and an experienced guide might make your climb more successful. As you think about the tools and skills you will need, are there any that you might want to outsource? Line up these resources early so that you aren’t scrambling when you need them most.

Phase II: Setting Up Your Infrastructure

Step 8: Create your media kit. Hire a pro to take a few photos of you and write a short and long version of your bio. Later you can add a video reel of public speaking clips. If you can, include a link on your bio page to download a zipped file of your kit.

Step 9: Enhance your bio/build your website. Add credibility-boosting features to your bio, such as articles you’ve written, speeches you’ve delivered and accolades you’ve won — anything that might convince a reader that you are the real deal.

Step 10. Get set to blog. If your firm has a blog, find out what you need to do to become a regular contributor. If you need to get buy-in from others in the organization, explain what you are trying to achieve. Work with the appropriate people to get the exposure you need. If you will be setting up your own blog, now’s the time to begin building and configuring it. If you need help, find and invest in the resources to make it happen.

Step 11. Set up your conversion tools. To turn web visitors and blog readers into leads, you’ll need to offer them something that’s compelling enough they will provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Usually, this is a longer piece of educational content, such as a guide, whitepaper or ebook. You will need to write this piece of content first, then place it behind a registration form on your website or blog. You will also need to design an appealing offer to entice readers to download the piece of content. Keep in mind that many anti-spam laws require that people opt-in to your mailing list.

Step 12. Set up your social media profiles. If all you do is build out your LinkedIn profile, you’ll be fine. LinkedIn is by far the most important social platform for professional services experts. Be sure to complete your profile in full. Use LinkedIn to share content (yours and others’) and network with potential prospects and partners and X (formerly Twitter). Facebook and YouTube and other social platforms may be useful in some cases, but I suggest that most experts spend their limited time elsewhere.

Step 13. Select and prepare your email platform. You may be using your firm’s existing email service or CRM, or you may need to set one up from scratch. Either way, make sure you’ve got a nice looking, legible email template ready to go. If you are choosing a new platform, select one that’s easy to use and has robust list management and reporting tools. Also decide whether you will require single opt-in or double opt-in for new subscribers.

Phase III: Develop Your Skills

Step 14. Set aside time each day to work on new skills.The most effective way to tackle a long-term project is to make a habit of it. That means carving out a little time each day to work on one or two pieces at a time. Never forget that this is a business commitment, not a hobby. So it’s okay — in fact, it’s important — to devote part of your workday to upgrading your personal brand. You may commit some of your personal time to it, as well, but it’s an ongoing project, one that will never end. Start building your job around it.

Phase IV: Launch Time!

Read over your plan one more time. Then start implementing it. It will be slow going at first, but it’s important to get the ropes and ladders in place before you set out. You’ve got a strategy, now put it into play!

Personal Brand Examples

For our book The Visible Expert Revolution and its guided counterpart The Visible Expert Course, we interviewed many real-world Visible Experts. Here are the stories of two of them:

Rhondalynn Korolak

Trained in finance and accounting, Rhondalynn had a high-profile career in tax law with Canada’s largest law firm and a Big-Four accounting firm. Changes in her personal life led her to immigrate to Australia. That’s when her career began to evolve. She became interested in business growth and cash flow. She found that entrepreneurs and small business owners were most impacted by these issues, and her interventions had a transformative effect on these organizations, which she found exhilarating. This discovery led to the ultimate focus of her career — helping small and emerging businesses master their cash flow challenges, attract more high-value customers, close more sales, and boost the bottom line and cash flow.

Over the course of her career she has learned to teach complex financial concepts in a fun, easy-to-understand way. She has also written two books, speaks at events around the world and produces regular videos and blog posts.

Dan Adams

Dan Adams didn’t start out wanting to become a Visible Expert. “I think some people may set out to become a Visible Expert but that wasn’t me at all. I had spent twenty-nine years working inside of large corporations. I thought they were going to bury me in the backyard when they were done with me.” But one day, Dan had an epiphany—one that led to a most unusual request. “I was working in the innovation space and there were some things we were doing that were actually working. It was very exciting, and I thought, ‘You know what? I just want to go for it.’ I went to my boss and said, ‘Would you please get me fired?’ I did that because I wanted to get a severance package to get me started. I didn’t really know what I was getting into at all.”

Dan left to build the AIM Institute, a firm with a very specialized expertise. “Clients hire us to help them with their new product development. They’re usually Fortune 500 companies with a B2B market focus.”

Dan’s dilemma is one that many aspiring experts face. Long years of relevant experience had given him the core expertise and market familiarity to advise his clients with confidence. But that kind of knowledge can also be a barrier. So he began conducting research on his clients “to find out what our clients were really seeking—and why they were coming to us. When that work was done, I had a much better picture of how I should explain what it is I and my team do. That was the starting point for us.”

To build his visibility, Dan has written a book, speaks at key industry conferences, blogs regularly on topics of interest to his audience and uses email to nurture his list over time.

Conclusion

If you are an expert with ambitions to become a leader in your industry, this roadmap can help put you on the path to a speedy ascent. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed at first, especially if you are busy already. Architect and author Sarah Susanka faced the same dilemma:

“I recognized that writing was what I felt passionate about, but I had no space in my life to do it. And I was so busy with my architecture firm that if I didn’t make some shift in my life, there would never be space for it. So I decided to pretend that I was my own client. I plugged myself into my own calendar and even gave myself a project number. I held myself to it, and that first book changed everything for me. All you have to do is take that one first, small step. It’s amazing what happens when you focus yourself on something that you really want.”

The key is to break down your personal branding strategy into manageable chunks. Don’t try to tackle too many things at once. Little by little, you will begin to see results — a new trickle of email inquiries here, a speaking opportunity there, and an incoming tide of new followers. At some point, people will begin asking for you. And eventually a few will want to hire you and your firm on the basis of your reputation alone. The thrill that comes with seeing steady progress makes all the hard work worth it.

Good luck. And happy climbing!