Los 10 pasos para empezar a gestionar tu marca personal - Jorge Sánchez Paniagua

Managing your personal brand is a task that impacts not only your professional career but also your personal life.

In my opinion, there are four reasons for you to start managing your personal brand today:

It shows initiative. We all have a personal brand, the difference is whether you manage it proactively or if you are passive and allow it to drift.
It directly impacts your professional career. It allows you to progress and increase your income, but also impacts the generation of business for the company for which you work.
It creates a long-term impact. Working on your brand will make it much more effective than starting to manage it at a time of need, such as looking for a job or when there’s an urgency to achieve a specific objective in a short time.
It takes time. Consolidating your brand is a process. The sooner you start, the better.

How to start managing your personal brand?

There are quite a few similarities between the management of a person's personal brand and that of a company or a product.

If you’re already convinced you need to start managing your personal brand, I’m going to describe the 10 steps that I consider fundamental, based on my experience:

1. Introspection and reflection

The process of managing your personal brand begins with a deep introspection in which you reflect on two dimensions. The first is defining who you are today and who you want to be. The second focuses on your capabilities: the levers on which you can rely to achieve it, which can be empowering or limiting, and the brakes that may be making it difficult for you to implement it.

In order to carry out this introspection, I recommend that you establish a significant time, choose a quiet place and turn off your cell phone. Usually it’s useful to carry out this process by establishing two or three periods of reflection across different days.

1.1. Reflection and introspection on who you are and who you want to be

In the first reflection on who you are, describe what you currently do and analyze your strengths and areas for improvement. Think about how you think others perceive you and identify what actions you have taken to manage your personal brand to date.
When reflecting on who you want to be, think about what you’re really good at, what you would like to do, what field you’d like to position yourself in and what your five-year goals are. Additionally, think about how you want others to perceive you and identify benchmarks around two dimensions: the field in which you want to position yourself, and other people who manage their personal brand well. In this way, you can analyze the actions necessary to reach those two goals. Finally, there are two elements for reflection that are usually useful at this stage: how you would like to be described in 10 years, and what you are willing to start doing today in order to manage your personal brand.

1.2. Reflection on your ability to manage your personal brand

Empowering or limiting levers: When it comes to reflecting on your ability to start managing your personal brand, analyze the levers that you can rely on, which can be either empowering or limiting. Some of these include discovering if you are introverted or extroverted; if you are open to new experiences and think in a disruptive way or if you prefer to maintain the status quo; if you are responsible, organized and persistent when it comes to achieving objectives or if you prefer to go with the flow; and if you are a positive or pessimistic person. Identify your traits that empower you and those that limit you so you’re able to dedicate the time needed to overcome limitations.
Paralyzers which difficult the implementation: Regarding reflecting on why you’re not managing your personal brand, or not doing so to the extent you would like, identify the reasons behind why you're pumping the brakes. Some of them could include: being unclear about your professional objective; a fear of labeling yourself in something specific that limits you; finding it difficult to prioritize and focus on limits; insecurity; fear of criticism; lack of continuity and perseverance; or lack of the necessary support in your professional and/or personal context. Think about which ones apply to you and define what you are going to do to overcome them and prevent them from continuing to paralyze you.

2. Public image

The important thing about your personal brand is not what you want to be or what you do to position yourself, but how others perceive you. Therefore, it’s essential that you carry out a public image exercise, which consists of asking for feedback from two or three representatives of each of the four audiences that I will comment on later. This helps make you aware of your reputation so that you can define an action plan according to the feedback received.

When asking for feedback, request your representatives to write a description of how they perceive you in two lines, offering three strengths and three areas of development and supporting, if possible, with examples. This is helpful for understanding the concrete things on which their feedback is based, beyond the generality of the high-level characteristics.

3. Value proposition

A key element of your personal brand is defining your value proposition. To do this, you must establish your purpose and identify what activity you want to position yourself in, what values you want to transmit, what are the brand territories on which you want to build your personal brand, and what are the possible synergies between your personal brand and that of your employer or the employment context in which you work.

Additionally, you must set the goals you want to achieve with your personal brand. There are many alternatives in this regard: professional promotion; job change; salary increase; business development for your company; promoting a new, complementary professional activity; being considered a benchmark in a certain subject; obtaining social acceptance; improving your self-esteem; and earning influence, among others.

Once the previous exercise has been carried out exhaustively, you must establish your element, or elements, of differentiation, allowing you to enhance your competitive advantage over the rest.

4. Audiences

When it comes to positioning your personal brand, it’s critical that you define the audiences you want to work with. The concept of audience refers to who you target to achieve your goals. There are many people who only direct their efforts to the audience of their potential buyers. However, there are four types of audiences and it’s important that you work toward reaching all of them:

Potential buyers: they are the potential market for what you offer. Depending on your objective, the alternatives are very varied: client companies (B2B), end clients (B2C), HR, your boss, your current company, other companies, and more.
References and certification entities: previous clients, previous bosses, professors, evaluations/certifications, etc.
Peers: professionals who share your role or the role you’d like. They are your professional colleagues and/or your competitors.
Massive indirect professional environment: they are the people who influence your reputation without belonging to your direct professional sphere, but who are in your environment and whose criteria are important to you.

5. Message to communicate

A very relevant pillar of the management of your personal brand is that you establish the message you want to convey. Using your value proposition and your differentiation elements, create the message you want to communicate and define a communication plan. To do this, you have to work on the WHAT and the HOW.

To work on the WHAT, you must select the keywords in that message and define your version of storytelling. In addition to having a general message approach, it’s very important that you adapt your message to each of the four audiences, since they reflect different points of view.

To work on the HOW, you must adapt your message to the different formats. This will depend on the particularities of each one, taking into account the length of the text allowed or recommended. It’s useful to write and internalize your message differently for each alternative: elevator pitch, post in social networks, post in blog, PowerPoint, Word, etc.

6. Communication channels

The sixth element to develop your personal brand is the communication channels—the spaces and media outlets where you are going to communicate your message to reach your key audiences.

6.1. Digital communication channels

If you want to develop a digital presence of your personal brand, you can create a personal website where you explain your value proposition. In addition, you can write a blog that helps you generate traffic to your website, allowing you to reach the four types of audiences. You can also give visibility to your blog and leverage yourself on social networks. When working on social networks, you will have to decide which ones you want to have a presence on and what you’re going to communicate on each of them. Likewise, it’s recommended that you adapt your message to each one, keeping in mind the synergies between some, such as Instagram and Facebook, for example. In addition, you must establish the degree of interaction and exposure that you want to have in each one, based on certain elements: if you have a profile, if you interact with other people's publications, if you generate your own posts, if you have a newsletter or if you’re in a group.

6.2. Non-digital communication channels

Many people associate personal branding with a presence on social networks. However, personal branding goes far beyond that and even beyond our digital footprint. The main channel that affects your personal brand is how you are perceived in your daily interactions with your professional and personal environment, from coworkers, bosses and collaborators to suppliers, clients and acquaintances.

Another relevant element is to consider how you approach the projects you’re involved in, whether you give lectures or do academic publishing. A channel whose power should not be underestimated is personal email, since it has a great reach with a low “cost.”

Reaching the fourth audience can be done via the specialized media of your sector or area of responsibility, digital and printed press, radio, podcasts and television.

7. Networking

Networking allows you to enhance your personal brand, especially if you know how to get the most out of it. This consists of creating, maintaining and strengthening a useful network of contacts; mutually beneficial in the different environments in which you have a physical and digital presence, including work, your personal life, events and social network platforms.

I find these ideas relevant for effective networking:

Networking should be an attitude or a philosophy of life that you carry out without any specific interest in the short term.
Effective networking is not about simply talking to people when you are at an event. If you can, review the attendee list ahead of time and identify the key people you'd like to speak to. Try to get a means of contact, an email, phone number, a business card or connect on LinkedIn.
Contact the relevant people in your network regularly to provide them with something that may be of interest to them without asking for anything in return. That will help you to remain present if something arises in which you can help them.
Connect demands with offers that appear in your network of contacts, this will help you gain credibility as a reference and your contacts will remember you when they need something and/or when they can help you.

8. Action plan to manage your personal brand

Write your action plan on a piece of paper to create a tangible road map for the management of your personal brand. Title it “My personal brand management plan.”

It’s not about building a megaplan, rather, quite the opposite. You have to be able to synthesize everything mentioned above in a maximum of three pages. Writing it down increases your commitment to yourself to carry it out.

When activating your plan, it’s useful to reflect on the different initiatives that you are going to carry out in a two-dimensional, prioritization matrix. In one of the dimensions, you look at the impact of the initiative, and in the other, you establish the ease of implementation.

Based on this prioritization, I recommend that you identify the three initiatives with high impact and high ease of implementation and establish the dates on which you will carry them out. Then, continue on in this way with the rest of the groups of three initiatives.

9. Follow up

If you want to successfully manage your personal brand, you will need to track the implementation of your action plan. I recommend that you block a periodic—for example, monthly—gap in your agenda to analyze how you’re doing with the progress of the milestones you proposed, allowing you to assess if you’re meeting the dates you established.

An intrinsic characteristic of your action plan is that it must be a living document, on which you will have to provide feedback as you see the progress of the different initiatives, in order to adapt it.

10. Perseverance

In my opinion, the most important element for a good management of your personal brand is your perseverance. In order for your message to reach the different audiences that you have established through the channels that you have considered, you will have to repeat it over and over again to generate the impact you want.

This need for insistence is due to the fact that you will have to overcome two challenges typical of the context in which we live today. On the one hand, we are all saturated with impacts of all kinds. And on the other hand, there are many very good professionals in all disciplines and it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate oneself.

Additionally, you must demonstrate your perseverance around a second dimension—the idea that things usually do not work out the first time around. You must continue to insist and look for alternatives to achieve each goal that you set for yourself.

To finish, I would like to share a very common distinction in executive coaching related to one of the brakes that paralyze us when starting something—perfection versus excellence. It is better to start doing something today without the need for it to be perfect and looking for it to be right—landing at an 8/10, for example—than to do something perfect in the future, achieving a 10/10. The underlying idea is that when you want to do something perfect, it’s difficult for you to start, creating extra pressure. However, when you take that pressure off yourself and just get to it, many times you end up doing something great and it takes less time and effort. Therefore, do not procrastinate, start managing your personal brand today!

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About the author: Jorge Sánchez Paniagua

I am a professional with more than 20 years of experience in multinational companies in leadership roles, managing high-performance, multidisciplinary teams with international exposure in different functional areas.

My disruptive mindset leads me continuously to question the status quo and more traditional approaches, with a strong focus on results and innovation.

Currently, my full-time professional role is as the Director of Marketing and Admissions at IE University Lifelong Learning. And in a limited complementary way, I work as an Executive Coach, Speaker, Adjunct Professor at IE Business School, and as an independent Board Member of companies.

If you want to know more about me, click here.