4 Pillars of Personal Branding & Promotion

Over the years in my other “lives” in marketing, management, and consulting, and in my role as publisher of an educational woman’s newspaper, I’ve developed and honed a powerful promotional and personal branding strategy. With it, I helped many professionals build their businesses. This strategy can be applied to your business or professional practice as well. I call it “The 4 Pillars of Personal Branding & Promotion” because each component stands on your foundation and supports your capstone of peak achievement and success.

The program is simple…but not easy.  Like any other worthwhile endeavor, it takes time, attention, and effort. Fortunately, it doesn’t require a lot of money.

To help you understand the concept, visualize a building…one of those classic Greek Parthenon-type buildings with four pillars supporting the roof. Like this one –

Temple of Concord--by photographer Alun Salt

Briefly, the four pillars rest upon your foundation:  your vision, mission, values, goals, strategies, plans, self-knowledge, and character. This is your groundwork.

There are a couple of steps leading up to the pillars. The first step is “Networking and Connections.” Here is where you selectively attend relevant business and social events to make meaningful connections with people who you might be able to help or who might be able to help you in the future.

The next step leading up to the four pillars is “Strategic Alliances”. Here you will build partnerships with people and businesses with whom you share customers or goals.

When you have developed these two important aspects of your business, you are ready to work with the 4 Pillars:  Publishing, Public Speaking, Promotional Events, and Passionate Philanthropy. By combining these four elements in your business strategy, you can achieve significant differentiation from your competition, customer loyalty, and personal satisfaction from your efforts. Let’s outline each pillar.

1.  Publishing

The first place to start is with Publishing. You must find a way or ways to get your name in print with articles that demonstrate your expertise and specialty. This one step will put you head and shoulders above most of your competition who resort to other means of advertising to generate awareness. The power of publicity is much greater than the power of mere advertising.

With the low-cost and simplicity of blogging software, such as WordPress, there is really no excuse for not considering blogging about your area of expertise. You can quickly establish yourself as an expert online, and help get your name and personal brand out in the search engines so people can find you on the Internet. Everyone can be a publisher today!

You should take advantage of all the free publicity you can get. However, it is often difficult to obtain free publicity and to control the message…and it seldom can be maintained over time. Consistency and repetition are critical to success in developing your business communications strategy.

If you are one of the elite in your field, you may even be invited to contribute to one of your trade or professional journals. You need to find a way to get your name and expertise in print…whether it’s on the Internet, in your eNewsletter, by writing a book, offering email courses, teleclasses, webinars, or publishing a regular column in a print publication.

2.  Public Speaking

Once you have some articles in print, you can leverage them into Public Speaking engagements. Many local organizations are looking for speakers. Don’t forget about the organizations you belong to–they may have opportunities for you to make a presentation as well. By volunteering to assist in planning topics, you can often find a way to be a panel or main speaker. You will probably need to start out as an unpaid speaker (only the best professional speakers command high fees). However, the value of speaking to the right audience with your targeted message cannot be underestimated. Your printed articles can serve as both publicity and handouts for your speaking topics, so the time you spend crafting your articles is multiplied in effectiveness. If you’re already comfortable with public speaking, you can find gigs at helpful sites like www.speakermatch.com or sign on as one of the experts at  LinktoExpert. You can learn to be a more effective public speaker (and enjoy it!) at groups like Toastmasters .

3.  Promotional Events

After you’ve built-up your reputation and public awareness with articles and public speaking, you’ll want to host a Promotional Event of some sort. This will generate additional “buzz” about your business and allow prospective clients or customers to meet you and perhaps sample your products or services. You can sponsor and co-sponsor events in your community. Done properly with the right combination of a creative theme, information about you and your services, entertainment, refreshments, give-aways, networking opportunities, and advance promotion you will be amazed at the new business that you can generate. You probably had no idea building your business could be this much fun! And you can usually get a link from the event host’s website back to your website as one of the sponsors, so this also helps you in search engine results.

4.  Passionate Philanthropy

When you tie in your promotional event and your other efforts with your Passionate Philanthropy, you will get even more personal satisfaction and appreciation from the many consumers today who are values- and socially-motivated. If you can find a cause that you believe in that’s related to your business, so much the better. Giving back to the local community is always a great idea. Facilitate a silent or live auction to benefit your favorite charity or cause, or ask for donations in lieu of an attendance fee at your event. (Learn more about this trend in Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism by Patricia Aburdene.)

The roof, or capstone of your building contains your ultimate masterpiece—your achievements, successes and your most powerful partnerships with your MasterMind group. (If you’re interested, you can read about this concept in the seminal book on the subject, The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill.)

That, in a nutshell, describes The 4 Pillars of Personal Promotion. I wish you the best of success with your promotional program and your personal branding!

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