The pandemic has brought adverse changes in the commerce industry. It is essential to think of personal branding during the COVID – 19 pandemic. As business people, we should put more effort into changing and strengthening our brand to embrace and adapt to the new current environment.
Your image should project itself as ready to succeed with the challenges we have today. Businesses must embrace the change and accommodate the necessary conditions for them to continue generating incomes and profits.
Personal branding is much more than personal reputation; it is communication, self-leadership, and an impression management tool. Our leadership should be able to not only survive through the pandemic but also thrive post the crisis. Our personal branding should communicate this.
Think of personal branding as life insurance for a career. To ensure your skills are enticing and attractive to your vendors and those that you serve, you have to take control of your image. Your image is what people perceive.
Unlike many people who allow others to create an image that perceives them. Do not neglect your branding, improve and strengthen it. Be known for your unique capabilities and skills.
A study by Bynder, (2020) was done to see how people think the pandemic will disrupt branding and marketing eventually. These were the results;
The following are the tips on how to build your brand:
- Communicating your value
In business, you can have a good image in business competency. You deliver up to the standards required by your target audience but, how good and strong do you promote your brand?
Being good at your job is not enough to build your brand, you also need to be an effective communicator. Learn how to entice customers by telling them what they want to hear.
Building your brand helps in confidence-building. Once you identify your brand, it will be easy to manifest more things that you want for yourself in an authentic way hence, becoming more self-aware too.
Building your brand in communication does not mean coming at your audience with pride. It means being humble in advertising what we do but still passing the message across, what we are capable of.
Customers and employers are most likely to go with people who are confident and still humble. During a crisis, any opportunity we get to communicate our value is critical and we have to make it work with such opportunities.
- Mentorship
As leaders, we can improve our brands by helping and advising our junior staff to navigate the business world. As leaders, we tend to meet employees who are quiet and introverted. It is our task to make them see themselves as leaders and ask them how they would sell themselves to customers. This is how you mentor people to grow their brand.
Inside each person, there is something they can offer the industry, especially during the pandemic recovery. Finding what one is about and how one can use it for the good of someone else. That is what they should build their brand on and strengthen the brand.
- Finding the right fit
Even with mentoring, building a personal brand should stem from our innate abilities, own skills, and personality. If someone is not a talker, there is no way they will become one. One should focus on attributes they can learn, then work on those attributes by practicing over and over, to strengthen them. These attributes can be used to sell you.
A person may be excellent at branding items in the organization, they will perform way better doing that than forcing them to stay at the front desk and address customers. As leaders, building our brand, requires us to help employees build their brand where their strengths are.
Best-selling author John Lawson mastered personal branding going from high school dropout to finding where he fit in. He built his brand as an entrepreneur and ecommerce expert with a goal today to mentor people on become the best in what they do.
Conclusion
It is essential to build our brands and have good communication to sell yourself. During the pandemic, our personal brands should reflect our abilities and embrace the changes to be able to grow and thrive through and past the pandemic.
