This document discusses the importance of managing your personal brand as a marketing professional. It recommends taking time to consider the values you want to be known for and how you want others to perceive you. Some key aspects to focus on include relationships, communication style, trust, knowledge, leadership abilities, and online presence. Maintaining social media profiles, writing articles, speaking at events, and having a blog can help establish your personal brand externally. The document emphasizes consistency across online platforms and setting goals and plans to effectively promote yourself as an expert in your field.

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Careerwatch
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pending time to consider your
personal brand, and the values
you wish to be known for, is an
invaluable investment. Have you
considered the people you most admire
and why? How some colleagues are highly
respected in the work place? People in the
public eye are controlled by the PR profes-
sionals who advise on behaviour, body
language and appearance. As marketing
professionals, we have this skill set to
hand so we should apply it to ourselves
for our advantage.
Firstly there are a number of questions to
ask ourselves: How do you want people to
see you? What are the goals you want to
achieve with your brand? How can you
publicly be your brand? What does your
brand stand for? What do you want
people to remember about you?
Considering your answers to these ques-
tions will help to shape your behaviour and
form a framework for how you will act
going forward and the goals you will set
yourself.
When considering your personal brand,
here are a few key words to help you build
your values statement:
Managing your
personal brand
to a leader and respond to require-
ments from a reactive standpoint to a
proactive one. However, being flexible
in your approach will again add value to
your offering. Knowing how different
partners prefer to work and adapting
your style accordingly will ensure that
you build effective working relationships
throughout your career. Knowing when
to step in to lead and when to step in
and provide reactive support is a
balancing act that experience enables
you to master.
• Relationships: Consider how you
develop your professional relationships
and networks. Developing a strong
professional network will enhance your
reputation as well as reflect on the
quality of your work. Understand who
the influencers and decision makers are
who will impact on your career as well
as consider role models and mentors.
• Language: Think about your communi-
cation style throughout your day. Adapt
according to your medium and your
audience. Do not overuse marketing
jargon when speaking to colleagues
outside the marketing department. Be
clear and concise in your communica-
• Trust: We use the term ‘trusted adviser’
in proposals and other marketing mate-
rials, however, what does it really mean
to the marketing professional?
Delivering on your promise builds trust.
Understanding your partners’ expecta-
tions and managing them effectively
builds trust. Pre-empting problems and
providing solutions builds trust. Once
you have established credibility with
your fee earners, the trust will follow
and this is strong brand collateral.
• Knowledge and expertise: In the world
of professional services, knowledge is
king. Think about the area in which you
work and how you can gain knowl-
edge. What do you want to be an
expert in? Do you have sector, practice,
geographic expertise? Think about how
well you know your clients. How cred-
ibly can you talk about them with the
client partner? Also, remember you are
the marketing expert so be confident
and knowlegeble when talking about
this subject!
• Leader verses follower, Proactive
verses reactive: As your career
progresses and you gain more experi-
ence, you will transition from a follower
As business development and marketing experts,
Helen MacRae and Alison Jesset spend a large
proportion of their career managing and developing
the corporate brand. But how much time are
marketers dedicating to their personal brand, a critical
aspect for their own career?
This article originally
appeared in professional
marketing magazine. For
further details go to
www.pmforumglobal.com

2. 24 june 2013 pm
Careerwatch
Helen MacRae is head of sector and prac-
tice business development and Alison
Jesset is head of marketing operations at
SJ Berwin.
tion but not too informal over email and
other online channels. Remember that
you are aiming to maintain a profes-
sional image at all times and once
something is in writing it is very difficult
to retract.
• Body language: As well as verbal
communication, we must not forget the
importance of unspoken communica-
tion. Without realising it, it is easy to
give the wrong impression by how the
arms are folded, the lack of eye
contact, the twitching of fingers. Again,
consider your brand values: confi-
dence, knowledge, expertise and mirror
these in your behaviour and body
language.
• Appearance: It is the reality of our time
that we are judged on appearance. We
cannot all look like super models, and
we might not be working in professional
services if we did! But it is easy to
represent our values through our
appearance. The old adage of ‘dress
for the job you want, not for the one
you have’ is a good starting point.
Radiate your professionalism. How seri-
ously you want to be taken at the
meeting will depend on how seriously
you take yourself and your career.
Online presence
Having built your personal brand internally,
it’s now time to transfer your good reputa-
tion to the external world. This gives you
an opportunity to showcase your experi-
ence and expertise to your industry peers
by writing articles as various speaking
engagements. Another important aspect is
your online personal brand. You may not
be aware of it, but this has already been
established. Goggle your name and see
what you get in the search results – you
might be surprised at what comes up.
Just as you are doing internally, you need
to make sure that you take control of your
online presence and how others perceive
you. At the very least, stay in touch with
your network. Ensure you have strong
profile pages and that they are kept up to
date, showcasing your knowledge and
expertise and highlighting your successes
and achievements. Social media platforms
can help to establish an online presence,
but consistency is a vital step in creating
LinkedIn discussion groups to share
thoughts, ideas and opinions, be part of
conversations and add value to discus-
sions.
Another tool for establishing personal
brand is Twitter which allows you to
interact with other professionals in your
network with similar interests and share
links and resources that may be of interest
to them.
A well written blog that concentrates on
your area of expertise can promote your
skills and expertise online and help posi-
tion you as an expert in your field. This is
time intensive as you will need to publish
new content regularly so you will have to
be dedicated to keeping your blog up to
date. If you don’t have the time to commit
to publishing frequently to your blog, you
can comment on others’ blog posts. This
gives you an opportunity to discuss the
topics that are important to you, listen to
others and learn from them. You can also
demonstrate knowledge of your area of
expertise. The key to building your online
presence is to be visible so make sure that
your name is seen over and over again in
comments or retweets.
One of the benefits of using social media
platforms to promote your personal brand
is that they interlink, so you can add your
blog to your LinkedIn profile, post a story
on your blog and tweet about it or include
a link in your Twitter profile to your blog or
LinkedIn profile. This minimises the time
required to maintain your different profile
pages and accounts.
In conclusion, managing your personal
brand in the same way that you do all your
other marketing and business develop-
ment initiatives will have a strong impact.
Set achievable and realistic objectives and
write a short plan on how you want to
achieve these. Set a timeline and seek
feedback whenever possible to check that
you are on track. Most of all, you should
enjoy living your brand values and this will
show through in your career. Good luck!
brand recognition, particularly as readers
and communities are likely to be engaging
with you on different sites. Consistency
should be applied across your name,
writing style and any photographs you
use. Above all, keep your profiles profes-
sional and make sure that you are using
privacy settings to control what personal
information people can see.
Building a personal brand online takes
time and effort so think carefully about
your goals and the different platforms and
social medial channels that can help you
achieve them. If your goal is to interact
with people in your industry who have the
same interests as you, you can use
Managing your personal
brand in the same way
that you do all your
other marketing and BD
initiatives will have a
strong impact