By B2B Marketing, personal branding, business plan, tech professionals, tools
You might think that being a technology professional is all you need to work successfully as one. After all, you’ve finished your studies, you might also have experience, you are passionate about your activity, you work hard, so what else could you need for your career advancement? Well, you need personal branding. Actually, you needed it yesterday, although you may not have been aware of this. So don’t waste any more time if you haven’t started to create one and let’s take a closer look at the reasons you need it and the steps to achieve it.
The Advantages of Personal Branding
There are over 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world, according to research firm IDC, including professional software developers and workers in operations and management, as you can see in the following table.
Source: https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers
Being one of them just won’t be enough, and this is where personal branding can emphasize its worth: you need to be unique, to convince others you are and to respect their trust in your values. Personal branding gives you a higher value and a lower cost of sales, since it’s easier to convince clients to buy, so it leads to a better customer satisfaction.
Even though it’s a project with a secure ROI, there are only a few people who choose to implement it, as it’s a long run process that asks time for progress and the willingness to do things differently.
The Four Pain Points Technology Professionals Battle With
Sometimes, embracing change is not as sweet as eating candies. Personal branding can have a tremendous impact on your career, as we will show in detail, but many professionals deal with change resistance when it comes to this. And we can highlight these four impediments, for a better understanding of the issue:
- Some tech professionals don’t want personal branding to matter in their career
- They don’t like the idea that their appearance makes a difference
- It’s hard for them to see the bigger picture of a long-term investment
- They don’t like to promote themselves at all
The four steps to conquer the battle of personal branding instead
- Discover
The first stage of creating your branding is to discover the way you want people to remember you by identifying your strengths and the experience that is valuable for the market. In brief, start seeing and thinking of yourself as a business, because this is how your clients will look at you.
- Design
The second phase of personal branding process is to design yourself as a business, know your audience and learn the profile of your clients, to create your own. Think about the resources you will need to fulfill your goals, who will be part of your team, which are your milestones and KPIs.
- Deploy
In the third phase, you start to draw attention to your expertise, to take action, to make your ideas reality. This is when you get to find your tone of voice and the ways to express it. Keep in mind that this is also when you get to make promises, as a professional, and to close the leads. Here are some tools that can help you at this stage.
Source: http://rajeshsetty.com/wp-content/uploads/pbtp.pdf
Also, you might be interested in which of these tools would work best for you, so here’s the result of research on it.
- Deal
In this last stage, you keep your promises, so you deal with the consequences of building your brand or in a word, honesty. Be honest and take time to repeat this process whenever needed, fine-tune it as necessary.
Since it’s a long run project that needs time and expertise, you might need some help, besides embracing change and practicing patience. At NNC Services we can provide the necessary support to help you stand out from the crowd, so get in touch with us if you want to step your projects up.
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