What would you think if I told you “I am not a plant”, at the very least it would be something strange and would arouse some curiosity in you. But on the other hand, if I tell you “I want to be an intern, not just another floor in your office.”the message would be clearer, you would understand that the goal is probably an internship.
Well, this is the end of a creative process and of a personal branding strategyspecifically my own.
I am Teresa Trejo, a student of the Master of Marketing of EDEM and I’m going to tell you how I got 15 internship offers and 34k views of my publication in a network I was particularly interested in: LinkedIn. By the way, I’m writing this post from my new internship position, today is my first day 😉
But, let’s start at the beginning what really is a personal brand?
What do we mean by Personal Brand
Just like the strategy of a commercial brand, to create a personal brand strategy is based on establishing some traits that identify us.
The traits we choose have to give coherence when communicating to make us able to sell ourselves as if we were a product. Therefore, developing a personal brand helps us to differentiate ourselves from the rest.
But don’t be overwhelmed, it’s not difficult! You just need a method and a pinch of creativity. I’ll bring you the method with these 3 steps, the creativity… you name it 😉
3 steps to create our Personal Brand
Itziar Oltra, professor at Master of Marketing of EDEMuses Simon Sinek’s golden circle theory to design and analyze personal branding strategies.
The objective of this theory focuses on creating and developing the value of an idea, a product or even a business, in our case the personal brand. It consists of three concentric circles, which organized from the center outward would be:
The first circle, the why.
why are we going to develop a personal branding strategy and what objective are we seeking to achieve?
The second circle, the how.
how are we going to communicate our personal brand, what tone and values do we intend to convey, and what audience are we going to address? Let’s define our identity.
The third circle, the what.
what are we going to tell, and what is our audience interested in?
The challenge, “Create a viral content”
I’m sorry to inform you that there is no manual for creating viral content, however, there are small details that can help us.
José Rochina, Community Manager of eDEM business schooland Jordi Nogués, professor at the Master in Marketing, gave us students some tips to improve our LinkedIn posts and make them more efficient. Here are some of them:
-A good claim or slogan.
-A description according to the content we are publishing.
-Use of hashtags to categorize the content and reach the target audience.
-Mention people and companies involved with the post.
-Generate spaces between lines: it will facilitate reading.
-Links in the post will hurt us, better locate them in the comments.
Another important part to take into account, is to have optimized the personal LinkedIn profile in order to promote our personal brand. Positioning ourselves with keywords appropriate to our sector will be very useful when it comes to appearing in searches.
To generate interest, and develop your personal brand you must create quality content, we should not limit ourselves to reposted content. With the exception that you consider that it brings value to your contacts.
The #I’mNotAPlant Campaign
At EDEM they are very focused on internalizing concepts through practice. With this in mind, what better way to apply what I learned in my internship search.
I followed the steps of creating a personal branding strategy based on the golden circle:
-Why: to get formative internships.
-How: communication based on:
- Values such as sincerity, empathy and proactivity.
- Informal, approachable and humorous tone.
- Audience of marketing and communication professionals.
-What: Create a personal branding campaign on LinkedIn that reflects my personality and expertise.
Personal branding strategy settled, I moved on to the creative process, which resulted in the #NoSoyUnaPlanta campaign. A post optimized to the maximum, full of winks to my personality, which encouraged the audience to collaborate with my goal. It was structured as follows:
-Introduction.
-Description of the objective.
-Personal winks.
-Call to Action, encouraging participation.
-Contact details.
-Link to CV in comments.
As an attention-grabbing banner to ensure that only the first three lines were displayed, before LinkedIn’s famous “… see more”, I created the following image through the only platform I could afford: Canva.
Campaign results.
It managed to generate repercussion and even discussion, it was spread through reactions and as a shared post in user profiles. During the first hour I motivated acquaintances to view and comment, so that LinkedIn perceived that the post was of interest.
These were the data obtained:
I also managed to connect with 173 contacts in the Digital Marketing sector. But the most important thing was that the proposed objective was achieved, I received numerous internship offers and in the end I chose one of them, where I start working today.
I would like to leave a phrase that Itziar Oltra, my teacher from the Master of Marketing of EDEM told us in class, and on which I based my personal branding campaign.
“If you do things, things happen.”
For your personal brand to have a reaction, there must first be an action.
