MARKETING TEXTBOOKS ARE INVALID – Why you need to reconsider your personal branding strategy
As many of us shift into the new new normal of relaxed pandemic safety regulations, I’ll be the first to admit that promotion (for personal or company use) and feelings are WEIRD.
There’s no longer a textbook solution to move forward! These are not predictable days, especially for human emotions, which marketing is based on.
What’s Marketing?
Let’s have a quick refresher on marketing and what it has to do with personal branding.
Definitions
Market: A market is the arena where sellers and buyers gather, interact, and trade goods for money. In personal branding, I consider the trade of influence for action. This can be you and your colleagues, you and recruiters, you and investors, you and prospects… It really depends on why you have chosen to show up in the world in a bigger way.
Goods, products, services: What suppliers have and consumers are demanding. In personal branding, this can be your service as an employee/freelancer, your ideas as a family member/friend/romantic partner/employee, or your leadership as a manager/entrepreneur. If you have explored my persona worksheet, consider the answer to “How am I meant to serve them so they can reach their goals” as your service.
Brand: A way for goods, products, services to be distinctive as belonging to a particular seller, so buyers can keep coming back. This is personal branding.
Sellers, suppliers, vendors: These are folks who have a product/service to sell. In personal branding, you are supplying your ideas, service, and personhood to your dream audience. In social media, you are a content creator.
Buyers, consumers, customers, clients: These are the groups of people sellers are targeting to sell their goods. In personal branding, I lump all of these into the term “dream audience”
How marketing used to work before the pandemic
While many companies adopted a newer way of marketing using empathy and customer-based services, let’s look at what the majority were doing and tie it to personal branding.
Content creators have a clear idea of what they want from their audiences and what they can offer in return
Content creators show up on a social media platform with ammo of hashtags, latest platform feature, and a big personality
Platforms has a small number of tech-savvy folks usually made of one or two generations. There were usually not many niche content creators, so it’s easy to find the right people to follow
Content creators posted consistently about what they’re up to, how fabulous they were, and why audiences should follow them
Algorithms reward the behavior of consistency and followership
The Market is weird
Content creators are weird
While Influencer Culture was getting formalized, we all noticed how companies were hijacking what used to be a community-focused format. Suddenly individuals had money to back up their pursuit of likes and follows, which resulted in follower farms, sneaky ads, annoying ads, and campaigns backed by full marketing departments.
What makes it weirder now is how tone-deaf the old way of doing things are. We’ve been through a lot as a globe – facing loss of family and friends, loss of activities we took for granted, loss of jobs and opportunities, and having more time to discuss real social justice issues. The fact that they haven’t changed is weird and uncomfortable to see.
Audiences are going through their own experience
For the first time, we have all had our stand-alone experience. The media audiences consumed over the past year, the curation of their social feeds, the people they have been living with in quarantine, and the causes they have emotionally invested in don’t follow the traditional stance of “demographic profile”. It’s not about the age, gender, or income bracket of your dream audience. It’s about their goals, frustrations, and motivations.
Audiences are going through a tough time
During times of stress, humans are individually programmed to cope. Examples of how different reactions to stress can be from the same situation is aggression, numbing, avoidance, and over-doing. Such different behavior in the same environment and the same circumstances!
Audiences are now unpredictable when considering what content they’re hungry for. This is a genuine unpredictability, not just ignorance of what a whole group of people want. The old way of putting out tone-deaf “look at how fabulous I am” posts will only be met with disinterest or frustration.
Communication and social media are being used differently
Our means to honor our human nature of connection has been radically changing in the past 200 years, but there’s a special blip recently in 2020 and 2021. The purpose and users of communication mediums have shifted on top of how they personally changed as described above.
As stated in my Personal Branding 101 workshop, my philosophy has always been social media is ANY medium for social interaction. Breaking away from traditional constraints of tech platforms owned by a handful of companies has always given my clients and attendees the strength to see beyond the illusions of social media obligation. So for my clients, the following won’t phase their personal branding strategies, and I hope seeing these factors in plain sight encourages you to let go of old ways as well.
Companies coming in
Remember what I said about content creators being weird? My heart breaks as I admit marketers have cracked the code of influencers and empathy-based marketing. While I am a marketer and love marketing, safe spaces of finding like-minded individuals that we can connect with has become saturated with companies who want to make a profit from audiences’ connection-seeking. Branded content (where an ad doesn’t look like an ad) is seeped so deeply on social media where a regular person uninterested in the influencer industry can be a little marketing device using their promo code to get free products they love.
Don’t get me wrong, this is genius empathy-based marketing, but audiences can smell it. As users of these platforms, they sense that they’re being pitched something for the sake of money, not connection, and it spirals them (and maybe you) into a natural mode of scarcity and comparison.
Lost souls coming in as social media becomes a coping mechanism
Maybe a result of scarcity mindset from companies coming in, maybe from loss the pandemic has introduced to them, people who interact on social media are lost. The feeling of confusion, loss, grief, and anger that comes from change shows up through posts and text. It creates defensiveness in the form of judgement that leads to scarcity.
Instead of gathering at events and on platforms with the purpose to connect and explore, it’s now strengthened as a way to cope with uncertainty. While the first few visits to social media platforms and events after quarantine was to remember how to connect and gingerly step out of their quarantine spaces, that compulsion to tap the comfort zone app. and in a state of coping, their curiosity, connection, and joy suffer.
Here’s the choice-point: You CAN create predictability by holding on to and encouraging fear. Human behavior in scarcity is much more predictable and comfortable than in growth and creativity. However, you will miss out on the miracle of innovation and disruption if you fall into this comfort zone.
Your life is in a state of change
Your inner world of feelings and self-esteem is the most important aspect of personal branding that so many ignore. Even if you started out in 2019 as a remote worker who stayed home all day, you are still experiencing the change we are all facing.
If you don’t like energy work, consider all the messaging that’s coming at you from the communication channels laid out above.
If you’re into New Age thought, consider how much low energy of frustration and loss is in the air right now.
Another change you could be experiencing is simply the loss of potential. Sure, maybe you didn’t plan on traveling or walking around carefree without a mask, but now that you can’t, well… That’s a shift you’re getting used to. Deep dive into how we’re processing change in this class.
What to do?
Here are some action points to reconsider what it is you’re doing based on the pain you are presently feeling or what you used to do back in 2019 and beyond.
If you’re feeling confused or procrastinating a lot
Be gentle with yourself and recognize your needs. You have every logical reason to be confused and to procrastinate. The fastest way, and possibly the only way, to get out of it is to embrace it. There is a reason why your psyche is stuck when it looks at the overwhelming change in the world. It’s time to take charge of your relationship with procrastination.
If you’re over-doing and overwhelmed by busy-ness
Consider why you feel you need to do so much so urgently. It may be that you haven’t prepped yourself for the new normal, but that’s OK! You got into quarantine without prep, and you’re still alive at this second. You can definitely explore where your urgency is coming from if you analyze how you’re comparing yourself to… Yourself. On the other hand, you may be seeing all these influencers with followers and pretty profiles and expecting yourself to have achieved it yesterday.
In both these instances, recognize your uniqueness, which is made of you, your values, and your priorities. You, your wants, and your needs are enough. The fact that you exist is enough. Sure, it isn’t enough to magically reach your goals, but it is meant as a starting point. We tend to feel urgency when we expect to have already achieved our goals, not when we’re on the way.
Urgency comes from expectation. Progress comes from being in reality.
If you used to live by the marketing textbook, it’s time to tap into empathy for your dream audience
You can, despite what your ego and superego say, empathize with people you haven’t yet met. Marketers have always done it, and it starts with considering who it is you’re trying to connect with. If you have a personal brand, you can admit to one human, with a set of goals, frustrations, and motivations, with whom you’re looking to connect and build a long-lasting relationship.
The first step is to be realistic and define them. It takes a lot of courage to put aside who you “should” be showing up for, and to choose who you’re meant to show up for.
What are you committing to?
Those who see this time as a new beginning rather than the illusion of “back to normal” are asking the best question ever: What are you letting go of from pre-pandemic, and what are you committing to from your learning of these two years?
For your personal brand, what have you learned about your dream audience during this time? Using your empathy super-power, what new frustrations are your dream audiences not letting go of? What motivations are they committing to?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and insights ✨