Creating Clarity Newsletter #001
Hi there 👋🏻
I learned the importance of brand in 2012. Before that, I only had a cursory view of brand from my work as a product manager. I didn’t really understand how it applied to people or businesses. Unfortunately for me, the lack of a brand directly impacted my career, and as a business, the lack of a brand will turn you into a commodity.
After not getting a promotion that was “supposed to be mine,” I decided to figure out how I could build my brand. So I interviewed hundreds of people on my podcast, read way more books than I thought possible, and discovered that building a brand requires only four simple steps.
The four steps every brand MUST go through when building their brand.
What follows are the four steps required to build a brand. I documented these steps in my book CareerKred, and they apply not only to personal brands but also to business brands.
1 – Define
The first step, define, sounds easy but is more challenging than you may think. Building a brand – personal or business – requires you to know what you want to be known for, so you must define what that is first.
To get started, ask yourself, “what do you want to be known for?”
2 – Integrate
In our digital-first world, the key to helping others understand what you want to be known for is via your online presence. So after you’ve defined your brand, you need to integrate it online. The best place to do this is on a website you control. The second best place is on LinkedIn.
3 – Create
For many, this is the hardest step. It requires action. Specifically, it requires putting your brand “out there” by creating and curating content. But, once started, the Create step doesn’t stop, and it’s how people will become familiar with your brand.
4 – Engage
Like the Create step, Engage requires action. First, you’ll need to engage with people (prospects) via social media and your content. These activities can take the form of liking, sharing, or commenting on other people’s content and your own. The goal is to start and hold conversations with those interested in what you want to be known for.
Ideally, you’ll only need to do steps one and two once. Steps three and four are repeated over and over. If you ever change focus or direction, start at step one and build a plan to move through each of the four steps to begin to build your new brand.
That’s it for this edition of Creating Clarity. See you next week.
Cheers 🍺
Ryan
Ps. Reply to this email (or send me one ryan@thedistilledbrand.com) with the word CareerKred and I’ll send you a free copy of the book.
