Personal Branding for Busy Professionals
When you’re navigating a busy daily schedule, it’s easy to put proactive personal brand plans on pause. But instead of skipping building your personal brand altogether, try these 4 tips for busy professionals.
If you’re a busy professional with your career on the rise, you likely already understand the power of personal branding for your career. But, perhaps outside of your 9-5 or the business you run, you struggle to find the time to invest in proactively building your personal brand.
In this blog, I’m sharing personal branding tips made simple for busy professionals so you can build your personal brand while on a busy schedule.
In my previous corporate life, I used to manage sometimes up to 9 meetings per day and a team, work on the weekends, plus I had an active social life. Sometimes I was studying during that time as well. I understand the overwhelm busy professionals can experience all too well. Reflecting on this, if I used my time more wisely - instead of not building my personal brand at all - this blog shares what I would have done. It is also some of the advice I share with my own personal brand coaching clients, many of whom have top jobs in their workplace.
Here’s a more sustainable approach to building your personal brand as a busy professional:
1. Pick a platform
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of online platforms you can leverage as a professional online - LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or podcasting.
When you’re first starting to build your personal brand online, I recommend focusing on one platform first. This will help you build the muscle for consistency online, before you even entertain the idea of anything else.
In his book, You Are The Brand Mike Kim shares some of my favourite strategic advice - build your business like Chinese Zodiac. Even if you don’t have a business, I like to think of this as strategising like the Chinese Zodiac. Make every year ‘The Year of….’. If you want to eventually have a presence on multiple platforms, focus on mastering one each year, before adding a new focus to the lineup.
But, what platform do you pick? While LinkedIn is the biggest social networking platform for professionals, it’s not a one-size-fits-all for every professional or business owner. Go where your ideal audience is most likely to be. For you, that might be Instagram, YouTube or another platform.
Play to your strengths. If you have a way with words, write LinkedIn articles. If you prefer the spoken word, pick podcasting. If you’re a visual person, try YouTube or Instagram.
When you pick a platform for your personal brand, you commit to the process. Commit to a process you’ll most enjoy to make it a sustainable strategy in the long term, while still meeting your audience where they are.
2. Document, don’t create
The idea of ‘creating content’ can be daunting. Take the pressure off creating by taking marketing guru Gary Vee’s advice to ‘document, don’t create’. Instead of placing too much focus on inventing ideas, document what you do.
For example, if you work in more creative fields like fashion, design or other visually-rich industries, this might be sharing your outfit of the day before work, or today’s project on Instagram. You have to get dressed anyway. You have to work on that project. Take a few seconds to snap a photo or shoot a short video and document your day.
What parts of your professional life or behind-the-scenes can inspire your content creation strategy? Which leads me to Tip 3.
3. Leverage the everyday
When you’re caught in the daily grind, it’s easy to stop seeing the gold in your everyday activities. The things that you do daily, that others might find fascinating, as a behind-the-scenes look into your everyday life. Perhaps it's a peek into your processes and your way of working, your relationships, teams or projects. Maybe it’s your busy out-of-the-office schedule jumping from offices to cafes and after-work networking.
Your ‘normal’ could be someone’s inspiration or education into what your type of work really looks like.
Think beyond your online personal brand as well. For example, if face-to-face meetings are a significant part of your diary, how are you actively nurturing these relationships to build a strong network? For example, do you connect with everyone you meet on LinkedIn. Do you actively organise opportunities to deepen your everyday relationships further, such as hosting a networking event and connecting people in your network to others in your network?
Start looking at your everyday life differently. What opportunities can you leverage?
4. Automate everything you can
If you’re a busy professional, you likely have less control over your diary than you might like. While you may commit to posting, say every Tuesday afternoon on LinkedIn, the reality may be that you’re in back-to-back meetings.
My favourite focus in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week is the value of automation. Put in the time to work on your business and not just in your business. Create systems. Consider your personal brand the business of You. How are you creating systems that can work for you while you’re working your 9-5, or not working at all? For example, schedule your LinkedIn article, YouTube videos or podcast episodes in advance. Use the gaps in your diary to develop and edit your content, but use scheduling tools available on most platforms to publish at the perfect time.
As Ferriss notes about the “New Rich” (NR):
“Being a member of the NR is not about working smarter, it’s about building a system to replace yourself.”
