You don’t have to be a celebrity to promote your products. It helps though, which is why Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia is thriving. His personal credibility is transferred to his company (which is B2B, by the way), and that helps it to drum up more business and to find new clients.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that celebrity status is fair enough for musicians and movie stars but that it doesn’t really relate to your industry. But you’d be surprised. If you think of a celebrity as simply a celebrated individual, the idea of becoming a celebrity in your industry starts to sound more realistic and achievable.
But how do you become celebrated? Well, there are a few ways, and the chances are that you’ve already made a start. If you’re creating content and providing commentary on your industry, you’re already starting to brand yourself as a celebrity.
Perfect your appearance
This form of self-branding is important because you have to fake it until you make it. In other words, if you want people to look up to you and to respect your opinions, you need to have faith in those opinions yourself. Let’s face it, you already know what you’re talking about. Well, either that or you’re working in the wrong industry.
The way that you appear to people is key. In the same way that you carefully craft the way that your brand appears to the outside world, you need to make sure that people see you as credible and authoritative. Creating content is all well and good, but the way that it’s presented is also important. You’ll want to consider creating a website with your author photo, your bio and your contact details as a bare minimum.
There are plenty of companies out there that actively prohibit their staff from putting themselves out there, but that’s a wasted opportunity. Sure, personal branding benefits the employee and can potentially lead to them jumping ship to join someone who’s willing to pay them more, but it also has huge benefits for the brand. If you’re an accountancy firm and one of your accountants has a popular blog about how to file a tax return, you can bet that the company will benefit in the form of referrals and new customers. You’ll know it’s happening when people specifically ask for someone to work on their account.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there’s no real way to guarantee that you’ll become a celebrity in your niche, but positioning yourself correctly and maintaining consistency is a good place to start. It also helps if you can successfully predict trends and changes in your industry over time. If you get it right enough times, people will start to notice. And they’ll start to see you as a celebrity.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.