This article comes from Entrepreneur.

Want More Clients? Focus On Your Personal Brand

How would it feel to run a competition-proof business? Wouldn’t you just love to have your client roster full? How about a waiting list of hot prospects impatiently longing for an opportunity to tap into your genius?

Here is the secret to making it happen with ease: Focus on your personal brand, and start building your visibility and audience online. Social media offers a brilliant platform to establish yourself as a sought-after expert in your niche. When you commit to showing up as who you are, regardless of your previous status or even the size of your audience, you can immediately experience some delightful advantages of getting more “personal” in your marketing.

People trust other people more than they trust brands

When you create content around who you are as a person (your values, your experiences, your passions), your audience develops a much deeper connection and trust, as they feel like they almost know you personally. They gobble your recommendations, open to your particular ways and strategies, you become a celebrity in their social media world, and your celebrity status will naturally attract higher paying clients.

When I consult experts and coaches who use Facebook for their visibility, I always recommend turning their personal profiles into their personal branding weapon of choice. It is the best platform for building relationships and gaining trust as it offers an excellent mixture of content types (video, live streaming, long-form posts, images, polls, stories) and direct access to other users via Messenger — your best tool for outreach and following up on your hot leads.

This may come as a shock, but in my professional opinion, Facebook personal profiles are much more valuable for organic client attraction than Facebook business pages. And this makes creating even a multi-million consulting business possible with the help of authoritative personal brand marketing as you take advantage of the best reach and the opportunity to target your potential leads strategically.

People connect to stories more than facts

When we show up as who we are we often share stories, intentionally or otherwise. We tell tales of how we overcame the impossible obstacles in our way and share how we’ve helped our best clients to step into their bigger vision.

The better we master storytelling, the more strategically we can use our personal experiences as a lead generating tool. People who learn about us through these stories connect and relate to us on a deeper level. Later on, this kinship fuels the response to our offers, programs and opportunities with powerful emotion.

Focusing on getting a good grasp on writing good copy is not that difficult. Even for someone like me, whose first language is not English, I generated most of my business opportunities through my written work. By sharing my personal story and documenting some incredible changes to my life, I could build an audience of loyal followers, many of whom became my clients at some point or the other.

Conversion is easy when that emotional connection is already potent.

Personal connection is competition-proof

When businesses do not put a personal brand upfront, they have to compete on price, quality and other general attributes. Leveraging a personal brand offers an advantage to stand out in a way that appeals straight to the hearts of your followers. Back in the day, Jane Fonda’s aerobics routine was not the best workout program available on the market, but her personal brand made it a sensation. In the modern world, we see celebrities and public figures using their personal brands to sell products that often have very little to do with what they became famous for.

Who you are as a brand can not be replicated. This makes what you are and what you do completely unique. And the connection your audience develops to you makes it much easier and faster to convert them into working with you. Personally, I only want to work with people who appreciate and respect me for who I am before recognizing my professional expertise. Attracting “correct people” into my business and life has only become possible since I focused on growing my personal brand and creating much more content around my life. My secret is being very strategic about what I share. Why I may come across friendly and open to my audience, most of them have very little knowledge of intimate details of my private life. This is what I love about this kind of marketing — it allows me to retain control over my privacy while still building that magical know, like and trust connection simply by showing up frequently with quality content and consistent messaging.

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