If you are selling a professional service, there is a company that you need to check out and that company
is huge marketing, huge marketing dot com, I've been following them for many years and they keep publishing
all sorts of research on the most effective ways to market your professional service firm.
So maybe you're a lawyer, maybe you're an architect, maybe you're a consultant.
You're going to benefit from learning from their research.
Now, one of the overall points they're making is that you need to specialize because specialists in
professional services tend to grow faster.
They tend to be more profitable.
They tend to be more desirable.
Now, that's a strategic choice that you need to make when you're selling a professional service.
Now, that's not always the case when you're selling a personal brand for entertainment purposes.
Often in situations like that, you might start as a specialist, but eventually you need to broaden
because you want mass appeal and you partner up with other brands to be able to increase the market
size.
But as a professional who who has a limited amount of time to sell, what you need to do is get your
hourly rates up and you do that through specialization.
Now, one of the key arguments they're making is that what you want to become is what they call a visible
expert.
You want high visibility in your target market and you want to be seen as an expert in whatever that
specialization happens to be.
Now, the specialization may be based on, for example, the target customer group that you cater to,
or it may be based on something like the problem that you solve or specific service that you offer.
So they say that there are different levels of visible experts, so resident experts, local heroes,
rising stars, industry rock stars and global superstars.
I think this is really where you want to aim is to be a global superstar.
Where can you compete on the global stage?
What is that specialty, that brand identity that you can have that's able to operate on a global scale?
Now, one of the key benefits, they say, of developing your personal brand is essentially how much
willing, how willing people are to pay you.
So your capacity to charge out at a much higher hourly rate, whether that's through large contracts,
whether that's through just little five year contracts or work projects, you're going to get a lot
more when you position yourself as a visible expert through your personal branding.
Now, we take a look here and we can see that the putting a strong emphasis on developing your personal
brand.
So even if you represent a larger agency and you're trying to get contracts for people that work for
you or perhaps people that even work above you, the fact that you're building a personal brand is going
to pay dividends for the overall firm that you work for because that gives the firm credibility.
And people are going to want to hire your company because of that brand that you develop.
So, again, Hinge relies on research.
So let's see what the research says about what is the most impactful ways to develop your professional
services brand.
The number one they have here is so I published books on marketing.
It's not that difficult, particularly when you're using Kindles.
So Kindle self publishing, you can do print on demand.
You can find a literary agent to try to get your book published to get a wider reach.
It's an excellent way of establishing your credibility that a lot of good personal brands have done
speaking engagements.
So they've broken it up into two segments here.
There's other speaking and then there's a keynote address.
One of the easiest ways to get a lot of visibility, I, I did this for a CEO that I was working for,
where I reached out to one of the most influential events in our industry and was able to get him a
speaking engagement.
And often what you need to do there is sell them on what the speech is going to be.
And often it's best if you have some access to something unique, like a unique data set, and you're
going to use that data to help the people in the audience where if it's just going up there in self
promoting competitive speaking engagements are less likely to approve you in those cases.
So find ways you can bring value, particularly unique value that not everybody is going to have access
to.
OK, so they also mentioned a company website I would also throw in there kind of whatever the equivalent
is of your websites, that might be a landing page or perhaps a LinkedIn profile, maybe YouTube channel,
whatever your main channel is.
And it may not necessarily be your website, your blogs are important.
So, you know, again, you can have a blog on LinkedIn, you can have a blog a medium.
You can have a blog on your own website articles.
I think articles are extremely effective, particularly if you reach an industry specific one that caters
to the people that you're selling to email marketing SEO regular column published and then the personal
website.
So one that's just for you and for your firm.
So again, I think all of these can be benefited by piggybacking off of other people that have larger
audiences.
So, for example, speaking on a podcast that already has a large following, you could co publish a
book with a brand or an individual that already has credibility in that target audience that you're
looking for.
So as you're exploring these, I would look for opportunities to achieve leverage.