How do you make your brand one that people want to work with?
By demonstrating your staff’s expertise!
In this clip from 2023’s B2B Forum, content strategist Christine Gritmon (Constant Contact) explains how your team’s presence influences your buying audience to know, like, and trust your brand.
Get Christine’s insights on building a presence in the following clip, or read the transcript below.
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Your industry has thought leaders.
Your company has brilliant people who know their stuff.
So why not have them be one and the same?
To that end, supporting your employees and executives in building strong personal brands is good for companies in four key ways. Probably more.
But in particular today we’re going to talk about how it’s good for:
First, I’m going to tell you my side of that and why I think it’s important.
But then the next several sides after that are going to have data. Because employers, companies… they love data.
But first I’m going to go with, kind of, the reasoning side of it.
So the first part: brand visibility. That should be fairly obvious.
If you are someone with a strong personal brand, you are pretty visible, at least among the people who you want to be visible among.
So if you are visible and that brand name—the company you work for is connected to your name and connected in people’s heads to you—that’s good for the brand.
If they’ve heard of you, they’ve heard of the brand you work for. So that’s good for brand visibility.
Taking that a step further, if someone is successfully developing their personal brand and their industry thought leadership, that means they’re developing a set of three words that are three of my favorite words as a marketer.
They’re developing that “know, like, and trust factor.” (Shout out to marketer Bob Berg who coined that.)
So if those people are getting known and liked and trusted, that will transfer on some level to your brand becoming known and liked and trusted if that is your employee.
Because people don’t like the cognitive dissonance of not having those two things be together.
So they think, “well, I know, like, and trust this person… and they work for this company. This company is probably good. Because otherwise this person I know, like, and trust would be someplace else.”
So it is good for your brand reputation.
Also, people trust people a lot more than they trust corporate messaging!
So if they see a person out there who’s representing your company in a good way, that’s going to go a lot further and a lot deeper than you saying, “we’re a great company.”
Instead, this great person is saying you’re a great company.
Much more effective!
Now to the personal side.
It’s good for employee retention.
It’s good for employee retention because why do people leave companies? Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel valued. Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. Sometimes it’s because they feel like they’re just not growing there.
If you can be a place where your employees feel like they are valued, they are receiving development, they’re a place where you can continue to grow?
You’re going to keep those employees.
And it’s much more effective to keep an employee than it is to have to go out and get new people all the time.
To that end, if you have those strong people out there as magnets, you’re going to attract better people as well, because the people who follow those thought leaders, again, they’re getting good impressions of your company.
They’re saying, “if this person I know, like, and trust… this person I respect… works for that company, it’s probably pretty good!”
So that’s also going to lead to better recruitment of better candidates.
That’s all the reasoning side.
I’m going to hop into a little bit of the data. I don’t love the data part very much, I’ll be honest with you, but I know that it’s important. So I’m going to kind of breeze through that a little bit so that we can get to the exciting part, which is how you can do all of this.
What does it mean to build your personal brand? What does it mean to support employees in building their personal brands?
But again, for mostly a room of employees here, so it’s really going to be about how you can build your own.
All right, so starting with visibility, some data on brand visibility.
89% of B2B marketers in a study that was co-sponsored by MarketingProfs said that brand visibility was a really, really important goal for them.
And this is social media specific, this next statistic. But the fact is, it makes sense that it would also follow through to any form of communication, whether in person, or via content, or anything like that.
When the exact—this one is specific to social media—but when the exact same content is shared by people rather than the brand page, it goes so much farther.
561% more reach. That sounds made up, but it is a statistic. There was a study.
Twenty-four-times more shares. Eight times more engagement. Exact same content.
Because who are people actually looking to connect with? People.
Nobody’s looking for content.
Nobody’s looking for the brand messaging as much as they are looking for messaging from humans.
They trust messaging from humans.
So if the actual person who works for the company shares something, it’s going to get a lot more traction than if the brand shared the exact same thing.
Doesn’t mean don’t share things as your brand.
It just means: also activate your people.
All right. Brand reputation.
A lot of this comes down to, again, trusting people, trusting employees, and trusting executives.
A lot of times, the executives maybe don’t want to spend time developing their thought leadership.
They’re like, “I’m busy running a company. This is not my job. This is not what I do.” And I see some nods. Some of you work with some of these executives.
But people are much more likely to trust a company when their senior executives… Again, this [data] is social media specific, but it’s not just social media specific.
Guaranteed, this is also—maybe with slightly different numbers—true of presence at events like this, presence at networking events, creating content, presence on podcasts.
There’s a million different ways that they can be out there.
But having a presence—the executives having presence, the founder having a presence, the CEO having a presence—goes a long way towards company trust and towards brand reputation.
Similarly—again, social media, that’s what I got data on, but it probably does extend to other things—a lot of people on social media and on the web in general… this also goes for SEO…
People are there largely for advice, information, or help.
Especially when it comes to something like B2B content or B2B contacts.
So a lot of people are there for those things, and they want to hear it from people.
They don’t want to hear it from a brand where it’s more likely to be connected to selling something.
If they get it from a helpful person, it’s going to go a lot farther.
Furthermore, people will pay a whole lot more to work with people who they consider elite experts.
If those elite experts work for your company, guess what that means?
They’ll pay more to work with your company because they will then be working with your experts.
So that is huge.
Thought leadership content: 45% of decision makers in a particular study said that they used thought leadership content when vetting what organizations to do business with.
Because if the thought leadership content is good, and created by someone smart, they trust that you’re probably not doing business with less-smart people.
They got to figure, if your content is good, your service is probably going to be even better.
And B2B customers are twice as likely to choose a brand that conveys personal values.
So it goes beyond the numbers. It goes beyond the features and benefits. It goes also to, “do we get value from this brand?”
Published October 3, 2024
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