In a well-known study conducted by Psychologist Dr. Albert Mehrabian, our ability to communicate effectively can be broken into three categories: spoken words, voice and tone, and body language. According to the study, when attempting to convey a message, only 7% of your success is based on the actual spoken words, while the remaining 93% is based on our tone and body language.
Amber Renae, a civil engineer turned branding expert, applies the conclusions of Dr. Mehrabian’s study to brand building. In our recent conversation, she outlined her three-pronged approach to effectively and efficiently promoting your personal brand to grow your real estate investing business.
Ultimately, the idea behind building a powerful brand is that it will allow your ideal customer to find you. How they’ll find you will vary, but generally, it’ll be through your website or social media platform. Once they do, Amber says, “they’ll immediately click over to the other one to see if there’s consistency. If they find that your social channels look like your website, then they start to see consistency. Then, they look for evidence of you showing up in person or in real life – on things like videos, live events, podcasts, speaking engagements, things like that. If all three of those are cohesive and consistent, then they start to depend on you, and once your audience depends on you, they have confidence in you. Once they have confidence, then they start to trust you, and you know what comes after trust…sales.”
Therefore, the key to increasing your bottom line is to create a cohesive and consistent online and offline person brand.
In order to tip that first domino in the buying funnel (i.e. attracting your ideal customer), Amber teaches a three-pronged approach that focuses on the communication factors that impact 93% of a message’s or brand’s success, which she’s broken down into presentation, performance, and publicity.
The first factor of a powerful brand is your presentation. More specifically, it is about forming a unique signature style.
Amber said, “some inspired actions that you can start taking today is to just start thinking of yourself through the lens of a personal brand – what makes you unique? What makes you stand out from the competition? What are you doing differently from the rest of the marketplace?”
Ask yourself these questions, write out the answers and use them to develop your brand objectives. Then, based on your personal brand objectives, start to think about how you can incorporate them into a signature style that is unique to you.
Amber says to take your signature style and apply it “across your body language, your vocal performance, how you engage in conversations, and how you treat other people.” You want to be that person who has great body language and who holds themselves with really high confidence and self-esteem, which is accomplished when you have defined a signature style and apply it to your online and offline presentation.
The next factor is your performance. A performance is anything you are actually presenting to your ideal audience – podcasting, videos, public speaking, Facebook live, Periscopes, etc.
Amber said, “No longer can you just write a blog post or do a social media share and expect that your ideal client is going to find you and connect with you. As a society, we crave connection, and it’s our responsibility as entrepreneurs to create a brand that connects halfway with people. The way that you do that is by creating things like a podcast, videos, doing live streams, etc. Anything that builds authority and thought leadership, because this is the way that you ignite a movement. This is the way that you get trust with your audience.”
When “performing,” this doesn’t mean you’re being fake or unauthentic. But since the goal of our brand is to ultimately build trust and gain confidence from our audience, this cannot be accomplished without an online and offline presence. We must use our signature style to get our faces in front of our customers.
Finally, once we’ve identified our unique style and our presentation approach, the last step is to publicize our brand. Building your own platform will be time-consuming, expensive, and laborious. But a good shortcut is to leverage other people’s audience, which will get your message spread a lot faster and to a much wider audience.
“It’s really just a matter of finding people that are creating great content and reaching out to them and going, ‘Hey, I’m going something interesting. Do you want to connect?’,” Amber said. For an exact process for how to get on other people’s podcasts, for example, read this blog post – The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked as a Guest on ANY Podcast – which is based on an interview I had with Jessica Rhodes, the founder of a premier guest booking agency.
Now that you know the three main factors to focus on, it’s time to build out your thought leadership platform. Here is a link to the “Branding and Thought Leadership” section, which includes multiple posts on creating and growing a thought leadership platform.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.