Five little branding tips

Find Your Superpower newsletter 042

Read time: 5 minutes

Topics covered: Personal branding, thought leadership, niche building

Do you feel like you’ve been sprinting since the start of 2024? I certainly feel like I have. 🏃‍♀️

Lots of new client projects and speaking engagements, plus my Six-Week Find Your Superpower LinkedIn Bootcamp is starting immediately after Chinese New Year. PS: You can waitlist for a future bootcamp here!

Taking deep, deep breaths.

Due to my tight schedule, I can’t do a big and bombastic newsletter today, but I want to make it count.

I therefore have five little branding tips to help you get closer to your ideal personal brand:

1/ The absence of a strong brand turns us into a commodity

The IMF released a report this week on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, warning that 40% of all global employment could be affected by artificial intelligence. Importantly, high-income economies will face greater risks than emerging markets and low-income countries, as reported by CNBC.

In this era, our humanity must prevail and shine through. 

On that note, just in case someone incorrectly summarizes it as: “Oh, she’s telling us to become influencers. Please, I don’t want to be an influencer!” I don’t think many of us want to be online influencers either.

What we want is to be well-respected industry experts and thought leaders. When you are a well-respected expert in your niche, the options available to you increase significantly.

2/ Your brand should have as little complexity as possible

All of us are multi-hyphenates. I am a mother-wife-boss-entrepreneur-coach-friend-sister-auntie-speaker-moderator. Imagine meeting someone at a networking event and telling them everything you’ve accomplished over the past 10 years... they’d run.

The goal is to slowly layer on new angles of your brand over time, but to start off as simply and cleanly as possible.

If you deviate from your brand persona, it will not only confuse us, we will also start questioning our trust in you. Consistency is linked to trustworthiness.

Please read my newsletter from last week where I did a case study on Club Med and argued that a good brand is really about a seamless experience. I also suggested that you audit every touch point of your brand to identify areas that you may need to put more effort in.

3/ The narrower the niche, the more powerful the brand

Specialists with niche knowledge are paid much more than generalists.

When we are facing a challenging situation, whether medical, legal or professional, we do not think twice about paying a specialist a lot of money for their expert advice.

We would rather spend the money to get an optimal result, than to save the money and pay the price down the road.

There is no debate here: niching down will make you far more money. Therefore, aim for focused instead of mass-market.

I will never forget this quote by Alex Hormozi: “Don’t make me niche slap you!”

4/ Consider the 80:20 rule 

There is a school of thought in branding that “you are your own niche”. According to this branding philosophy, there is no need to be extremely focused and you can talk about anything under the sun as long as it is relevant to you, because YOU are the brand.

Erm, have you seen the things I’m interested in? 🤣

From Rachmaninov to mental health, science communication, kids and financial independence… you’ll get a splitting headache if I tried to post everything that I am interested in. You’ll probably unfollow me after a particularly confusing turn.

Here’s a suggestion for you: 80% of your content should focus on your niche, especially on a professional platform like LinkedIn. 20% of your content can then surprise and delight your followers and serve to gently expand your niche. How does that sound?

Everything in moderation, please.

5/ We must keep levelling up our brand

Let me ask you honestly, what are you doing to level up your brand? Some people post the same thing every day, and it gets a little bit “same same” after awhile.

Focusing on your niche and specialty isn’t the same as posting the same thing repeatedly.

Let’s level up together, by learning new styles of storytelling and new modes of storytelling (e.g. videos, newsletters, carousels). We can also take better photos, and most importantly, we can live a great life.

Instead of posting about 365 “same-ish” days a year, why not live 365 exciting days a year, and sharing those exciting moments with us less frequently? 

Live more, post less please.

A LinkedIn thought leader roadmap

On 26 January, I will be running a public LinkedIn Branding Basics workshop on Zoom for my course buyers.

In particular, I will be sharing my 12-month thought-leader roadmap, which will explain how you can go from unknown from LinkedIn to top of category on LinkedIn.

A caveat is that you must already have the necessary experience and/or education record in a specific niche or industry, and all you need now is the right strategy to pop on LinkedIn.

If so, please join me to hear more!

🔴 DATE: Friday, 26 January 2024, 11AM - 12PM (GMT +8)

🔴 LOCATION: Zoom webinar (an invite will be sent closer to the date)

Simply purchase any online course from: https://www.julianachan.org/courses

See you next week! 

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Thanks for reading issue 042 of my weekly Find Your Superpower newsletter.

For those of you who are new to my newsletter, Find Your Superpower is subscribed to by 31,000 people on LinkedIn and email, and discusses the following three goals: (1) Making a career transition, (2) Professional branding on LinkedIn, and (3) Reinventing ourselves for the future of work.

Here’s how we can stay in touch:

1. I would recommend you purchase my course, The LinkedIn Success Mindset. In this all-in-one guide to LinkedIn, we will learn how to manage our mindset, take action and avoid making cardinal sins on the platform. I will be giving course buyers a LIVE branding basics workshop on 26 January 2024.

2. If you are very new to LinkedIn, consider my masterclass on LinkedIn professional branding, Find Your Superpower: How to Rebrand Yourself on LinkedIn. This 1h on-demand video course that will help you identify your professional brand, write a brand statement from scratch, and launch your brand on LinkedIn. Don’t muck around for years on LinkedIn, sort your profile out quickly.