The 7 Tenets for Effective Branding™ - Tenet #5: Know Thy Target Audience(s)
This is one of the most critical components of any effective branding strategy or document-deliverable, and yet, it seems it often gets overlooked.
Excellent personal branding is no different than if you were Head of Marketing and putting together a marketing campaign to bring a new service or product to the market; the process always starts with, "Who is the Target Audience?" and then all marketing materials, messaging, positioning strategy are aligned to that identified audience profile.
So, why is it that this best practice is so often overlooked by career professionals?
For the sake of this blog post, we are going to keep it simple with a couple short, sweet examples.
Example 1:
After exercising the 2 Simple Questions laid out in the Tenet #1 blog post you realize you want to return to a more entrepreneurial environment and have your eyes set on late-stage VC or an incubator opportunity at a large, established brand.
What types of skill sets will that particular audience be looking for at that specific stage of growth? (Hint: a candidate who can build and scale; who can do more with less; who can get things done at rapid speed with limited resources ...the list goes on.)
So, with that in mind, what types of experiences, achievements, skill sets can you bring forward and highlight in your branded documents to make that connection with this audience?
Example 2:
You've exercised the 2 Simple Questions and realize from the exercise that you want to return to a mid-market sized company after being at a Fortune 500 for the past 7+ years. You see that a lot of mergers and acquisitions activity impacting your industry of choice, and realize this may need to be integrated into your branding strategy.
What types of skill sets will that particular audience be looking for at that specific stage of growth, potentially focused on an M&A (mergers + acquisitions) strategy? (Hint: a candidate with change management and acquisition integration experience; a candidate who is agile and can flow with changes; a leader who can lead within ambiguous environments, etc.)
Or, maybe your industry is not experiencing a lot of M&A activity, but you still have your heart set on returning to a smaller company. Usually companies of this size are looking to scale to the next layer of growth and need a candidate who can bring big-company brand experience into their organization to provide more structure and best practices. So, if you have this, flaunt and pitch it this way.
Hope these short, sweet examples have given you food for thought as you begin on your journey.
