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With this article we answer the 3rd of the 3 questions your personal brand must answer from the perspective of your target market audience:

1. Why should I care?

2. What’s in it for me?

3. Why should I believe you?

In our previous article Marketing Success Favors a Specialist, I emphasized the importance of clearly and simply stating what it is that you do – or more specifically, what is the #1 benefit for your target audience to work with you or do business with you?

If you can succeed in making yourself known for doing 1 thing really well – you are far more likely to be remembered and recommended, than if you try to pass yourself off as a jack of all trades, 1 stop shop.

The challenge we face today with online personal branding, is that people are much less trusting than they used to be. Politicians, corporations, celebrities, sports stars, the news media – wherever we turn, it seems another person or organization that was previously put on a pedestal, is exposed for lying or deceiving.

Social media has helped expose these people. The ability for ordinary people to search for information and publish their views online provides a welcome balance to one-sided PR and spin.

The key lesson from all of this – is that you must tell the truth, and you need to provide your target audience with real reasons to believe any claims you make. It’s one thing to make a claim, but you need to be able to back it up.

To do this you need to provide evidence to support your online personal brand. This could include things like:

• Relevant experience and qualifications
• Testimonials from satisfied customers / recommendations on LinkedIn etc
• Personal media / press-kits / third party endorsements
• Evidence of achievement / professional successes
• Verifiable data and statistics
• Demonstrations – this is the ultimate proof. Don’t just tell them. Show them. Let them see and hear for themselves that you are the real deal.

What have you done to back up your claims?

As our world moves increasingly online, customers need to feel they are dealing with a real, authentic person. This is where the role of video will become increasingly important in online personal branding.

In future articles we will cover the “Do’s & Don’ts” of using video to promote your personal brand online.