It has never been easier to build a brand!
As entrepreneur your biggest marketing asset today is you.

Whether you offer a product, a platform, or a service, customers today want to know the person behind them. As an entrepreneur, your biggest asset is you. The combination of customers’ need to know and trust whom they are buying from, along with the ease of availability and accessibility through social media, makes it easy and faster than ever to build your brand.

Three things making it so easy for entrepreneurs to build their brand today:

1. Customers are looking for the human aspect
2. Your biggest asset and the biggest differentiation between your entrepreneurship and any other business is yourself – the person behind the product, platform, or service.
3. With social media building your brand, creating the awareness and the trust is easy. And (almost) totally free.

Dan Gingiss is an author, speaker, and expert of customer experience, who built his personal brand while still working full time in executive positions.

I love Dan’s story because it represents the big opportunity each entrepreneur has today.

The key to any successful entrepreneurship is to understand what your biggest asset in the eyes of your target audience is.

 

Follow your passions

I love Dan’s answer when I asked him about his best advice for entrepreneurs.

“I would say to follow your passion,” Dan said. “When I interview for jobs, I always tell people that what I’m looking for in a job is where I don’t hit the snooze button in the morning. I judge job satisfaction by how many times I hit snooze. If I don’t want to get out of bed, that’s usually a bad sign.

What I’ve found is by following my passion, by doing what I love, I’m jumping out of bed in the morning! I’m excited to go to work because I’m doing something that is meaningful for me.”

 

Build your brand long before starting your entrepreneurship

Dan said his 20 year career has consistently focused on ‘delighting customers’, spanning multiple disciplines including customer experience, marketing, social media, and customer service. He has held leadership positions at three Fortune 300 companies – Discover, Humana, and McDonald’s.

Dan found his own unique space by becoming an expert of customer experience. That what he did most of his career: holding executive positions of customer experience in leading companies.

While working in these companies, Dan started to build his brand as an expert in the space of customer experience.

He was invited to speak in different events in the name of the big brands he worked with and in time became known as a sought-after international keynote speaker who believes that a remarkable customer experience can be your best marketing.

In addition to become a recognizable speaker, Dan is the author of the book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media, a host of the Experience This! Show podcast, and a regular contributor to Forbes. Brand24 recently named him one of the “Top 100 Digital Marketers 2019”.

That’s what building a brand looks like.

And that’s what enables Dan start his new journey as entrepreneur while he is already known as a brand in his field.

 

Social media today paves the way for entrepreneurs

Once you understand that your unique point of influence and sales is who you are and what you best are at, it becomes much easier to create the awareness, connection, and trust of your audience. Because it’s all about being you.

Here is where the magic of social media starts to work. It’s all about engaging with people, listening to them and talking with them.

As Dan said when he talked about the pros and cons of social media for building your brand through providing meaningful value to your audience:

“What I love about social media is it’s the first and only marketing channel where people can talk back to you. You can’t talk back to a TV commercial, and if you remember the early days of social media, marketers looked at it as another broadcast channel. ‘Let’s put our TV commercials on Facebook! People will love that!’ Of course, no one wanted to see TV commercials on Facebook. Companies were forced to listen to what customers wanted, marketers had to adjust to all channels in that way, like they’ve had to in social media, which is listening to your customers and then delivering the content that they’re asking you for instead of acting like, ‘We know, as marketers, better what our customers want.’”

 

Looking for practical steps to building your brand and entrepreneurship to reach a business success?

You might like to check out my cheat sheet about the daily routine of successful entrepreneurs.