How to build a personal brand to increase traffic?

1. Why should we build a personal brand?

Many people would wonder, why should I create a personal brand when I just go to work honestly?

So, let me first introduce to you a formula, the business model of life: Achievement = Ability X Efficiency X Leverage.

A person's achievement is the result of a combination of multiple factors. Ability and efficiency are gradually developed in the process of our growth. The main factor we are discussing today is leverage, because using leverage correctly can often achieve 10 times the result with half the effort.

Among the leverage factors, given a given choice, we often have no control over products and capital, but we can change our team and personal influence. Changing some factors can increase the leverage coefficient and achieve greater personal achievements in life, which is our path.

Yes, as an operations and marketing department, the responsibility is to continuously attract new customers, retain customers, activate customers, convert customers and build brands for the company. As a professional practitioner, in addition to improving departmental capabilities, what you should also improve is your personal abilities in the above aspects.

As the saying goes, if you can't clean up your own house, how can you clean up the world? If you can't manage your personal traffic and brand well, how can you manage the company's traffic and brand? I personally suggest that all people in the workplace should create a personal brand, or at least have the mindset of a personal brand.

Warm reminder: Please forgive me, because it is not a pure methodology, there are many contents about my own Ben in the case. This is more realistic and also reflects the practice of building my own personal brand.

So what does it mean to have a personal brand?

You can see a comparison:

I’m Uncle Zou. I focus on operational growth and my consulting fees are cost-effective. Please let me serve you. —This is a sales pitch

I’m Uncle Zou, and I focus on operational growth. During this special period, our consulting fees start at 30% off. —This is a promotion

You don’t know Uncle Zou, but you have heard his sharing and think he is okay, so you want to invite him to do internal training. —This is marketing

You don’t know Uncle Zou. Your company wants to find an operations growth consultant, and your friends all recommend Uncle Zou. —This is the brand

I have spent so much space saying that everyone should build a personal brand, but everyone has limited time and energy. What benefits can building a personal brand bring?

1. Low-cost traffic

First of all, I think everyone knows that among all transactions, the transaction method with the highest conversion rate is actually referral. Judging from my performance of over 10 million in the past few years, the shortest transaction cycle may only take 5 minutes, while the average transaction in the TOB industry may take about 1 week, and most customers recommended by acquaintances or readers can be closed, with a transaction rate as high as 64.1%.

Humans are emotional animals. Between a commercial company and a warm-hearted person, people are more likely to trust each other. Just like maybe you don’t like the company I work for, but can you understand me, a willful uncle?

Since you have chosen to build a personal brand, you will inevitably continue to accumulate fans. The recognition and attention from specific fields can help you obtain low-cost traffic. It would be great if this traffic is highly consistent with the company's customer base.

2. High degree of trust

All cooperation is based on trust. It is because of understanding and recognition that people become your fans. This process can solve the problem of trust very well.

3. Enhance personal value

Amid the intensifying workplace crisis, personal brands can not only bring in traffic and new people, but also enhance personal value, especially workplace value.

You must know that the success of a company cannot represent the value of a certain person. It is often said: Don’t take the platform’s capabilities as personal capabilities.

In the process of building a personal brand, you are constantly improving your operational and marketing capabilities, while also improving your social value, until one day you can proudly say: I am still capable even after leaving the platform.

4. Promote self-growth

When you start building your personal brand, you will expose yourself to everyone's eyes. Public supervision will force you to cherish your reputation and continue to learn, grow, be self-disciplined, share, be tolerant, be altruistic, etc., until you integrate the habit of excellence into your bones. After all, we don't want our own personality to collapse.

I won’t go into details here about the various benefits and commercial realizations in the process of building a personal brand, but Uncle Zou can tell you that the ROI is higher than you can imagine.

2. How to build a personal brand

Next, let’s talk about how to build a personal brand based on operational thinking.

I have summarized the daily work of operations and marketing into six major sections, namely: product operation, content operation, delivery operation, event operation, community operation, and data operation. So we will continue to break it down with you according to the above six major ideas.

1. Product operation thinking

According to the thinking of product operation, what we need to do includes:

• Identify your target audience
• Analyze existing resources
• Finding unique value
• Design functional modules

A good positioning is better than 10 times the effort, an advantageous resource is conducive to a single point breakthrough, a unique value is conducive to implanting in the mind, and a good function can improve retention.

1.1 Identify the target audience

Clarifying your target audience is the same as positioning. It means thinking about your personal brand, the image and audience you want to establish, and going where the traffic and attention you need are.

If your target audience and personal strengths are highly consistent with the company's target audience, then that should be the best choice. If they are not consistent, don't worry. As long as your influence in a certain field has made a breakthrough, everyone will think that your credibility is higher than others. At this time, it is easier for you to transfer your influence.

For example, the key decision-makers (KPs) of most of Chuanglan’s products are mainly product managers, operators, marketers and CEOs of small and medium-sized enterprises in companies with a large number of C-end users. So I also target these people for my personal brand, and I have my own positioning: Uncle Zou, a marketing officer focused on operational growth and a marketing operator with billion-level growth.

We can see that among the people sharing today, Teacher Cao Hu is positioned in marketing consulting, Teacher Chen Yong is positioned in super conversion rate, Teacher Xu Zhibin is positioned in private domain traffic, Teacher Yu Yongyi is positioned in big data, Teacher Du Zhong is positioned in industrial product marketing, etc., all of which are precisely positioned for the target population.

1.2 Analyze existing resources

In the process of positioning, the main thing is to find your own advantages: I have what others do not, and I am better than others.

Everyone needs to carefully analyze their own talents, abilities, and energy, because personal branding is something that may follow you for 100 years.

Discovering your strengths is not that complicated. Try more of the things you are best at; repeat more of the things you have achieved results in; and study more of the things that interest you. As you accumulate experience slowly, the data will give you feedback so that you can find your own advantages smoothly.

I would also like to recommend a book to you here called "Discover Your Strengths Now". After reading it, you can evaluate yourself and re-understand yourself.

1.3 Finding unique value

When looking for unique value, many people will feel that they seem to have nothing unique. Some people, like Teacher Chen Yong, who speaks fast and has quick thinking, are easily remembered, while people like Uncle Zou, who are not good-looking and have ordinary voices, are easily ignored.

How can we find our own trigger point and make ourselves different?

My advice to you all is:

① Research competitors: This is a method often used in our company’s operations and marketing. In personal branding, if you have clearly defined your customer base and your own strengths, all that remains is “competitive analysis”. Find the best person in the same field, study him, and learn from him.

②Niche areas: Niche is a field that is more detailed than segmentation. It is about finding possible points in the segmented market that are overlooked by big players in the same field, and making breakthroughs in single points. For example, fission in growth, live codes in fission tools, and copywriting in fission processes all belong to niche areas.

③Create uniqueness: Often the above points are not easy to find, so we can shape them. Doing one thing 100 times will make it something unique, as unique as Steve Jobs’ jeans, Lei Jun’s grin, Yang Shoubin’s floral shirt, and so on.

Since I am nothing special, I can only create my own unique value from the functional modules.

1.4 Design functional modules

The design of product modules is not achieved overnight, but is the result of constantly listening to user feedback, thinking about user needs, gradually optimizing and conducting grayscale trial and error.

In personal brand operations, we can also design functional modules, such as introduction, image, temperature, additional functions, etc.

For example: We have to start with the name. My real name is Zou Yang, but when we go to Baidu to search for "Zou Yang", what we see is definitely Wang Sicong's seventh girlfriend, a beautiful model, so I changed my nickname to "Uncle Zou". In this way, when you search on Baidu, you will basically see me. If you search "Uncle Zou's willfulness" on Baidu, it will definitely be me. Uncle Zou is very easy to create topics and bring people closer. Topics between me and others often start with the name to break the ice.

The three elements of a good name: easy to find when searched, easy to remember when spoken, and easy to understand when heard.

A good personal brand also needs to be cultivated both inside and outside. In the workplace and business places, a clean and sunny image is very important. Psychological research shows that the trust between people mainly comes from three aspects: language, tone and image, and the proportion of external image is as high as 55.6%, which shows the importance of external image.

Another problem is that not everyone is so beautiful or handsome, so what is the way out for us ordinary people? My suggestion is standardization and unification: unified image, standard actions, unified introduction, standard PPT, unified color tone, and standard style.

Just like my personal poster photos are almost the same, the PPTs are all templates and have my own photos, which are always implanted in the readers' minds.

The final additional function is more complicated and time-consuming. We need to think about whether to just establish a standard personal image, or continuous content output, just create a public account, or provide more community support, just write practical content or unique viewpoints, or provide training courses and so on. More functions will not be expanded in this initial stage.

2. Content Operation Thinking

Once the positioning is clear, content is the key. Good content is the basis for spreading your personal brand.

Building a personal brand is a long-term process, so continuous output, systematic operation, and high-quality content have become an important means to strengthen personal brand.

There are also some basic principles of content operation:

①First of all, it must be useful. Users find it difficult to accept promotional and sales-type content. To find useful content, we need to learn the methods used by Internet celebrities to help users solve problems and find readers' pain points and itchy spots .

The bigger the problems we solve for users, the greater the value of our personal brand. This is like the difference between general fans and targeted fans. The value of an account with 100,000 fans in the automotive field is far greater than that of an account with 1 million joke fans.

② Secondly, there must be material. What is the difference between useful and informative? What makes it useful is that it only tells the answer without much extension or literary grace. Being informative means that it not only tells readers the answer, but also allows them to broaden their horizons, understand the essence, and refresh their cognition. The content of the creation is rich and full of emotion. In the end, the readers will say "awesome" and then like, repost and comment three times in a row, 666.

③More importantly, it should be interesting. In fact, for people in the workplace, it is easier to obtain useful and informative content. After all, everyone is doing professional work every day. However, most people are not willing to read and accept dry information. Readers hope that the content not only brings them knowledge, but also brings them pleasure, relaxes their mood, and gives their brains a refreshment. For example, all the theoretical contents of operations are drawn into comics, and some people record the boring product knowledge into videos to make users accept it better and more happily.

That is why we are "indignant". Why are there many people who have little practical knowledge or even no knowledge, but are interesting and born to be interesting, and yet they can have millions of fans? This is the power of interestingness.

Because everyone has different interests, we can output different types of content, such as text, pictures, audio, and video. In fact, activities, mini-programs, and APPs can all become your content.

The value of content increases incrementally from jokes to posters, to articles to white papers and to published books, making people feel more trustful.

So we also have a lot of professional authors sharing this time, including Chen Yong, the author of "Super Conversion Rate", Xu Zhibin, the author of "Small Group Effect", and Yu Yongyi, the author of "Big Data Marketing". So next year, I hope everyone can see Zou Yang, the author of "TOB Marketing". I can be secretly happy for a while, even though I haven't even finished writing the book.

When you are building a personal brand, there will be questions like how to produce continuously.

In fact, if you want continuous output, you must have continuous input. Uncle Zou gives you four magic weapons:

1. Review comes from work practice

2. Thinking comes from understanding from reading

3. Interviews with experts

4. Observe the integration from cross-border

Do the above four points well, and after a period of practice and accumulation, your content will no longer be a problem.

3. Thinking of delivery and operation

Once everyone has a clear positioning and continuously produces good content, they need to continue to spread the content.

After all, this is an era where even good wine needs to be hidden if it is not well-known, and content cannot last long.

There is too much content, everyone is too anxious, and time is limited. If the content we work hard to produce cannot be seen by others, it would be a great pity and not conducive to the building of a good personal brand. Therefore, content delivery and operation is particularly important.

There are two types of delivery channels: paid channels and free channels. Paid channels are expensive and complicated. Detonating yourself too early when your capabilities are not sufficient is likely to backfire. I suggest starting with free channels and gradually building your influence.

Many friends only publish content on official accounts, but now the opening rate of official accounts continues to decline. In order to expand the dissemination of content, it is recommended that everyone produce once, reuse multiple times, and distribute it through all channels.

On the one hand, you need to output your personal brand through more forms of display, such as text and pictures. Exposure in various forms such as audio and video.

On the other hand, you need omni-channel distribution to spread your personal brand, such as establishing your own personal website, official account, Zhihu, Weibo, Toutiao, Penguin, Sohu, Dayu, Douban, Jianshu, Renrenshishipinmiaoguan, marketing department, Meihua.com, Yiou.com, Titanium Media, etc.

Content creation is important, but content delivery is 10 times more important than content creation.

Let’s take an example combining products, content and channels: My personal brand name across all channels is “Uncle Zou’s Willfulness”, and the avatar and introduction are basically the same. Every time I write a piece of content, I will distribute it across all channels. For example, the training I gave to thousands of retail practitioners last week, "A Guide to Breaking Through Community Operations in the Retail Physical Industry", was included in more than 200 websites without any fees, including Titanium Media, Ebrun, Sina Technology, etc., which brought good dissemination and a lot of attention.

What needs to be noted here is that the rules of each self-media platform are different, and everyone needs to learn more about them. And although the standard action is omni-channel distribution, everyone still needs to find the most suitable platform for themselves after a period of time to concentrate on breakthroughs and rapid rise.

Because only when you become the leader in every brand can you use the empowerment of the head effect to achieve a leveraged leap forward.

Everyone must understand that the power of the platform is far stronger than that of an individual, and if you have a strong supporter, you must hold on to it.

4. Activity operation thinking

I have a few suggestions for event operation thinking:

4.1 Both organization and participation are required. Organizing an event is your home ground. You can make a cameo appearance and have the initiative. You will be remembered and become a connector. Participating in an event is taking advantage of the momentum and borrowing the potential energy of the organizer. You become a connected resource.

At the same time, you can see that all my poster images are consistent, and all the activities I participate in are inseparable from the two keywords of operation and growth.

4.2 It is better to meet once than to chat for a year. We have established connections with everyone online through content and other means and cultivated trust, but this is far from enough. What we gain online is shallow, and a deep relationship requires face-to-face interaction, just like when we first met on TOBCGO, we still need to strengthen our relationship through family dinners and offline activities.

Another exception is that you can participate in some activities with great potential and become the protagonist, which can attract others to connect with you, such as participating in well-known TV shows, attending top conferences as a guest, etc.

5. Community operation thinking

When we were designing the product module earlier, we talked about whether to do offline activities, whether to establish a community, whether to make more products, and whether to provide value to your readers. This requires everyone to adjust according to the actual situation.

In fact, I 100% recommend that everyone should build a community.

5.1 Accumulate core and form circles

First of all, the community is to accumulate your readers, and secondly, through the community you can reach out to them repeatedly and deepen their trust.

Here I will use the models commonly used in my work: communication, drainage, retention, activity, and conversion.

AARRR is also applicable to personal branding. We use content and activities to spread and attract traffic, and use personal WeChat to retain readers. We select core fans from them and form your own circle. Regardless of whether they can be converted into corporate customers, they will be a great help in your personal branding journey.

What are core fans: those who are consistent with your target audience, trust you, and are willing to help you and grow together.

5.2 Cross-border fan gathering and influence fission

When we have accumulated a certain level in a certain field, we can try to select different fields to cross-border fans.

For example: At the beginning, I was immersed in the mainstream 2C Internet circle. By chance, I witnessed the growth of TOBCGO, so I studied with everyone here, met many TOB industry leaders, and learned from them. Recently, I have replicated my community operation, content operation and other capabilities in the retail industry, trained thousands of retailers, and coached nearly a hundred brands on the retail industry's community, content, marketing and other operational growth modules.

Today is also my 7th online sharing session after the New Year of 2020. There are more plans and event coaching for Retail 100 brands in March. This is to use my reusable professional capabilities to continuously split the influence among the target population.

Here, the goals, image, PPT, and content of personal brands still follow unified principles.

6. Data Operation Thinking

Building a personal brand is a long process of continuous adjustment and optimization, so we must always pay attention to data, collect data, explore advantages, and iterate quickly, just like we do in operations and marketing.

For example: Every time we send a public account push, we may see a lot of data statistics. We can judge readers’ attitudes towards our content based on indicators such as the number of readings, forwardings, comments, etc., and optimize it accordingly. When we answer questions on Zhihu, we can optimize the content based on the number of likes of different styles and the application of algorithms.

As for the content of data operation, we can start a separate topic to analyze it in detail later.

In order to ensure that everyone who has not yet fully returned to work will not forget their profession, I reviewed the various modules of operations with everyone today. Sorry for the embarrassment.

3. Achieve super conversion from personal brand traffic

In fact, the second part of the content is more about traffic diversion and dissemination. Traffic alone does not necessarily mean growth, and how to improve the conversion of personal brands in China is also worth considering.

1. Generation of traffic

When generating traffic, you should pre-embed hooks to allow public domain traffic to flow into your private domain traffic.

For example, distribute content with your profile and WeChat account;

For example, the names of all platforms are the same, making it easy for people to find you;

For example, put your WeChat ID in the profile of all platforms to make it easier for others to add you;

For example, put your own QR code in the PPT to make it easier for others to add you;

Do the following operations, so that your recipients can continue to receive your messages and actively find you and add you.

The key to generating traffic: don’t chase her, attract her.

2. Traffic acceptance

In the process of attracting traffic, the most important thing is to guide readers to add your personal account. There are also many details that need to be paid attention to here, such as timely self-introduction, collecting the other party's information, guiding readers to follow your official account, and enter your community system, and strive to form multiple points of contact with you.

The essence of traffic acceptance: since you are here, don’t leave. I want to establish multiple relationships with you.

3. Traffic Operation

When readers reach personal accounts, public accounts, and communities in the matrix, it becomes a process of continuous influence and conversion.

For example: If we forward the long poster of the TOBCGO conference directly to our Moments, what everyone will see is a set of blurred images without tone. So I asked the designer to insert the photo of me and a business director into the center of the poster. In this way, when I post it on my Moments, what is realistically displayed is the image of the two of us, and then add two sentences of copywriting, so as to increase attention and personal influence through the operation of various details.

Yesterday a company came to discuss internal training courses. Just as Teacher Chen Yong said: There is money hidden in the details.

4. Make good use of external forces to achieve a win-win situation

When we are building our personal brand, most people do not have enough strength and potential, just like me, a humble little transparent person in the TOB field.

Here I would like to introduce a trick to everyone, which is to use external forces to achieve a win-win situation.

Leveraging strength is like the super symbol proposed by Hua & Hua, go find a big tree and hug it.

For example, looking for hot spots to create content is leveraging power.

For example, careful use of platforms with traffic is also leveraging power.

Still taking the example of today’s conference, I enlarged my own photo and put it together with a group of TOB bigwigs. This is also a way to take advantage of the momentum.

But such opportunities don't come often, so what can ordinary people like us do?

Another trick is to find the big names around you and communicate with them, firstly to gain knowledge, and secondly to create value by leveraging their potential energy.

If there are no big shots, the best way is to make use of the community. Try to join some communities with real big shots, such as the TO B CGO community I am in, contribute my own value, be willing to help others, and get along well with the group owner... This kind of leverage is something that most people can do. Start by cultivating from one group. When you have potential energy in many groups, you will also have a certain influence.

This is the basic framework for leveraging external forces to achieve a win-win situation. Due to limited time, more content cannot be expanded.

5. Practice yourself and empower your team

More importantly, we can’t go play alone, we have a team.

When we have learned how to build a personal brand and helped individuals achieve traffic growth, don't forget to empower the team and share what you have learned with the team, especially companies with business teams. They need to contact a large number of potential customers every day and are the profit creators of the company. For example, the "Building Employee Personal Brand" training that I give to new employees in the company has always topped the training rankings. I'm just smiling.

Operations/marketing and business, a pair of contradictions in many companies, at this moment, began to complement each other, work together, and strive for the company's revenue growth.

4. Final words

Due to the recent epidemic, many friends have mentioned the midlife crisis again. In fact, I believe that the midlife crisis does not start at the age of 35, but starts with rigid thinking. I also believe that everyone can be a brand, and every copy can divert traffic. The growth of corporate revenue can be accumulated from the growth of each person’s traffic, and the practice from 0 to 1 billion starts from small things.

The last little easter egg, if you feel that you are powerless alone, why not join forces to build a personal brand? If you are a practitioner related to operations/marketing/growth, if you feel that you cannot output content frequently or have limited time, if you feel that it is too hard for one person to persist, then I will use my existing accumulation and organize a group of people to help you optimize basic information, distribute high-quality content, grow with you, and achieve mutual success together. Do you feel excited? After reading this, do you want to hook up with me?

No personal brand is ever achieved overnight. All leverage is gradual and slowly strengthened. This kind of precipitation will be like a snowball on a snowy mountain. It will continue to accumulate on the long slope of your life, becoming thicker and thicker, and the potential energy will become greater and greater to achieve your future self.

Starting today, try to build a personal brand, just like Archimedes' fulcrum, use the lever to leverage your life business model and achieve a win-win situation for both personal and company growth.

My last words to everyone: The only thing you should sell in your life is yourself.

Author: Zou Shu

Source: Uncle Zou's Willfulness