Why Creating a Website Makes Sense for Personal Branding Success

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As someone who has had the opportunity and been responsible for building high-performing marketing teams, the process of selecting talent can be frustrating. Marketing professionals are knowledgeable on how to position, differentiate, message, and showcase; or at least they should be. We get swamped with hundreds of typical and often-times boring run-of-the-mill resumes from applications. Recruiters typically assess keywords combinations and minimum requirements for hiring managers who then do about a 3-4 minute review before deciding next steps. I often asked myself why a modern marketer doesn’t do more to really stand apart and sell me on why their brand and offering is viable for my business. I mean the decision-making process for making a hire is so similar to a buyer’s journey already. Shouldn’t talent appeal to what decision makers want to see?

I want to be sold on what you can do for my business by looking at how you sell yourself. Do you stand out in a competitive talent market?

Some people might still enjoy the antiquated black and white resume and cover letter. Sure I might see bits and pieces of information and results on how you can drive results if I go looking for it. Is there enough there to suggest your skills are really different from the next applicant and make me want to talk to you? With all of the modern tools and applications at our disposal, why great talent isn’t doing more to sell me on them makes me scratch my head. You are your own brand and I am looking for your services to enhance my business.

Think of your personal website as the main place where people go to learn about you. I advise others to keep your actual resume somewhat limited in its information. This is much the same way we would not create a marketing brochure for our product that explained EVERYTHING! Make them want to see more.

Below I will outline simple, yet worthwhile strategies for utilizing a career showcase website in your personal branding strategy. There are a lot of other examples out there but I will highlight my own strategy and website I utilize during my career transition. Sure, not every hiring manager will view through the same lens but like in business, a lot of times it is about selling the sizzle and not the steak. Make an memorable impression when you can!


Creating a great looking website that showcases your brand and capabilities to potential employers is easier than you think.

Let’s begin. Do you have a website for your personal brand?

What does almost every business have in common today? You guessed it, they are online showcasing their brand and company out there for interested people to see. A website is a given in today’s digital economy and is often a primary source of business for many. Marketing professionals understand this and much of our time is spent optimizing this channel to increase awareness and modernization. You should at the very minimum utilize a landing page or personal showcase to help position your skills, experience, portfolio items (if you have them). There really isn’t any excuse anymore with the plethora of tools available online to create an inexpensive and decent looking website for people of all skill levels. You don’t need to be a design professional either. Here are some winning ideas:

1. WordPress Hosting Instance (pick your provider) and a good theme

WordPress is a proven content management system utilized by companies and professional web developers alike for over a decade. I have created many websites for companies using WordPress and its ease-of-use is often times better than enterprise systems I use in corporate environments. With many fantastic paid themes available at sites such as ThemeForest, you can find something that works for your personal brand. I utilize GoDaddy’s WordPress Hosting and run my website on WordPress. A word of caution however, is that there is a bit of a learning curve. I encourage all marketing professionals to have working knowledge of how to build in a CMS and WordPress is a great way to learn.

Utilize a website builder and hosting hybrid solution (less advanced)

For those of us that don’t work in corporate CMS updates and website creation, there are many affordable and user-friendly solutions on the market. You can certainly be a novice and less creative and still put forth a fantastic effort. They feature drag-and-drop builders and many templates to give you the look and feel you want. Here are a few I would recommend to get started.

2. Wix (www.wix.com)

Go to Wix.com

Wix offers a variety of professionally designed and easy to use templates right out of the box. I wouldn’t say they are going to be the most impressive website design but it is better than none at all. It is simple to get started and its free.

3. Site123 (www.site123.com)

Go to Site123.com

I really like the intuitive user experience that greets you when you get the to site. The navigation is great and it gets you started creating your website by asking what type of site you want. Like the other options here, if your creativity or technical capability is limited, they offer great ways to build a personal website to showcase your talents and capabilities.

4. GoDaddy Website Builder (www.godaddy.com)

Go to GoDaddy.com

GoDaddy sells a lot of different products but they have really jumped into the pre-made website bundle game. They offer a curation of professionally designed templates to choose from and getting started is free, like the others. Again, you are not going to light the world on fire from a agency-like visual perspective but it can get the job done.

What should I include or showcase on my site?

Think of your personal website as the main place where people go to learn about you. I advise others to keep your actual resume somewhat limited in its information. This is much the same way we would not create a marketing brochure for our product that explained EVERYTHING! Include call-to-action on your resume and application that links them back to your site. This is where you want to drive the traffic and interest. If your goal is to get into discussion phase in a highly competitive talent market, then standing out is of critical importance to your success. Here is a list of items I recommend including on your site and that I have used with success:

  1. A section about you, a brief narrative and summary of your experiences. This is the foundation of your value-statement and objective. It explains what you can bring to the table.
  2. What are you good at? Include your expertise and focus strengths that the employer will be wanting to see. Do you have certifications, other skills, or capabilities with software packages? You want to feature them.
  3. Your work history. I try to think of this section as the resume but expanded significantly. I utilize metrics such as “revenue increased”, “followers created”, “purchases increased” and so forth. Summary of quantification builds trust and credibility in your capability. Make sure you are keeping track of these metrics on your career journey.
  4. Do you have projects or portfolio? Trust me portfolios are not just for designers and creatives. Whether you created assets, presentations, and other items by yourself or as part of a team, include them. Humans are innately visual and our curiosity drives us to seek more information. It presents information in a way that your resume alone simply can’t.
  5. Education You can include this in expertise but I recommend keeping it separate so it doesn’t get lost in the information.
  6. A way to be contacted You can create a very simple form for people to email you as well as include phone number. I would avoid putting stuff like your home address on your website when it is available to the public. Resume distribution with address you can control; not so much with your website.
  7. Reviews and Recommendations! I can not stress enough that people put getting reviews and reputations at close to the top of their personal branding strategy. Reputation management is a critical strategy for business success so why not for you as well? As a consumer, we use recommendations or reviews for the businesses and products that we want to purchase. Your next hiring manager can be influenced in the same way when weighing you against your competition.

Conclusion

Your resume alone should not be thought of as the only asset showcasing you. In fact, it should not even be at the center of your strategy. At best a resume is a tool to get traffic to your most valuable asset, your personal website. A personal branding website can do much more to showcase your skills, expertise, work history, and capabilities than just a resume alone. There are many affordable and easy-to-use options available for marketing professionals on the market. Remember, this is your personal brand and marketing strategy so putting forth extra effort, no matter the experience-level, can be valuable when your are trying to differentiate.

Personal Branding Success Factors for Marketing Professionals

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Here I am doing something I never really anticipated needing to do in my career—writing blog posts on my own personal experiences. The story unfolds with me being in another job transition. My previous employer made the decision to close the local office in Scottsdale, AZ where I worked but offered me the ability to relocate to retain my position in Kansas City. Unable to uproot my family, I had to sacrifice my position (sacrifice seems like a harsh word) for our life here in the Valley. My wife’s career, daughter’s therapies, and family nearby keep us firmly entrenched and loving it here in the southwest.

The decision was never really a difficult one but I find myself, like many, playing the frustrating waiting game of finding the right role for my next career move. So I set out to do what I do best — create a marketing plan and strategy around my job search and position my offering and capabilities in the market. My hope is that I can help others find success whether they are in a transition or are planning one soon.

Marketing professionals are great at marketing themselves right? The truth is not always. Below are 8 strategies for personal branding success.

Many people would think that a career marketing professional would be great at marketing themselves. As it turns out, many are not. It is one thing to market our company’s products and services but another thing to position ourselves successfully in a competitive talent market. Questions such as “where do I start?”, “what can I do?”, and “how can I truly stand out?” all seem easy to answer until you sit down and put pen to paper.

So I start my personal blogging experience highlighting the importance of treating your personal brand as a business. If you are a fellow marketing professional reading this, perhaps my experience and guidance will help you whether you are thinking about a career move or are currently in one. I try to keep things rather strategic for now and will deep dive into tactical in other posts.

1. Start With an Objective

Yes, you heard that right. You should have an objective in mind when beginning your personal branding journey. Sounds like a Captain Obvious statement but what seemed like a good idea in the beginning can change paths and unravel rather quickly in the real world. Any great marketing campaign starts with a clear and concise objective. This acts as your lantern in the dark, helping illuminate the way through various tactics you can employ that will get you to your end goal. If you find yourself changing your objective often then you might need to ask yourself whether it was the right one to begin with.

2. Market Your Offer Like a Business

If you are like me, you have been heavily involved in your company’s product or services and how to position them successfully in the competitive market. You, yes you are very much like the product or service. You have features, functionalities, a price (commonly referred to as your compensation), a value proposition and so forth. The idea, of course, is to put together a branding and communications strategy that will give you competitive advantage in the talent market. Simply emboldening a resume with some colors and blasting it to various job postings may get you a call but does it really set you apart from the crowd? A marketing professional has a lot of knowledge in a lot of key areas that are considered benefits/advantages to employers. Your goal is to make sure the message and delivery of that message is on point enough to get you further through the hiring manager’s decision funnel.

Everything is practically digital in the majority of our marketing tactics right? You should be capturing your achievements at every stop in your career and showcasing them in various and creative ways.

3. Embrace Digital

As with the statement above, we have to learn a lot of tactics and terminology to be effective as marketing professionals. Like the businesses we run, the digital economy has impacted our ability to position our brand and generate awareness. Think about your personal brand and what channels are available to you to properly position yourself and your capabilities to your right target audience. Most are in digital right? You send a PDF resume to an HRIS system to hopefully get an email response. Several stages further in the process do we actually go offline and have human communications. So this is a critical point to make here. It stands to reason that success in your personal brand is strongly tied to your ability to utilize the digital channels to your advantage. My own experience has taught me to build a personal capabilities website, blog, Linkedin, Twitter, a resume that serves to create traffic to my site, and analytics to monitor how well I am doing. We are generating traffic and awareness and it is all a numbers game.

4. Continue to Seek Opportunities to Learn

Knowledge isn’t stationary, it evolves and adapts to the world around us. Marketing strategy and the tactics that execute it change at a rapid pace. I admit that I felt there was not much more I needed to “prove” with my academic knowledge or skill set that I could bring to an employer. I have shown the ability to drive significant business results and growth at every stop. As I come to be reminded, we are in a feature and benefit world that drives decision makers towards value perception. Continued executive education, niche strategy marketing courses, and certifications are all great ways to add more focused and relevant knowledge that is applicable to your role and creates immediate value.

5. Create Relationships

Relationships are the driving force of purchase decision making and economic growth. A business must have good relationships with their target audience and customers. Employees at a firm must forge good relationships to effectively run a business working together. In personal career branding, relationships create opportunity. Seeking and finding influencers and serving your cause is vital for creating opportunity pipeline. I have been spending time messaging and getting in front of executive placement firms; creating a relationship that will hopefully serve our mutual interests. These relationships create a sense of trust as a candidate they would feel good about putting in front of their hard-earned clients. We can oftentimes find sources of relationships going outside of the direct career channel. Joining your local AMA chapter, technology councils, etc. are all ways to get your message out there and create awareness in your capabilities.

6. Be Self Serving

Let’s be honest, the whole idea and function of a personal career branding strategy is self-serving. It is supposed to be. If it weren’t, it is highly unlikely we would be able to set our skills and experience apart from the rest. This blog article serves the interest of my strategy as I am able to syndicate my thought leadership and content into social media. Likes, shares, and clicks to the website drive traffic where others can learn of my marketing leadership experience and capabilities. The advise here is to not be afraid to serve the needs of your strategy as you would for the company’s product or service you market. Find creative ways to disseminate your message and create positive awareness.

Do not be afraid to gain new skills and give yourself every competitive advantage possible. More critical, however, is never believe that going to such lengths is unnecessary. If you are not doing so, your competition is and will gladly take your place.

7. Quantify Your Career Successes

As consumers, we love numbers and quantification. It helps us realize and rationalize reasons to purchase a particular product or service. They are easily comparable to the competition and if the competition does not have them, it normally puts them at a disadvantage. In personal career branding, the success you as a marketing professional have had driving your critical area of impact should be quantifiable. Everything is practically digital in the majority of our marketing tactics right? You should be capturing your achievements at every stop in your career and showcasing them in various and creative ways. For me, I am like most in that I am very visual. Seeing graphs, bold numbers, and achievements create a very real impact to my sub-conscious. You utilize these strategies on your product sheets and corporate websites; you should be doing this with your personal brand assets as well.

8.  Measure and Evolve

Pick a marketing strategy, any strategy and I bet it doesn’t stay the same. It isn’t supposed to after all as we know marketing is at best, a hypothesis and action. Your website or digital campaign can launch, but analysis of results and optimization actions will ultimately dictate how successful it will be in the end. That being said, look for ways to measure digital activity from your personal career branding strategy. If you create a website, make sure to have Google Analytics. Seek qualitative and constructive feedback from your relationships. If interests are mutually aligned, these people want to help you succeed. Can you A/B test aspects of your personal go-to-market strategy? Look for ways to ultimately understand whether your personal branding objective is being realized through data acquisition. Track as much as you can and look at patterns that show where the strategy can use tweaking to produce the results you are seeking.

Conclusion

In summary it is critical for you to embrace that times change rapidly, especially if you had been in a role for many years. The talent marketplace continues to get more competitive every day and you can find yourself getting behind very fast. Treating your career and experience like your business would a product or service is critical to success. Your knowledge are your features, your skills are your functionality, and your experience is your benefit. Viewing them this way ensures you create a marketing strategy for your career and personal brand that will help you achieve your objectives. Do not be afraid to gain new skills and give yourself every competitive advantage possible. More critical, however, is never believe that going to such lengths is unnecessary. If you are not doing so, your competition is and will gladly take your place.