Getting Comfortable With Marketing Yourself

I believe you have unique value to offer the world. There are problems for you to solve. Projects to pursue. And a specific customer / audience to serve, whether that be internal or external to your organization. And to progress in your career, you will need to seek out higher level work to hone your skills and develop your expertise. If you want some control over your professional health, then I submit that you have an obligation to adopt personal marketing practices. Your unique gifts deserve to be manifested and see the light of day. And that typically doesn’t happen without effort. If you are feeling under-utilized, you need to devise ways of growing. If you are in a work situation that is a bad fit for you, you owe it to yourself to find a better one. If there are unrealized projects or career directions burning a hole in your brain, you need to look into these. And even if you are comfortable with your career position right now, can you afford to be complacent? Your work exists in a marketplace and you have competition. If you are a commodity, you are in trouble. You can, and should be, a unique product. Which means you don’t fit everywhere. Not everyone is your customer. The more you fine tune your thing, the more valuable you become to a smaller, more defined target market and the smaller your competition set gets. Which is wonderful. Except that you need to seek out and connect with your market and develop your reputation. Personal marketing is not a bag of tricks. While there are a lot of tactics, the core activities include:

• Developing a stronger sense of your professional value

• Finding clarity on your natural target markets

• Planning out your direction and areas of focus

• Developing and managing your personal brand and professional story

• Purposefully managing your profile platform (LinkedIn and others)

• Developing your body of work and managing your reputation in your field

• Building key relationships and/or ensuring that you are known and have access to work opportunity channels

• And being market ready when it comes time to make a move

Granted, personal marketing is not something that you might be comfortable with. You may hold beliefs about personal promotion being something unseemly. You may not buy-in to the value and therefore not prioritize the actions required. And you may not possess the skills or knowledge to develop your brand, positioning and market. These are common but surmountable obstacles. To truly own your future and create the level 10 career you might desire, these personal marketing principles deserve your attention. This is about mitigating risk and managing the downside as well as developing the upside. Our professional life, both directly and indirectly, can have a major impact on our overall well-being. Take an ownership mind-set and assess your awareness, attitude and readiness relative to these personal marketing practices. As always, I am here to support you.