By Jeff Beals
When starting any endeavor, it only makes sense to pick the low-hanging fruit first. In the self marketing game, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in your current place of employment.
While most of your personal branding time is focused on marketing yourself to the greater world (i.e. prospective clients, future bosses), it is important to remember that the easiest and most logical place to start building your personal brand is right under your nose.
It doesn’t cost you much to focus your self marketing inside your current company. Many professionals work for huge organizations that are full of talented, motivated and highly successful people. In these situations, you have hundreds of personal target audience members right beside you, collecting paychecks from the same entity that gives you yours.
Companies are microcosms of the global economy. They are subcultures of the broader community. They are ideal places to hone your professional and self marketing skills before announcing yourself to a bigger marketplace. It is much easier to become a rock star inside one company than it is to become one in a whole city or the entire country.
You can adopt a number of behaviors to maximize your self-marketing opportunities at work. First and foremost, you simply need to be a good person. The old saying “nice guys finish last” is not true. To get ahead in today’s world you need to be nice and not just nice to your boss and the higher ups. If you are consistently nice to everyone in the company, you will build a stellar reputation.
Being nice does not mean that you become a pushover. On the contrary, having a reputation for treating people well will make others pay attention much more closely when you do have to make bold decisions that make some people unhappy.
You need to build relationships with your colleagues. You don’t necessarily want to be known as the company partier who gets blasted drunk with co-workers every night after work. You do want to have healthy professional relationships with people at work. In fact, research by the Gallup Organization has shown that people who have a “best friend” at work tend to be happier, more effective and stay with the company longer.
Solid work relationships enrich your career and make your job more fun. They are also useful when you need allies during one of those institutional political struggles that companies deal with periodically.
Suffice it to say, you have a personal brand INSIDE your company, so make a self marketing plan for internal as well as external audiences.
Jeff Beals is a professional speaker and award-winning author, who helps professionals enjoy greater success through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. He delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. To discuss booking a presentation, go to JeffBeals.com or email at info@jeffbeals.com or call us at (402) 637-9300.
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