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Are you ready to uplevel your coaching or consulting business? Do you dream of building a personal brand that attracts high-paying clients? Are you craving to finally break the ceiling and go from six to seven figures? All while working fewer hours and being better aligned with your work. If so, your quickest path to getting there is to build a strong personal brand.
With a powerful personal brand, you can attract your dream clients, sell high-ticket coaching, and elevate yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Creating a brand, however, is not easy, and takes a lot of discipline, hard work, and knowing what not to do. In this article, I’ll dive into the 4 common mistakes entrepreneurs make that hurt their personal brand.
What is a Personal Brand
Before jumping into the common personal branding mistakes that coaches and consultants make, let’s clarify what a personal brand is. According to the Harvard Business Review, a personal brand is the set of values you would like others to believe you have.
Unlike your credibility, which is how others see you, a personal brand is how you desire other people to see you. It’s the respect you desire to earn from them in relation to your field. It is the process of intentionally promoting an image and perception of yourself that influences how people connect with you. In short, controlling perception is a huge part of having a successful personal brand.
Mistake #1: Trying to Be an Expert in Too Many Things
The first personal branding mistake a lot of coaches, consultants and other entrepreneurs make is having too many business specializations or being an expert in too many things. You cannot build a personal brand by being the Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of none. If you want to build a powerful personal brand as a coach, where you’re viewed as a true expert and can land those high-paying clients, you need to have a focused business.
To accomplish this you’ll want to avoid calling yourself a million different things. I see this all the time among struggling coaches and consultants. They’re a business coach, social media strategist, SEO expert, author, realtor, sell supplements on the side – you get the idea.
If you want to build a powerful brand, you need to get clear and focused. One of my favorite quotes by the late Steve Jobs says with focus and simplicity you can move mountains.
With focus and simplicity, you can move mountains. – Steve Jobs
Simplify and elevate your personal brand by becoming known as the expert who can solve one thing. Once you scale your business you can always offer other things, but it’ll be extremely difficult to gain traction if you come out the gate trying to be everything to everyone. As the saying goes, when you try to be everything to everyone you end up being nothing to no one.
I teach a concept called the Ladder of Influence where I break down the 4 levels of influence, the challenges at each stage, and how to successfully ascend through them, so you can grow your influence and authority and make 7 figures. Be sure to download a copy of the free 33-page guide here.
Mistake #2: Using the Wrong Images
Another personal branding mistake I see is using the wrong images on your website, your social media, and other marketing collateral. This is usually the most common thing people think of when it comes to personal branding – the external image component of it.
When you use the wrong or dated images of yourself, you can really negatively affect your positioning. Remember how you’re perceived can impact the perception of your overall personal brand. You should look professional, even expensive, if you are targeting a high-caliber market and selling high-ticket services. All of which should be reflected in your photos.
Trust and rapport can be created on social media.
Photography can go a lot of different directions, but it needs to be relevant to your target market. Obviously, if you are say a health coach, you are probably going to have photos of you exercising wearing form-fitting clothes, showing off your physique, and drinking smoothies like you would see on Instagram.
However, that does not work when you’re an executive coach trying to market to a corporate clientele. Having photos where you’re showing off your body isn’t professional for your market, so it’s important that you dress relative to the people you serve.
This is where skirt suits or pants suits would look really good or even having professional dresses. Even if you are a man who never wears a tie, having a sports coat even over a nice T-shirt with some slacks or jeans looks great.
Not only do you want to dress for your market but you also want to make sure that your clothes represent your brand. If you’re going for a high-end look you’re going to want to wear nicer clothes. This could mean anything from the style of clothes you’re wearing to having clothes that are dry cleaned, ironed, and pressed.
Again for women, if you’re marketing to corporate, I would encourage you not to wear very revealing clothes. Let your message and your work and the results that you get for your clients speak louder than showing off your figure. It’s okay to wear form-fitting outfits but avoid wearing low-cut tops or very short skirts that wouldn’t fly in a corporate setting. This is also going to help you attract the right clients because they’re going to be interested in your work and not your sexuality.
As an additional note, make sure that your photos are current and not something from the 90s. The name of the game on social media is relevancy, which means you need to be seen as someone that is relevant, that is current, that is up-to-date with the way that things are working today and that can be reflected in your personal image and clothing.
Ever seen someone who is stuck in another era? It affects your sales. So if you need to see a new hairstylist to get a fresh haircut, or if you need to go shopping you can always hire a personal stylist to help you. For many people, something as simple as a makeover can skyrocket your confidence because you can discover how to dress for success and really to your best body shape, coloring, and more.
Another important aspect when it comes to your personal brand photos is having it done professionally. I mean a professional photo shoot with a professional hair and makeup artist. This is really, really powerful. They can do a better job than 90% of the people out there doing their own hair and makeup, and the artistry can help you appear your very best and gain even more powerful photos. Furthermore, people can tell when had your photos taken professionally, which says more to them about just how committed you are to being a professional.
Once you have your photos you will want to pull those into all your marketing assets so your new images are reflected across your social media, on your landing pages, and in your assets.
From personal experience as a consultant for coaches, getting the image of your personal brand right is one of the most challenging things I see people struggling with. It feels icky and outside of their comfort zone. But remember that you want to dress to impress, and more importantly you want to look the part for that next-level client you’re dreaming of going after. Stepping out of your comfort zone and elevating how you show up online and in all that you do will help you build your personal brand and it will absolutely help attract high-paying clients.
Mistake #3: Having the Wrong Message
Another common mistake people make that weakens their positioning and hurts their personal brand is having the wrong message. Your messaging matters and 90% of struggling coaches and consultants I meet are struggling not because their offer isn’t good or they can’t solve people’s problems, but rather because they fail to effectively communicate their value in the marketplace.
This is one of the areas I work very intensively with my clients on and in my coaching programs. When you have your marketing messaging dialed in, you will attract the best clients. Take it from me, an expert in high-end client attraction and sales. By getting this right, I have helped countless clients land high five- and even six-figure deals!
Trust and rapport can be created on social media. In fact, when your marketing messaging is dialed in and you have the right systems in place, it takes care of 80% of the sales conversation.
When you look the part and when you have the right message your initial discovery call is really an alignment piece. Do you like each other? Do you want to work together? Yes. Then you close them!
To improve your messaging you want to make sure that you are speaking directly to your ideal client’s pains and desires. This begins with fully understanding who your ideal client is.
Many people come to me saying they know their ideal clients and yet when we start working together we see that they don’t really know them intricately. They might have been going after the wrong kind of client and once I find out their genius and their background I show them how to reposition who they are in the marketplace, so that they can go after next-level clients. And yes, they go on to close high five- and six-figure deals.
Other times I have clients that stay within the same market, but don’t fully understand how to articulate their that person’s pains and desires. Together, we work on the messaging to not only concisely communicate those but also to powerfully present their solution. Most of the time people get very long-winded with their words when really we need to say as few words as possible. There’s a real art and science to that.
When it comes to your messaging it directly affects how you are positioned, or perceived, online. It further affects your personal brand and your ability to have a pipeline full of high-paying clients, so you need to get it right. The best words should magnetize your perfect client to you and, quite frankly, repel anyone who is not a fit because ultimately you don’t want to waste your time with looky-loos, those who want free advice, or those who have no intention of buying. You want to attract the very best people who see your value, don’t have time to waste, want results right now, and are eager to enroll.
The wrong words attract the wrong people, so the best way to master your messaging is to work with a messaging expert like myself to understand the strategy you need and help you put the right words in place.
Mistake #4: Using the Wrong Colors or Fonts
The final common mistake that can weaken your positioning, affect how you’re perceived online, and yes affect your personal brand in a negative way, is having the wrong brand colors or fonts. A lot of people make the mistake of choosing colors that they love but aren’t necessarily the colors that are right for their market and for the solution that they provide.
You need to understand the psychology of color and what is going to resonate with your ideal clients related to the services you provide. These are often not your favorite colors or maybe not even ones that you would wear on a regular basis, but that’s okay because this isn’t about you it’s about magnetizing the right client.
Font choice is a huge component that a lot of people miss the mark on. For example, if you’re marketing to corporate clients you want to stay away from a whimsical font because it doesn’t convey an image of trust. Remember corporate is used to clean and professional fonts, so you’ll want to stick with those that are more familiar with what they are used to seeing. This is where a brand expert, someone who really understands how to leverage human psychology using colors and font can be very helpful to assist you in honing your personal brand from a visual standpoint.
Putting it All Together
If you can avoid these common mistakes that coaches and consultants make you are on a solid footing for building a personal brand. Don’t be afraid to focus on one thing, or to pick one lane where you can gain traction and create expert authority around the problems that you solve. If you can get really current with your look, meaning with your hairstyle, your clothing, and your overall image, you can capture the attention your dream clients, and with the right messaging coupled with the right colors and fonts build trust and magnetize them to work with you. It’s all of these factors combined that will help you build a powerful personal brand that attracts high-paying clients and high-ticket sales.
What will be your first step in building your personal brand as a coach or consultant? Let me know in the comments below or by booking a call with me. I would love to hear from you.
