Personal Branding For Life Planners

What is a Personal Brand?
Simply put, a personal brand is how you promote yourself. A personal brand includes the unique combination of skills, experience, and the aspects of your personality that you want to highlight. It paints the picture of how you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behaviour, how you carry yourself and what you stand for.

Why should Life Planners have a sound personal brand?

Is it your dream to become a successful Life Planner?
Is it also your vision to build a healthy pool of clients that seek your expertise?

You would like to build a good relationship with your peers and clients and you also would like to have a good rapport with everyone you encounter, professionally. Therefore, personal branding is incredibly important, and in fact your personal brand can be vital to your professional growth.

A personal brand encapsulates how you present yourself to current and potential clients. It gives you the opportunity to ensure that people see you in the way you want them to. It gives you the opportunity to showcase and highlight the best professional skills you may have, and the positive aspects of your personality that would encourage people to not only approach you but to trust you as well.

Let’s face it, in the digital world today, every single one of us can be searched on the internet. This is the inevitable scenario of today and as such anything that we put out there about ourselves, or anything else that is said about us online as the result of our actions can be accessed at the click of a button. Thus, it is important to be aware of our actions and build a brand that does not stray far from how we wish to be seen. 

Simple steps to building your personal brand:

1. Understand your values and vision

Attract your ideal clients by building a brand that aligns to your values. If you are still working out your values, here are a few questions you can ask yourself to get the ball rolling:

- What can I bring to the table, should this customer choose to buy a policy from me?

- How can my service benefit them?

- What would make my customer recommend my service to his or her family and friends?

If you are a Life Planner and you believe very strongly that you are able to help your customers to take greater initiative to improve their health, then your brand should include aspects of your beliefs.
For example, you can learn more about how to improve health and work these into your conversations with the people you meet. For instance, you can have conversations about the importance of exercise, the benefits of health screenings and how getting enough sleep and eating well can improve overall health and wellbeing.

You can share articles on health in your social media pages or even include snapshots of your own exercise regimen.

In a nutshell, identify your personal values and tie them to your messaging. Do this consistently and you may find that your target clientele will be drawn to you.

2. Collect 360 feedback for continuous improvement

Sometimes, how we see ourselves and how others see us may not be the same and thus, it is important to also know how our peers, superiors and customers see us. Positioning ourselves according to our personal brand but failing to demonstrate values that align to this brand that we have crafted can have detrimental effects instead. Therefore, keep yourself open and receptive to feedback. You can start by asking for honest feedback from the people you meet and build feedback mechanisms into your communication – like for example a simple questionnaire or survey at the end of emails you send out to clients.

If you notice gaps in between your brand and the perception, then it is important to put in the effort to close the gaps by improving your skills and knowledge.

3. Be aware of social media

Even if you use social media for personal and non-professional matters, exercise caution as any negative postings or illegal online activity can destroy your brand. For example, posting racist comments on social media will hurt the feelings of your clients and your colleagues – as a result, your network will shrink in size and people will be reluctant to work with you. As such, it is important to exercise great caution and awareness with all online activity. Think, before you post

In a nutshell, a career as a Life Planner means that you will have to develop a strong network of connections and clients. A sound personal brand that is appealing and positive will have a positive effect on your success in this industry.