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Tips to enhance your digital reputation

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Brand guru Lauren Kress shares four tips to strengthen your personal brand so that you stand out in a digital crowd.

As the world continues to fight the rapid spread of coronavirus, confining many people to their homes and radically altering the way we live and work, it’s becoming clear just how important it is to have a strong digital presence if we want to stay connected.  

Brand guru, entrepreneur and UNSW alumna Lauren Kress (BSc '11, MCDArtDes '15) says that in a digital age, promoting just about anything – including yourself – isn’t simply a fast and fierce grab for eyeballs. In fact, understanding how to keep attention long enough to create a memorable interaction, or compel action, is both a science and an art. It involves juggling considerations around how to engage audiences with content that is unique to you, playing to your strengths, and knowing your audience while simultaneously aiming to offer value and insight that people crave.

When it comes to building your digital presence and reputation, Lauren has these four recommendations

Know yourself - that's the biggest thing.

Take a closer look at your strengths and weaknesses to find your voice, and from there, determine the platforms that are going to work best for you. If you're good at talking on camera, make video content. If you're a good writer, start a blog. If you're great at striking up a conversation, interview relevant experts. You don't have to be good at making every type of media and platform work for you - play to your strengths. 

Your strengths aren't what make you perfect.

Lauren’s biggest learning when it comes to building a personal brand is that it isn’t about trying to present a perfect image to the world. Instead, it should be the things we shy away from - our mistakes, our quirks, our vulnerabilities and our humanness. That’s what makes us distinct and it’s ultimately what people fall in love with.

Make content that people can become addicted to, and make it often. 

Our brain is wired for a story. Stories should deliver information to us in an easy-to-understand and emotionally relevant way. Content that hooks people in with a relevant headline and keeps them reading with an engaging story is very formulaic. By understanding how to tell your story, and telling it often, you are able to build mental availability in the minds of the people you want to connect with.

Keep track of your content performance, and adjust accordingly. 

Look at what's working and what's not working. Track everything. Whenever you publish something, look at what happens to that content over time. Look at the comments; look at who's sharing it. This is a powerful way to essentially experiment on your audience and see what lures them in and retains their attention. Learn how to optimise your content marketing using a test and learn approach.

With most of the world at home and our attention fixated on screens, it’s more important than ever to share how you can create value for others in the digital arena. You only have a few seconds to signal to the brain that your content is worthy of its attention. This holds especially true with the omnipresent idea that something “more interesting” could be just a short thumb scroll away!

 

Lauren Kress

Lauren Kress (BSc '11, MCDArtDes '15) is a millennial, theoretically trained scientist and growth innovator whose knowledge of investment-led growth is transforming decision making in business. Lauren is the creator of the Home Start YouTube series, host of the Grow Your Brand podcast, and founder of The Change Makers Collective: a science-led growth consultancy for visionary thinkers and leaders who are changing the world for the better.

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