How To Build A Personal Brand Profile As Respected Coach With Lauren Clemett

Show Notes

Background

Known as the Brand Navigator, Lauren is an International Award-Winning Personal Branding Specialist with over 30 years experience in brand management working within world-leading advertising agencies. She is a five-time bestselling author, Neurobranding expert and Managing Director of The Audacious Agency, where she helps entrepreneurs, leaders and change-makers build their profile to stand-out and be well known, well paid and wanted.

Make Your Brand Your Compass

Known as the brand navigator and the reason for that was, Lauren grew up living in the bush in New Zealand. And she used to use maps and compasses back in the day before the internet help us around the place. She also loves orienteering but didn’t like the running part very much but she loves making compass. The bit where you could figure out very quickly at the minute. You had the compass, and you aligned everything exactly the direction you wanted to go. And I now talk about that as being a really great analogy, especially for people. If you’ve, left corporate and you’re not sure about how to brand and market yourself, or you’re new to the world of coaching, you’re not quite sure how to position yourself in the marketplace.

It can be very confusing and very overwhelming so try to make it really simple by making it tangible. If you think about it this way, that your brand is your compass. It’s what keeps you on true north. You know, when you are offered an opportunity or somebody asked you those awful words, you should do something.

And then inside your gut go, oh, “I don’t know about that”. Now, look, it could either be just a little bit of fear that you need to overcome, but if it really doesn’t feel right and it’s hard work, then don’t. When you’re in alignment with your life’s purpose and doing the things that fit with your brand, things are easy.

Doors swing open, right? Whereas when you’re not on course, when you’re slightly off direction and you can be a couple of degrees off, it just doesn’t feel right. And it’s hard work and it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to work properly. And that’s because you’re not doing what your brand is supposed to do. So your brand is your compass that keeps you on that true north and the right direction.

So having that compass makes sure that you can’t make those fundamental mistakes.

Use Your Map as Your Marketing Action Plan

You need branding and you need marketing. You need to be promoting yourself, but you also need purpose. You need to know who your audience is, exactly what your niche in coaching is, because you’re on a very wide platform. And also, to make sure that you are planning it all out because you want to be spending most of your time coaching, not most of your time wasting money and effort on stuff that doesn’t work.

At the moment there’s very little ROI, on most digital marketing and platforms, it’s very expensive, very costly. And you can waste money very quickly.

Overcome Your Fear

When you decide that you want your own business, when you stepped out of your working environment and decided to be coach, you should be brave and overcome your fear. You say to yourself “I want that freedom, that lifestyle, that entrepreneurial opportunity. And then your brain changes. This is common. It can happen to a lot with people. They overcome that amygdala, that fear center in their brain that’s there to keep them safe and keeps you in that nice comfort zone. And you’ve told your brain basically, like, “I know it’s going to be hard”. I have to go out and get clients. I have to promote myself. I have to do all these things. I have to create a program. I throw out a book. I have to get up and speak all the sort of stuff that you might not want to do. I have to do this stuff, and I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

And you’ve overcome that fear center. You’ve got a superhuman brain. You’ve overpowered, you’re infused into.

Do A Litmus Test

However, with this superhuman power comes the Kryptonite and the Kryptonite for entrepreneurs and coaches mostly is this bright, shiny object that us all know that we love. Opportunity to go and meet Tony Robbins or that opportunity to start a webcast. Or I should start a book, or I should do a program and it’s like, I should, you should.

And all these things happening. Look at squirrel they look good but they do lead us off track. The idea of having your brain as the true north is you know, when it feels off and you can quickly correct. And then it becomes more like a litmus test. But if somebody does come to you with an opportunity to appear on a podcast or to be on a webcast or a TV program, or pay money to be in a magazine or whatever it is, or combine up with other coaches and run a retreat.

There could be all sorts of opportunities. If you just sit for a minute with your brand and let it be a litmus test. And would my brand actually do that? Am I in front of the right audience? Is this the right message? Is this the right time for what I’m doing? I mean, is it going to take me closer to my goal, or is this just a distraction?

If you can sit with it just for a moment and let that gel, if it is the right thing, then go for it 100%. It is but just take that little bit of time to just check in with your brand. Is this what my brain should be doing before you say yes to stuff? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s really important, particularly with these opportunities where they go, oh, you can be one of the top 15 coaches in your city, state, country, world.

Oh yes. But it’s going to cost you X amount of US dollars and it’s always US dollars. I multiply it up for all of us that are not in the US. So you guys get an 80 when you don’t have to worry that multiply. But it’s always in US dollars and it’s going to actually be a good fit for you.

Or is it just a good fit for them? Because at the end of the day, they’re a business too. So a lot of people will come and offer you things that actually, is no good for you at all but it’s good for them. So that’s where you’ve really got to be careful. And like you said, do that litmus test, check in before you go and say yes.

Use Opportunity as Your Leverage

A lot of the time in the coaching industry, we undervalue our time. If you’ve been invited to speak at an event or do a sponsorship, when you are charged for something or your time, you have to use four times that to leverage it to make it worthwhile

So maybe you’ve been offered like $1,000 to be in a magazine. We’ll put you on the front cover. Top 20 coaches in the world, whatever it is, give you an idea, probably about $1,000. You’re going to appear in that magazine and no matter what they say, and they’ll distribute it, they’ll send it out like this and so on.

They might. They’ve got readership of 800,000 people. Whatever it is, you still have to leverage it. Yeah. So, you’re then going to have to spend the time and the money to take that article and repurpose it, put it on your blog, put it on your LinkedIn profile. You’re going to need to send it out to your database, put it on your website, put it in social media over the next few months, put it on your collateral.

Make sure it’s included. Normalize all the things that you do. So in order to leverage anything that you do in terms of marketing and promoting yourself is either going to be a call in some way, audio time or your money.

Choose Opportunity That Converts Money

When you took an opportunity to be an award winner or a podcast guest or, speaker or in a magazine, , ask yourself, “ How am I going to use that to level up my profile?” Will it make you more visible? If it’s not going to work, if it’s something that like a magazine that your audience would never read, like Gardening Weekly or something, whatever it is, no matter how free that opportunity might be, it’s a waste of your time because it’s never going to reach the right audience and it’s not going to make any sense.

It would be like someone who is a mum, but their kids are now well and truly grown up and their audience is corporate. Going for an old mumpreneur award. Yeah, yeah, you might want it. That’ll be lovely. It’d be nice to spend on the. They run an amazing conference. It’s a fantastic community but to leverage that would be very difficult because your audience doesn’t care that you’re a mum. They care that you’re a high-performance coach. And so you’d be better off entering an award to do with high performance and maybe, maybe being a bit of a maverick in the coaching industry or something that the corporate world would go, hey, we need that, because that’s different to what we’ve had before. Yeah. And for our international audience, Aussie mum is an Australian.

Awards program that is obviously Aussie for Australian. And yeah, it’s the mum produced by. So quite often it is mums with younger children that have done really well in their space and overcome the work life balance and all of that kind of thing. So yeah, really, really important. So definitely, looking at your audience, the other thing of course, about leveraging is it the you then have to be able to make money out of it.

So it’s great to be that spotlight and have all those views and likes and everything else. But if you don’t actually have anything that you can sell these people or any way of getting some kind of money, then you’re going to have a lovely holiday and a lovely hobby, but you’re not actually going to have a business. So leveling up is amazing and what we need to do, leveraging is very important, but actually being able to convert it into money for your business is the key.

Links

Golf is Not a Game of Perfect: Rotella, Dr. Bob
Audacious Agency

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