75 - Branding and Staying Relevant w/ Megan MacNeill

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today’s guest is from across the globe in Australia--Megan MacNeill is the founder of Relevant, where she’s helping ambitious industry leaders get noticed, get relevant and stay remembered by creating strategies that increase their impact and influence where it matters to them.    Megan’s take on why branding matters boils down to understanding that people are going to brand you if you don’t get ahead of them and brand yourself. Taking control of your own personal brand is having a bit of an impact or an influence on what people think, feel, and say about you. Some people still won't like you, and that's totally okay. You don't have to be everyone's cup of tea.   If you’re a solopreneur, or you've got a small team, then the best logo you're going to have is your face. Your face is your logo, and you take it with you through your career. You take it with you when you start your first business. You take it with you when you start your next business. It's your values. It's what aligns with you. The biggest thing is to be you.    It’s important to have a color palette that goes with what you're doing.  when you turn up in person, you have a certain look, you might have a color.   The best way to increase our brand's recognition, nothing is stronger than face-to-face, but it’s hard to scale. The next best thing is if you can get on a stage. When you're in a room with someone, they feel like they really know you. Even though we’re in a period where that’s hard to do, you can still do that one too many in the form of webinars or being a guest speaker at online conferences, or going live on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Follow your audience.    LinkedIn is a powerful tool. Think of it as a landing page, not as a resume. Never mind putting all of your jobs and all of the skills that you have and all the little tasks that you've done because people don't really care. They just care about you. They care about your stories. They care about how you can help them. So start thinking of it with that kind of mindset. Never mind all the experience and all the stuff down at the bottom, take your time filling that in. Get that top part filled in first, because most people don't scroll down.    Remember, articles on LinkedIn don’t get priority. If you're making videos or images, things that do get priority on LinkedIn, you might see a spike in the number of people that are seeing it, engagement, etc, whereas those metrics may go down for your articles. But, the shelf life of articles is amazing, and in three months or in three years’ time, someone could be reading that article.   Key Takeaways Branding matters boils down to understanding that people are going to brand you if you don’t get ahead of them and brand yourself.  Your face is your logo, and you take it with you through your career. LinkedIn is a powerful tool. Think of it as a landing page, not as a resume.   LINKS   relevantbusiness.com.au