In industries like finance and accountancy, setting yourself apart from the crowd can be difficult, especially when competition for roles is so fierce and there is often very little to separate candidates when it comes to qualifications and experience.
Finance professionals are therefore beginning to look more and more to marketing and personal branding principles when searching for new opportunities in order to differentiate themselves and take more control of their online and offline reputations. So if you’re thinking about spending more time cultivating a professional personal brand in finance or accountancy, we’ve outlined some tips to bear in mind below.
Personal branding tips.
We are going to cover:
- Create a personal branding action plan
- Avoid over-blogging
- Remain current and add personality
Create a personal branding action plan.
Creating an action plan can be an extremely effective way of ensuring your personal brand takes shape. In any business, a marketing plan has specific short term and long term goals which evolve over time and you can apply the same principles to yourself and your job prospects.
Set goals and deadlines by which to achieve them and ensure you have a good balance of short and long term priorities. For instance, you could start by cleaning up your social media platforms, ensuring your LinkedIn profile is fully fleshed out and your privacy settings are in order. You could also start drawing up a calendar of key events to attend in the finance sector to ensure you have a broad selection of networking opportunities lined up.
Longer term, consider creating your own website and populating it with blog posts based on industry news and trends or try and make a commitment to be more active on social media. Whatever goals you decide to map out, don’t forget to ensure they meet the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time sensitive) criteria and always remember to check your progress every 2-3 months.
Our recruiters in the finance and accountancy sectors outline their top personal branding tip in the clip below:
Avoid over-blogging.
If you want to take your personal brand seriously and really differentiate yourself from the competition, blogging is pretty much essential. However, professionals in the finance sector have a tendency to ‘over-blog’ and spread themselves too thinly over a variety of different platforms. Obviously having a finely tuned personal website is much more likely to give you the edge over other candidates, but don’t get too hung up on writing hundreds of posts. In fact, experts recommend that you only commit to publishing 2 or 3 posts a month, especially if you want to make sure your insights are well researched and your figures are correct. You should also consider contributing posts to your company’s blog, authoritative finance news sites or even platforms like LinkedIn Pulse as it’s a great way to diversify your distribution and share your knowledge with different audiences.
Looking for more personal branding advice? Check out our comprehensive guide here.
Remain current and add personality.
Financial markets are always fluctuating so it’s vital to stay in touch with the latest updates and trends in your sector. Commit to following key finance publications on Twitter and consider setting up Google alerts for search terms relevant to your specialism so you can react to news quickly. Keeping on top of rapid changes not only shows you are paying attention and knowledgeable about your field, but also demonstrates that you are adaptable and versatile as well.
Also, when it comes to writing new material, don’t be afraid to allow your personality to shine through and experiment with different styles. Finance news can be particularly dry at times so injecting a little bit of personality, originality or even a bit of humour can really help to engage the reader and those all-important recruiters. The same applies to your personal website, whilst you don’t want it to look too casual, there is nothing wrong with writing in a tone you’re more comfortable with as it will allow you to further differentiate yourself from other job seekers.
