Personal Branding | The Power of Imagery | Portraits, Headshots, Lifestyle, and BTS
Personal Branding | Portraits , Head Shots , Life Style and Behind the Scenes Images.
Personal Branding, marketing of one’s career as a Brand, distinguishing yourself as the expert in your niche through the process of exploring, expanding and showcasing your values, strengths, goals and persona to build an attractive presence online.
Captivating Imagery is the principal tool in any marketing endeavor.
People feel before they read, don’t they, and seeing a picture allows them to feel what you are about before they have the chance to read what you’re telling them.
Images enhance your narrative and strengthen your connection with your community.
But, why should you care about your Personal Brand?
Increasing your visibility and recognisability in your field makes it easier for colleagues, employers, client and collaborators to find and remember you leading to you enjoying more career opportunities.
Let me know ask you a question, would you rather work with someone who shows a clear professional work ethic and expertise, who has taken the time to show their credibility and to build trust or someone who just tells you they are an expert but haven’t invested in themselves enough to prove it with perceivable records.
Investing in yourself is the wisest thing you can do.
Not only does your personal brand afford you the opportunity to grow your career but it grants you control over your public perception, allowing you to highlight your positive attributes, achievements and qualities which, when confronted by an antagonist bad player can have them looking silly and you looking even better in comparison.
So now you’ve seen the benefits of your personal brand but how do you make one?
We’ll start by conducting a self assessment, what narrative to we wish to tell of ourselves – what are our strengths our achievements and what do we want to be known by and by whom we do we wish to known?
Once we have our foundation we will begin focusing on creating an online presence, the most important aspect of this is our content library.
It is important to create and maintain momentum, but you decide the pace. In your library you will need:
Portraits
Headshots
Lifestyle Images
Behind the Scenes Images
Portraits: Striking Story Tellers
Typically, more artistic and stylised to reflect the Brands essence and message such as confidence, creativity, professionalism, or approachability, and used in conjunction with
About Pages, Showing the Personalities behind the brand.
Social Media Profiles, Portraits designed to captivate and engage your community, encouraging them to delve deeper into your brand. - Think Feel Good Story Content
Marketing Collateral, Brochures, Business Cards and Posters benefit a personal, human touch that with a bit of artistic twist become phenomenal talk pieces and relationship builders.
Portrait of Janina
Headshots: Powerful Professional Presentors
Every professional has a head shot in their toolkit, you may have seen them on LinkedIn, within Author Bio on your favourite blog, book, or article and within your most trusted companies website.
Headshots are clean, straightforward and focused on trust and professionalism.
Typically they will use either Rembrandt or Butterfly lighting profiles, but some photographers may use Clam and others depending upon the image intention and what is most complimentary to the facial structure.
Portrait of Thomas Symington
Lifestyle Image, Relatable Relationship Builders
Lifestyle Images depict real-life inaction, they are pictures of you, your team, your partners and associates engaging in on-brand activities, highlighting your product/service in use, showing the results and experiences your community will enjoy with your support and most importantly build relatability in your brand by having contact points your community resonates with, building, nurturing and strengthening your relationships. They are typical poised as Candid and depict a typical day enjoying the benefits of your brand association.
Life Style Image of Christopher
Behind the Scenes (BTS) Humanizing, Engaging, Trust Growers.
BTS Material shows the inner working’s of your Brand, what it takes to do what you do. These build trust by allowing people to see that below the surface you know how to swim – you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it to best serve your community. It shows a more raw, unrefined version you brand that humanises you highlighting the effort and passion to serve that makes your brand more approachable and authentic, which can promote engagement and enrich your community relationships further.
BTS can include: Shots of your workspace, the (Generic) stages of your process, or interactions with your team and clients.
Behind The Scenes with Tom and Tom
Launching your Holistic Marketing Campaign
You will want to take a holistic approach to your personal brand’s content calendar. Remember to consider how each type of image fits within your overall narrative.
For example:
Portraits can used as for key touch points on your websites and social media profiles.
Headshots for networking focused activities, such as seminars, lanyards, business cards.
Lifestyle Images for relationship building and sharing of aspirational content to affirm the success of your offering and relatable content to build trust.
BTS shots to build deeper connections through your brand, email campaigns or news releases.
Don’t forget to maintain overarching consistency with your images, there style, tone, and quality creates cohesive visual identity across all platforms.
However there is some flexibility as a phone photo serves as a more personal, spur of the moment, time piece which can create more authenticity.
KEY TIPS:
Stories secure sales so consider utilizing a range of images from your library to tell a comprehensive story about your brand, highlighting your many strengths, USP’s, achievements.
Be mindful of the strengths of each platform and the standard of content. Consider that LinkedIn expects professional head shots as standard and Instagram thrives on lifestyle and BTS content.
Final Comments
Personal branding thrives with a stocked Image Library full of diverse types of images—portraits, headshots, lifestyle, and BTS, each working hard to serve a distinct yet complementary role to grow your influence, opportunities and income.
You now have the knowledge and strategy to enhance your visual storytelling but also strengthen your connection with your audience. By weaving these elements into a cohesive marketing campaign, you can create a powerful and authentic personal brand that resonates across various platforms and has you surging towards the top of the industry landscape.
Your Personal Brand will differentiate you in a crowded market, highlighting your powerful distinct qualities and making you the easy choice when it comes to decision time.
Your professional reputation strengthened through strategic and authentic information releases with powerful imagery that recognizes your accomplishments, boosts your reliability, and showcases your expertise boosting the respect from your colleagues and your influence in your field.
Laying the very foundations for future career growth as your personal brand grows, so does your potential for ongoing career advancement and success.
By being known, by being trusted you are afforded better resilience with changing economic tides through your strengthened network and community recognition.
By taking control over your personal brand you seize control of your professional narrative leading to greater personal and professional fulfillment.