A personal brand is an asset for people across professions, and this is certainly true for finance and accounting professionals.
If you’re a professional working in the finance industry, personal branding has a host of benefits ranging from building your reputation in the industry to helping with job searches and the ability to monetize your brand.
In this article we’ll explain the ins and outs of personal branding for finance professionals—including explaining the benefits that should make you want a personal brand in the first place, offering tips for building your personal brand, and sharing examples of finance professionals with personal brands you can emulate.
Overview of Personal Branding for Finance and Accounting Professionals Topics Covered in This Blog:
The benefits of personal branding for finance and accounting professionals includes the more obvious positive outcomes like a higher volume of career opportunities and business growth, but it also includes things like network expansion and personal growth.
Developing a personal brand will put your skillset in the spotlight. You’ll be able to tangibly display the skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated through years of work, study, and practice.
Activities associated with personal branding such as audience building, creating products and services, and learning new skills are all tangible benefits that support your career growth.
For example, if your personal brand content focuses on offering industry commentary and sharing finance tips, you will be constantly researching and staying up to date on your industry in order to create that content.
If your personal brand strategy involves creating new products, or offering services, you will have additional examples of your work to display on your resume from these projects.
A personal brand is a knowledge-and-skill billboard because it simultaneously forces you to learn new skills while giving your new ways to demonstrate those skills to employers and clients.
Related: The Pros and Cons of Personal Branding
Personal branding can help you increase your chances for career advancement. If you work as an independent accountant or financial advisor, your personal brand is a marketing channel for promoting your practice.
On the other hand, if you’re employed by an organization, a personal brand helps you get recognized in your field and can serve as a career safety net thanks to the network growth it offers. An established personal brand can lead you to new job opportunities, which can lead to better working conditions, a good work/life balance, the opportunity to improve your skills, and higher income.
Related: Personal Branding Challenges: Tips for Overcoming the Most Common Personal Branding Challenges
Professional Skills
As mentioned above, a personal brand forces you to develop your skills. If you want to grow on social media you have to learn audience and community building. If you want to start an ecommerce side hustle you need to learn about websites and ecommerce platforms—the list goes on.
These new skills not only support more personal brand growth if you’re an entrepreneur with a finance or accounting practice. Those skills will also benefit you in your full time role if you are employed by an organization.
Personal Growth
In addition to developing professional skills, building a personal brand leads to personal growth as well. For example, working to build an audience and make connections will give you the opportunity to practice networking and soft skills such as communication and leadership. We’ve also discussed how introverts can approach personal branding and use it to get more comfortable with things like posting content publicly, putting themselves out there, and public speaking.
Building a personal brand is an empowering and confidence building journey that will see you improve tangible skills in your field as a finance professional, and also lead to personal growth.
Related: Personal Branding Checklist - Essentials Every Personal Brand Needs [Free Guide + Examples]
Now that we’ve discussed some of the benefits of personal branding, it’s time to get tactical and discuss how you can build your own personal brand. To help you get started, we’ve outlined several personal branding tips for finance and accounting professionals.
When considering how to go about personal branding for finance, social media platforms present themselves as a great place to start. Many of the top examples of personal brands all share one thing in common: they leveraged social media to start building their audiences.
Social media platforms can be used to connect with other professionals in your niche, find content creation styles and topics that best suit you, and to build audiences that can lead to new clients, job opportunities, and other invaluable connections.
The key to getting started is to choose a social media platform based on two primary factors:
For instance, if you’re good at written communication, you can use LinkedIn or Twitter to write LInkedIn posts and Tweets.
If you are comfortable creating video content, videos perform well on social media and present an engaging content type you can use to build your brand. For example, you could create videos where you offer quick and practical finance tips on TikTok or Instagram.
You can do the same thing on YouTube by taking advantage of YouTube shorts, or record longer form YouTube videos with finance case studies or podcast episodes interviewing fellow finance professionals.
Find a social media channel that aligns to your personal brand goals and start building there.
Related: Personal Brand Audit: Assess Your Personal Brand [free guide]
While creating your own content is a key part of building a personal brand, you can also start engaging with other people, like fellow financial professionals, industry influencers, and potential clients and employers.
Engaging with content from other finance professionals will lead to better engagement and exposure for your personal brand in several ways:
Set “Mini Goals”
To make engaging with other people’s content a tangible practice, try using our “mini goals” strategy. The idea is to set mini goals, or quotas, for things like content publishing, or in this case, engaging with other people’s content. These mini goals should be simple, attainable, and stack up to your long term personal brand goals.
For example, if you wanted to build your personal brand on Facebook, a mini goal for this long term goal would be to commit to posting on Facebook 3 times per week.
A mini goal for engaging with other people’s content could be aiming to reply to two Tweets per day from finance thought leaders on Twitter. Another example could be leaving a comment on 1 TikTok video related to finance per day.
Try setting your own mini goals to keep yourself accountable for engaging with other people’s content, and ultimately achieving your long term goals.
Related: Personal Branding Action Plan - Checklist + Complete Guide for Starting Your Personal Brand
To offer further guidance, in this section we will take a look at examples of personal branding for finance professionals that you can emulate in your own brand.
Tascha is a startup advisor, investor, and finance influencer with over 175K followers on Twitter. Tascha has built a strong following and reputation for offering explanations for what is happening in the financial markets, and offering data and analysis in order to inform her followers. All of her posts are created in a manner that offers her followers digestible and easy to understand information, such as this thread that provides a crash course on cryptocurrency economics.
There is a lot to like and emulate with Tashcha’s personal brand, as she has established herself as a knowledgeable and accessible finance thought leader.
Tatiana Londono is a real estate agent and coach with over 2.8 million followers on TikTok.
Londono’s approach combines tangible advice to help fellow real estate professionals and home buyers with a creative and fun theme to the content she creates. For example, she interviews her employees about their progress, shares her own success stories, provides market analysis, and shares examples of the software and tools she uses to do her job.
If you want to build your personal brand like Tatiana Londono, create attractive videos with helpful finance tips, find an authentic approach to target a specific audience, and post consistently.
Related: The Importance of Personal Branding
Kenny is a financial advisor with over 227K followers on TikTok. His goal is to help people take control of their financial future and achieve financial independence.
Kenny built his personal brand by posting TikTok videos at a pace averaging two posts per day, demonstrating both content quality and consistency. Kenny has diversified the topics his personal brand is known for, as he discusses things ranging from personal finance to side hustle ideas and self motivation.
Financial professionals looking to build a personal brand can learn from Kenny’s straight forward approach in which the content he creates comes off as genuine, no frills, and actionable in terms of the advice he offers.
Related: Tools for Personal Branding: Best Marketing Tools to Add to Your Personal Branding Toolkit
To brand yourself as a financial advisor, consider the following steps:
Related: Personal Brand Framework: 5 Steps to Defining Your Personal Brand [plus a free template]
An example of a personal brand can be found in Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal brand. The marketing and business guru has created a reputation for himself that positions him as a thought leader, helps him grow his audience, and serves as a marketing channel for his various businesses, such as his marketing agency VaynerMedia.
You can learn a lot from Vaynerchuk’s personal brand. It has a clear target audience, key messages designed for those target audiences, attributes that make his brand stand out, established channels for delivering those messages, and underlying business goals that his personal brand serves.
Related: Examples of Personal Brands: 5 Personal Brand Examples From Creators Who Built Huge Audiences and Successful Businesses
A personal brand is an invaluable career asset for finance and accounting professionals. If you are considering starting your own personal brand, or want to expand your existing reputation as a finance thought leader, leverage the personal branding tips for finance and accounting professionals covered in this blog post.
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