The 5 C’s of Personal Branding: Connection - Ethos3 - A Presentation Training and Design Agency (2024)

• By: Amy Boone

You can have the best ideas and products in the world. It won’t matter a bit if no one knows about them. Getting the word out is a matter of brand connection.

We are in a 5-part blog series covering the 5 C’s of creating your personal brand: clarity, content, connection, creativity, and community. Check out our blogs on clarity and content if you missed them.

Today we are discussing how you can connect your content with your audience via social media and relationships that center around problems and solutions.

Social Media

Social media has done a great deal of good in helping us market our ideas, our products, our companies, and ourselves to a wide and diverse audience. In creating your brand, you should have consistent and high quality content across all channels of social media.

However, we have to be careful that we don’t mistake marketing on social media for true connection of our content to our intended audience. Owner of Marketing Magnitude, Kelly Rossi says, “Even if you pour your heart and soul into your social media marketing campaign, you may not see those efforts rewarded with the one thing you actually care about — new customers.” The problem is, social media can feel distant. Even though it’s aimed at connection, it doesn’t inherently offer the ability to connect your brand to your customers without intention and interaction. In other words, it won’t work if you don’t.

The Online Marketing Institute says that 90% of inbound leads never turn into qualified sales opportunities because people buy from people, not from software. Branding expert and CEO of Mighty Networks, Gina Bianchini says, “We are living in a world of big, massive social networks and so many of them don’t actually allow us to have deeper, more meaningful connections.”

So social media is helpful. But it’s not meant to stand alone. And it can’t replace meaningful human connections. So what can we do to connect our brand to the public?

Problem/Solution Relationship

The most effective way to create true connections hasn’t changed since the beginning of time. It’s still about fostering relationships. For starters, stop selling and start relating. If you believe in what you are selling (even if that is your own personal brand), it becomes easier to foster connections if you focus on problems and solutions. In other words, examine how your brand meets specific needs. Then highlight the problem/solution relationship as you communicate your brand.

The Online Marketing Institute has some great questions that will help you focus on the problem/solution relationship. To me, this sounds a whole lot like audience analysis (knowing your audience so you can create your message just for them). I suggest reading the following questions and following each of them up with this companion question: And how might my brand help?

• What problem is the prospect trying to solve?
• Where does it hurt?
• What is going on in their world that triggered the need?
• What would be their perfect solution if they could describe it?
• What’s the timeline they are working with?
• What information would you need from us to be considered as your solution?

By all means, leverage the power of social media to help you market your brand. But don’t mistake posting for connecting. It takes human effort and relationship to actually make the connections with potential customers.

In our next blog, we’ll get creative and discuss ways to make our brands stand out. In the meantime, check out the presentation design and training services available at Ethos3.

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