Use it to stand out, advance your career and lay the foundation for your next evolution.
Healthcare and personal branding for executives have a very cool and interesting thing in common. In both arenas, consistency is king.
Consistency of care in a health setting means low variability from shift to shift, day to day, nurse to nurse, resident to resident, attending to attending and patient to patient. Consistency in healthcare also includes consistent dosing of medicine and billing! But in all, consistency in healthcare builds trust and lays the foundation for better outcomes.
In personal branding for executives, consistency also builds trust and lays the foundation for better outcomes.
Consistency in your professional brand means always delivering messages aligned with your core brand in the same tone, across channels. So, your “elevator pitch” (or transformation statement as I like to call it) and your LinkedIn profile need to say the same thing, albeit appropriately for the channel. Your resume and your website must be clearly written and speak to the same audience. And what you say when you introduce yourself at a business dinner should be the same as what you say about yourself at the beginning of an industry conference presentation.
You know all about the value of consistency in healthcare—or your particular industry—because you lead toward it every day. At Revealing Genius, we are leaders in helping leaders do professional branding. Let’s dive deeper into what we know about the importance of consistency in your professional branding efforts.
Consistency Builds Clarity, Conciseness and Trust
When you know who you are and what you stand for, you can more clearly and concisely articulate your professional brand across every channel.
The ETA™ process from Revealing Genius has been used many, many times to help leaders and executives clarify their uniqueness so they can talk about it better, more rapidly achieve the next milestone in their careers and, ultimately, transform the world for the better.
Doing the work to be clear and concise when expressing your professional brand is increasingly important in today’s fast-moving world.
Consider these statistics:
Google User Experience Research says mobile phone consumers will move on to another site if they don’t connect with the one they’re on in two seconds.
LinkedIn says most visitors to its professional networking site form an impression of a person from their profile in as little as 50 milliseconds. That’s half a second.
Forbes suggests that all it takes for someone looking at your online presence to start determining your value is a tenth of a second.
Having consistent messaging about who you are and what you stand for is even more important when you have so little time to connect with your key audiences!
When you add to this that most people consume a large portion of their messaging and content on their smartphones—devices that have, at largest, screens measuring six or seven inches from corner to corner—you can see why consistent, concise brand messaging is invaluable.
Do a good job with your messaging and you’ll build trust with the people you most want to reach. And trust is where buying decisions come from.
According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. In other words, someone’s decision to work with a company or a person is more of an emotional decision than a practical one.
By having the same message for your key audiences about what you do and who you most want to serve—regardless of communication channel—you instill feelings of recognition, comfort and trust, and are more likely to make people have a positive impression of you.
Consistency Forms the Foundation for Brand Evolution
A recent article from Entrepreneur magazine also suggests that having a consistent brand can lay the foundation for being able to shift your brand in good ways later. If, because of your professional branding work, you have consistently communicated your purpose, your audiences will better respond to your making an appropriate brand shift.
Author Jessica Wong writes this about company brands, and this idea can be easily translated to professional brands:
“Changes to a brand may affect its identity but not the underlying values. In other instances, it is obvious how a change in brand values is both positive and necessary. Climate change is an example of the latter. A few decades ago, few companies would have considered that taking a stance on climate change is important for them. However, as awareness of the dangers of global warming is increasing, more consumers base their choices on criteria such as sustainability.
“As a result, brands need to change to continue to be perceived as a force for good,” Wong writes, even asserting, “Change can be necessary to maintain consistency.”
Consistency Is King In Personal Branding For Executives
At Revealing Genius, we call our ETA process “time-proven” because we’ve seen so many leaders and executives in healthcare and other industries use it successfully. They’ve created professional brands that build trust with their key stakeholders, helping to make key connections. They’ve also reached important career milestones because of their ability to communicate clearly and concisely who they are, who they serve and the key transformation only they can facilitate. They’ve even been able to evolve their brands as their careers evolve, consistently applying their core values to their new situation.
You can do this too. We look forward to assisting you.
