How to Use a Personal Brand for Exposure, Leads, and Sales

Are you struggling to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace? Wondering how to leverage your expertise to generate more leads and sales for your business?

In this article, you'll discover how to build and monetize a personal brand that creates exposure, generates qualified leads, and drives sales through authentic relationship building.

Why Personal Brand Building Matters for Marketers: Consumer Research

Personal branding has evolved far beyond influencers and content creators dancing on TikTok. The phenomenon is now infiltrating everyday business in ways that demand serious attention from marketers, entrepreneurs, and professionals across all industries.

Brand Builders Group invested over one hundred thousand dollars into a PhD-led national research study weighted to the US Census to understand exactly how personal branding impacts consumer behavior. The results reveal compelling evidence that having a strong personal brand means you can create measurable business advantages.

Seventy-four percent of Americans say they're more likely to trust someone who has a strong personal brand. When you examine the specific business implications, the data becomes even more striking. Sixty-three percent of people say they're more likely to buy from someone who has an established personal brand. Fifty-seven percent say they're more likely to recommend you, while fifty-five percent say they're more likely to do business with you.

The research reveals that personal branding matters most in professions requiring high levels of trust. The number one profession where Americans said it matters most that their provider has a personal brand is their doctor. Number two was their employer. Other top professions include lawyer, financial advisor, banker, accountant, and chiropractor.

This pattern makes perfect sense when you understand the underlying psychology. The higher the requirement for trust, the more important having an established personal brand becomes. People buy products and services from companies, but they buy relationships and trust from people.

The financial implications are equally significant. Sixty-seven percent of Americans say they would be more likely to spend more money on products or services that come from companies where the founder has a personal brand that aligns with their personal values. This represents a fundamental shift from purchasing decisions based solely on product features or price to decisions influenced by the human representative behind the brand.

How to Market With a Personal Branding Strategy

Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. Don't get caught up in thinking your personal brand is websites, logos, colors, fonts, or specific platforms. When you hear personal brand, make it synonymous with reputation.

Reputation has existed since the dawn of time. You can't ask, “Do I need a personal brand?” anymore than you can ask, “Do I need a reputation?” Whether you need one or not, you have one, or the absence of one is harming you. The only difference between a personal brand and reputation is that personal branding represents the digitization, multiplication, and formal monetization of reputation.

Just like in real life, you wouldn't walk up to a stranger and immediately try to sell them something. You would build a relationship, get to know them, understand their needs, be useful, and add value. Only then, if an opportunity arose where you could help them, would you mention your services. The same principle applies digitally.

While many people think personal branding means earning money through brand deals, sponsorships, or platform payments, the real opportunity lies in using your personal brand to sell what you already do. 

If you're a lawyer, you're not trying to make money selling courses – you're using your personal brand to sell legal services. If you're a chiropractor, you want people to come to your office. If you're a nutritionist, CPA, financial advisor, or esthetician, you're using your personal brand to get people to buy the services you already provide.

This approach creates a sustainable business model where your expertise directly translates to revenue through the work you're already qualified to do, rather than trying to become a content creator or influencer in an entirely different field.

#1: Start With Who You Want to Serve

Whether you're working with your own personal brand or your business owner's personal brand, you actually don't start with why. You start with who. The moment that you're clear on who you're serving, every single other downstream decision becomes clearer. 

If you know who you're serving, you know where to advertise, you know exactly what type of messaging and words to use to attract their attention, you know how much those people can afford, so you know how to price your offerings, you know what to include, you know what type of people you need to hire to staff that, which means you know exactly what type of infrastructure you need to build.

Contrast this with someone who is unclear on their who, or with somebody who makes the huge mistake of saying their brand is to help everyone. When you help everyone, that means you have to advertise everywhere. You have to use messaging that applies to everyone. You have to offer products and services that are ubiquitous and relevant to all people. By definition, that's commoditization.

The clearer and more specific you become about your target audience, the more effectively you can serve them. Even if you're narrow in an industry, topic, service offering, and geography, being broad in the size of business you're trying to reach creates confusion. For example, enterprise organizations have wildly different needs and terminology than medium-sized businesses with a few hundred employees. Medium-sized businesses have wildly different needs from small businesses with ten employees.

Serve the Person You Once Were

You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

This doesn't mean that's the only person you can serve, and it doesn't mean you have to do that. However, it means that the most natural place, the most natural momentum, the most obvious opportunity, the deepest connection, and the path of least resistance is to ask yourself: who is the person I once was?

Nobody is more qualified to speak to that person than you. You can argue with someone's credentials or take issue with research methodology, but you can't argue with a person's results. You can't argue with a person's experience. The credibility lies in the fact that you've walked the path.

The process involves asking yourself these critical questions: What challenges have you conquered? What setbacks have you survived? What obstacles have you overcome? What tragedies have you triumphed over? Therein lies your deepest area of credibility, your deepest level of expertise, and thus, the most opportunity for your brand and business.

There are different ways to shape this narrative. You might literally teach people how to go from your previous situation to your current success. Alternatively, you could focus on the specific skill that got you out of that place. It could be a mindset thing related to networking, relationship building, or a technical skill like graphic design, photography, or becoming a CPA.

Whatever the skill is that got you pragmatically out of that situation becomes the thing you teach, but your stories all talk about the mindset change. There's the mindset piece of any transformation, the method piece with tactical elements, and the motivational piece. Different narratives and angles are possible – it doesn't have to literally be the thing that you once did.

#2: 3 Ways to Generate Exposure Through Strategic Content

Getting exposure via your personal brand requires understanding the intersection of emotional issues and tactical strategy. Many mission-driven messengers worry about appearing vain, conceited, or self-serving. However, they fail to realize that effective personal branding is the opposite of self-centered – it's service-centered.

The way to get exposure is to be so useful that people can't ignore you, to be so helpful that they have to pay attention. It's to make such a positive impact on their life and business that they're not showing up for you – they're showing up for them. And that's how exposure comes.

There are really only three types of content marketing strategies that work effectively for exposure, called the three E's: entertainment, encouragement, and education.

Entertainment: This approach is exemplified by creators like Adley Kinsman.

Her content consists primarily of pranks, emotional heartstrings, and gimmicks that capture attention through entertainment value. While this can be effective, it presents unique challenges.

The only way to really monetize entertainment is through brand deals, platform payments, sponsorships, and advertising revenue based on eyeballs and impressions. You're competing with the best content creators in the world, making this an extremely difficult game to win.

Encouragement: Ed Mylett has built probably the highest-grossing motivational speaking career in the world, commanding one hundred thousand dollars per speech.

Ed talks about motivation, the power of one more, and getting yourself to push harder and do more than you're capable of. He tells the story of redemption – his dad was an alcoholic who was verbally abusive to Ed when he was little. Then he tells the story of how his dad redeemed his own life through sobriety, how Ed developed this level of toughness, and how they became very close in later years. His dad dedicated his life to serving others and helping others break free from alcohol addiction.

Ed talks about how to put your life in service, push yourself to the next level, and achieve wealth building and mindset transformation. He's a tremendous speaker – one of the best in the world from a motivational standpoint. When you listen to him, you want to run through a wall, and it's also tactical.

Education: This is the most accessible strategy for most professionals and the primary focus at Brand Builders Group. The secret here is to teach everything you know and teach it for free. You can teach everything for free because people don't pay as much for information anymore. They pay for organization and application.

You can teach everything for free, but in small bite-sized chunks in random miscellaneous order. What they pay for is the organization of those ideas into a book, course, system, or coaching program. What they pay the most for is application – the support and assistance.Dr. Gabrielle Lyon isn’t the most entertaining or encouraging, but she is a true expert, a medical physician who talks about protein and muscle-centric medicine.

She now has millions of followers, appears on the biggest podcasts in the world, has become a New York Times bestselling author, and has achieved all this by teaching what she knows as a true expert.

Most of what Brand Builders Group teaches has been given away for free. If you wanted to spend thousands of hours listening to every podcast, downloading every YouTube video, watching every social media post, and listening to every podcast appearance, you could organize it yourself. However, most people prefer to have it organized systematically and taught exactly what they need in the moment they need it, directly related to their specific journey.

Save the Best for First

One of the core mantras at Brand Builders Group is “save the best for first.” The next piece of content you put out should be the next best thing you can think of to say. The next best, most useful thing to say.

You don't have to be afraid of giving away too much. What you have to be afraid of is not giving away enough, and then people never return because they're getting pulled away by more entertaining and inspiring content elsewhere.

#3: Generate Leads with the QAC Formula

Creating content that generates leads requires a systematic approach to addressing your audience's most pressing questions. The process begins with identifying exactly what your ideal prospects want to know.

Identifying the Right Questions

Start by going to ChatGPT and asking: “What are the biggest questions that [your target audience] have about [your topic]?” For example, if you're focused on social media marketers and AI, you would ask: “What are the biggest questions that social media marketers have about AI?”

ChatGPT will generate a comprehensive list in seconds. You can also supplement this by reviewing comments on your existing social media platforms, surveying your audience, or surveying your customers to understand their biggest needs and questions.

This approach gives you approximately thirty questions that represent one month's worth of content if you're posting weekly or one quarter's worth if you're posting monthly.

Once you have your questions, apply the QAC formula: Question, Answer, Call to Action.

Question: Start your video with the question itself. Don't say, “Hi, everybody, it's great to see you,” or “How are you doing today?” You have three seconds to capture people's attention. One of the best hooks of all time is a question because it tells people exactly what you're about to tell them. You say things like, “Have you ever wondered what AI is going to do to short-form content?” or “How do we use AI to improve our short-form content?” or “Are you wondering whether AI is going to take your job away?”

Answer: When you answer the question, address both the things that people do wrong and what's the right answer. Talk about mistakes, mindset, and method. This structure makes your content more memorable and positions you as someone who understands the complete landscape of the topic.

Call to Action: You must tell people what to do next. There's a gradient spectrum of commitment for calls to action, ranging from low commitment to high commitment:

• Like this post
  
  
• Share this with a friend who needs to hear this
  
  
• Subscribe or follow for more ideas
  
  
• Leave a comment with your thoughts or best answer
  
  
• Send me a DM with your questions
  
  
• Download my free lead magnet
  
  
• Register for my free training
  
  
• Buy my book or course

The call to action doesn't have to be the same one every time, and it shouldn't be, but there must always be one.

#4: Convert Leads to Sales Using the Four F's

The real money in personal branding doesn't come from massive audiences or viral content. It comes from building relationships and having meaningful conversations. The mindset shift required is crucial: you're not selling to the masses; you're selling to a person. Sales still happen most effectively in a one-on-one environment.

The Dollars Are in the DMs

Most content creators think of comments as annoying interruptions. This perspective is fundamentally wrong. Comments represent people raising their hands, saying, “I like you, I trust you, I want more of you.” You should have a red siren going off when you see a comment like this because that person is one step away from saying, “I will buy from you.”

Your goal is to deliberately move conversations from public spaces to private, one-on-one environments. When someone comments on your content, respond with “Thanks for your comment. I just messaged you” or “I just sent you a private message with the answer.”

This transition moves potential customers through a progression: mass market content leads to comments, comments leads to DMs, and DMs leads to sales conversations. You don't need millions of followers to make millions of dollars. Most businesses only need a couple dozen perfect customers to double their revenue.

The Four F's Sales Process

Once someone is in your DMs, use the Four F's process to guide the conversation toward a potential sale naturally:

F1: How Did You Find Me? This opening question feels natural and helps you understand their journey. They might say they found you through a podcast, social media post, or referral. This information helps you understand what content resonates most with your ideal prospects.

F2: What Was Your Favorite Part? Ask what they've enjoyed most about what they've seen from you so far. They might mention a specific interview, video, podcast episode, or piece of content. This helps you understand what type of value they're seeking and what resonates with them personally.

F3: Tell Me About Your Future Goals This is where selling actually happens. When they are talking, you are selling. Sales is not about talking – it's about listening. The more they talk about their dreams, goals, and future aspirations, the more they sell themselves on the value of achieving those outcomes.

Ask about their future goals, desires, and what they're hoping to accomplish. Listen carefully to understand their specific situation, challenges, and objectives.

F4: Free Resource: Offer them something of value for free. In many businesses, this takes the form of free consultations or strategy calls. Brand Builders Group's entire business model centers on offering everyone a free call.

These free calls are casual, conversational, and not high-pressure. Most people who do a free call won't become clients, but enough will to build a substantial business. The calls focus on understanding their dreams, hopes, goals, and future. For some people, the services naturally align to help them achieve those things.

This approach works because it mirrors natural human relationship building. The free resource serves as what Brand Builders Group calls a “trust soldier” – not just a lead magnet to capture contact information but a genuinely helpful resource that demonstrates your expertise and commitment to serving others.

When you focus on being so useful and helpful that people can't ignore you, several things happen. Even if they don't buy immediately, they often become advocates who refer others. Your customer base becomes your sales force through abundance and generosity rather than pressure or manipulation.

The process removes the sliminess often associated with sales because you're completely service-centered. The more you lean into helping people achieve their goals, the easier selling becomes, the faster it happens, and the more money you make.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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