lifestyle

How to Market Yourself Effectively

When I moved to Japan, I joined an email list for foreigners.  Recently, I received an email advertising a bike that someone wanted to sell.  In effect it read:

Bike for sale, email for details

What a useless promotion.  The writer had unlimited space to market his bike and all he wrote was that.  My reaction was that it must be a rusty old bike that he wanted to palm off and so it wasn’t worth his time to write about it.

A while later, the same person re-submitted the advertisement.  This time he added the brand, model name and price of the bike.  This still wasn’t enough detail, but it was enough for me to realise that this was a great bike for sale.  I forwarded the email to a friend who had been looking for such a bike.  It turns out that there was nothing wrong with it.  It was a beautiful racing machine and the price was very good, it was just the marketing that was terrible.

The same thing can happen when we market ourselves to our world.  Regardless of the capabilities that we would like the world to see, we fail to effectively market ourselves and so the world looks straight by us.

The first thing that we must realise, is that to live effectively in this world, to achieve our goals and make a difference, we are highly dependent on interacting with others.  Even simple acts like walking down a street, require subconscious cooperation with other pedestrians.  How much more so, when we want to effectively relate with the surgeon who will operate on our internal organs.  Even, apparently self sufficient people, are still dependent on others if they want to live effectively.

We need to work with others and they need to work with someone, but why would they chose us?  Marketing yourself is simply communicating why someone would want to interact with you.  It includes honestly presenting your positive features - the ones that are valuable in that particular relationship - in a way that interests the other person.  It is not deception or charade.  It is simply presenting your self in your best light, in a way that the other can see and appreciate.

In the past, I have been hesitant to deliberately set out to market myself.  Perhaps this is because of an unhelpful link in my subconscious that relates self-marketing to boasting.  It is clear that this link is invalid if I market myself with integrity, but my subconscious still tries to hold me back.  Maybe this reluctance to market yourself to others is holding back your interactions with others as well?

Marketing yourself to others effectively is never a hard sell.  It should be as natural as sharing your name.  It is communication that the listener will find interesting and will be looking for, as they seek to understand you.  All you have to do is supply the information that they are looking for. 

When you meet someone who needs help to cross the street, they need to know that they will be safe in your hands.  The way you speak, your appearance, and the way you act will all become part of your marketing message.  You want to say, and they want to hear, that you are a capable and trustworthy person to help them across the road.  If you effectively market yourself, then your help will be appreciated and you have made the world a better place, if you don’t market yourself effectively, the other person may refuse your help, and you haven’t made any difference.

The benefits of effectively marketing yourself are:

1. You will ease social interactions as you can rapidly build rapport with others
2. You will become more valuable to others as they can see how you can help them
3. You will become more valuable in your own eyes as you can see clearly your own positive traits.
4. You will achieve your goals more effectively as you will be able to secure the cooperation of others more easily.

7 simple steps to get your marketing program started:

1. Think of an example of a situation where you have something valuable to contribute.  Write down what valuable factors you bring to that situation.
2. Next to each of your valuable characteristics, write down one way that you did or could have communicated this value early on in the interaction.  It may be with words, or your personal presentation.  It may be with your eyes or gestures of your hands.  It may be your body or what you carry with you.  How will people know what you have to offer?
3. Carry this excercise with you for the next week.  Always asking yourself “What can we achieve here?  What characteristic do I hold that will help us achieve it? What do I need to communicate to this person to facilitate that achievement?  How do I communicate it?”
4.  Practice the art of looking in the mirror before you leave the house and pretending you are a stranger.  Ask “Why would I want to interact with this person that I see in the mirror?”  Even a smile can make someone see your positive side more clearly.
5.  Develop a positive way of talking to yourself.  Consciously avoid putting down your achievements and your useful characteristics.  On the other hand don’t build them up to be something that they aren’t.  Hold a healthy, productive view of yourself and you will be able to effectively communicate it to others.
6.  Ask before your tell.  The first thing you want to do in an interaction is listen to the other person.  If you have effectively presented yourself physically, the way you dress, the way you walk and your genuinely interested smile will already have commanded their attention.  Now listen to them and ask their story.  One easy and quick way to market yourself to others is simply to demonstrate that you are sincerely interested in them.  Afterwards you may get the opportunity to tell your story.
7. Allow others to praise you rather than doing it yourself.   You are presenting information about yourself.  Allow them to get excited about it if they choose.  There is a fine line between marketing yourself and being full of yourself.  You will feel it when you reach it, don’t cross that line. 

Too often, we sell ourselves short not by who we are, but by how we communicate who we are.  Practice effectively marketing yourself and down the track you will find that you are able to achieve your goals and make the world a better place through your interaction with others.

Do you have a story about how marketing yourself has paid off for you in the past?  We’d love to hear it, so leave us a comment below.

Thanks

Tom