Developing personal brand for CPA is not just for accountants who run their own firms and practice. It should be considered by any accounting and finance professional. Self-employed CPAs can differential themselves from other competitors; while corporate CPAs can leverage their personal brand for career growth and opportunities.
Why do we care about Personal Branding
So why bother putting up an effort to create your personal brand? Consider these:
- It provides you a reason to spend time figuring out what’s important to you, and therefore what you hope to do professionally.
- It differentiates you from people who do similar work, and create awareness of information that is important to your work.
- It gives you the opportunity to put your best foot forward and build your reputation.
- It provides a way for the right kinds of people/professional opportunities to find you.
- It ensures your external professional image matches your internal values.
- It provides an efficient means for you to give your “gifts” to this world.
Personal branding is a broadcast of yourself to the world in a way that people understand your authenticity. In turn, this creates deep awareness to yourself and others and further bridges a connection and relation between you and the world.
Build a Personal Brand for CPA in 3 Steps
- Establish your mission statement
Start with thinking about and writing down your top 3 values. Personal values are something you stand for firmly, for example honesty, growth, kindness, and etc. Then construct your mission statement with these top values. The mission statement builds the infrastructure of your brand. So that when you go out to promote yourself and you can communicate your brand clearly, because you know who you are and what your values are. Check out some personal mission statement examples here.
- Identify your target market
Think about who you want to attract to your gifts (value proposition, experience, specialty, niche) or who you want to serve to. Ultimately, your target audience would be someone who exchanges monetary value for your services, or who can influence other people, who would exchange monetary value for your services.
- Build your presence assets
Your presence assets are the outlets to get people to know about you and your brand. There are two type of these assets. One is digital or online asset, such as a personal website/blog like this one you are reading and social media accounts like LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. If you would like the technicality of building your digital assets, please refer to this perfect guide by Neil Patel. The other type of asset is an offline asset. These are the traditional media outlets such as business cards, physical networking and community outreach.
Maintain Personal Brand
Like most others, nowadays we mainly build our brand through online presence. A very critical rule in building and maintaining personal brand for CPA is following 80/20 rule. 80% of your communication through your brand should focus on helping and serving your target market and the rest of 20% is for self-promotion.
Another important part of the personal brand maintenance is reputation management. You would like to begin monitoring your online presence by:
•Search for your name at least once per month
•Create a search alert for your name
•Check your privacy settings on all social media accounts.
•Feed your online presence with positive content
Be aware of who might be looking for information about you. Think about to what sites Google will direct searchers for example, thhose searching for information on accountants will be directed to sites such as Yelp, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor, etc.
To conclude, I hope you find this post helpful and would take this opportunity to invite you to connect with me. Here are my LinkedIn and Twitter. Happy Building!