Podcast: Leonard Kim Explains How Personal Branding Is Critical to Marketers’ Ultimate Success

By Sean Brooks on Aug 25, 2021

You may provide white label management services to your client or fulfill their reputation management services yourself. But have you given thought to your own personal branding?

A successful marketing agency is built on trust. Your clients are turning the futures of their businesses over to you when they hire your agency for marketing services.  Once a decision maker gets all the facts, their final decision of who to hire is often based on gut feel. Don’t leave that to chance.

As you know, The Marketing Umbrella podcast brings you some of the world’s top experts in their fields. Below is a recent podcast where Umbrella CEO Itamar Shafir interviews with Leonard Kim, an internationally recognized expert on personal branding.

As a principal in a marketing agency, you don’t think you need personal branding? That’s where you are wrong. Leonard will tell you why you need personal branding as well as the secrets of building your personal brand.

Here’s a bit of the podcast transcript so you can get a taste, then go listen to the podcast or watch the video.

Why You Need Honest Personal Branding and How to Achieve It

Itamar Shafir:

“Welcome to the Marketing Umbrella podcast where we talk with successful marketing experts about ways to build and grow your digital marketing agency. Our guest today is a personal branding expert. He is an acclaimed author. He has been recognized by Forbes as a top marketing influencer, by Inc. Magazine as a top digital influencer, by Entrepreneur as a top personal branding expert. His TED talk, Why You Should Let Your Fears Guide You, has been internationally recognized and one of the best TED talks ever. He went from being almost homeless, we’re going to talk to him about that, to becoming a personal branding expert that millions are listening to. I’m excited to say hello to Mr. Leonard Kim. Hi Leonard.”

Leonard Kim:

“Hey, how’s it going?”

Itamar Shafir:

“I’m so excited about this session Leonard because I think personal branding is, at the end of the day, key to success and especially for our listeners who are in the expertise, authority, a domain being a marketing agency, owner, people go to because of your expertise, branding yourself is key. Do you agree to that?”

Leonard Kim:

“It’s definitely the key. A lot of people really look for the person when they’re deciding which agency to go with. Let’s say, if you just typed in like marketing agency to work with in Google, you’d just get a few different results and most of the websites look similar so it’s really hard to navigate and figure out exactly which one to choose. So, it’s a lot easier for people to go to someone based off a personal brand and based off that name brand recognition.”

Itamar Shafir:

“So, being a personal branding expert, if you could scope for us, what do you see? What do you say is personal branding? When you go and help somebody with their personal branding, what exactly are the pain points that you’re attacking?”

Leonard Kim:

“I think the big thing about personal branding is it’s the intersection between how you see yourself and how the world sees you. We see the world a certain way and we’re like, Oh yeah, we’re a certain way to the world and the world sees us a very different way. So, what we have to do is we have to figure out what that intersection is between us. Well, I usually deal with all my clients when I first started working with them as I get two sets of post-it notes and I’m like, On the first set of post-it notes, write down everything that you can think of to describe yourself like if you think you’re smart, funny, charming, handsome, get a business, whatever it may be. If you like swimming, write down everything that you can on, maybe like the blue post-it notes. Then on the red post-it notes, go and pass those out to your friends, family members, colleagues, coworkers, and have them write one word on each of those. And then what you want to do afterwards is you want to match these up.”

Leonard Kim:

“At the blue ones and the red ones match up together, those are probably things that stand out in your personal brand that are the intersection between the two. Now, if you say that you’re funny and no one else says you’re funny. Chances are you’re probably not funny. The good thing about this though is other people are going to say things that you might not have about yourself. Those are the things that of how other people see you, but you don’t see yourself. But those are intersections between your personal brand because then you could drive those points out and make those emerged so then you could have those in your personal brand as well.”

Itamar Shafir:

“So, do you agree with me that when somebody optimizes their personal brand, they’re also optimizing their chances of success?”

Leonard Kim:

“Exactly. And I think with a lot of the people don’t really focus on is exactly how to build a personal brand because they don’t know how to do it. They focus on maybe the Instagram lifestyle. Maybe I’ll go out there and put up a lot of great pictures of exactly what’s going on in my life. But personal brand really is an entry. It’s the mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly combined together where you get to showcase your whole real self to the world.”

Itamar Shafir:

“Yeah. So before, I have a bunch of more questions that are more specific to marketing agencies and personal branding but before we jump into that, I really want you to tell the listeners just a little bit about your background and how you got to helping people with their branding…”

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To hear the rest you can see it here:

You can also listen to the podcast.

After you watch the video or listen to this podcast, we think you’ll agree that personal branding is a lot more than posting lifestyle photos on Instagram. Building your personal brand is a process that requires thoughtful strategy just as you provide strategy to your clients when you resell online reputation management services.

Personal branding isn’t about putting on a front. It’s about revealing who you really are. Sure, be honest about the successes. But also be honest about your struggles. You will find that people can relate to your journey of discovery. Being honest about your fears and struggles can actually help you make sales. How? You’ll need to listen to the podcast or watch the video to find out. And if you want to provide similar services for your clients, consider white label reputation management services.