Nowadays family, friends, colleagues and even brands judge you by the way you present yourself in social and personal situations. Hence there is a pressure to aspire to become the type of person you feel you would respect or want to be with.

The best way to determine your personal brand is to look around at your role models that you like to listen to, emulate and admire. Over years of interviewing Heads of States, Royal families, CEOs, Prime Ministers, I have discovered that role models tend to be parents or world leaders who inspire change that has brought them fame and success in their respective careers.

Every individual aspires towards being different and having a unique identity that would eventually become their personal brand. Most companies do regular staff assessments and have a staff development culture where they find the strengths and attributes of members of the team that make them stand out.

When addressing the need to develop their personal brand, many people these days look towards social media influencers who often become overnight successes with bought followers and likes. The youth who intellectually are not able to connect the dots and cave in to the pressure to feel wanted hence face classic delusions.

There are very few people who can really influence and this only comes with real authentic passion that translates into all aspects of the life of the influencer and not just for one perfect Instagram post that gets selected over thirty versions of the same image.

The sad reality is that by the time the search for that perfect picture ends, the magical moment is gone and the experience is not real anymore and results in mental roadblocks towards a more productive and long-term personal growth.

The challenge thus lies in taking bold steps to develop a personal brand that brings out the best of what you see in your role models, teachers and people you admire. Often, engaging with a mentor helps in guiding and shaping your personal brand.

Successful people reflect on their sense of self and observe habits and actions they relate to and respect. The best option naturally is to be with people who have similar values.

Hence if you are looking for authenticity and want to be true to yourself, then emulating someone else from a medium like Instagram where everything is posted for effect may result in disappointment especially when realization sets in that the image is staged and doctored and may not reflect the reality of the situation projected.

Enhancing your personal brand with improvements within your comfort zone and taking actions that reflect your values results in a meaningful and fulfilling lifestyle plus it helps in creating an authentic personal brand that makes you the person you want to be.

By Shereen Shabnam

Objectives allow you to keep track of your progress and give you some purpose and direction within your role. Building your career is hard work, and often we get so used to ‘doing it’ that we lose sight of how far we’ve come, how much we’ve improved and developed during the process.

As a manager, it is absolutely essential you provide this structure for your employees and ensure they’re working towards achieving overarching business goals and aren’t feeling lost. There really is nothing worse than feeling like you have no direction and you’re waiting to be given tasks from the top down rather than able to define your own structure and way of working in order to meet your objectives and contribute to the business goals.

You have a responsibility as a manager to maintain motivation and morale within your team and setting objectives is a great way to do this.

However, setting these objectives isn’t as easy as randomly selecting a few things you think are easily trackable – they should be designed to challenge your team and help them build skills they may be currently lacking.

An objective should embody focus on all facets of an individual, their role within a team, and the larger organization around them.

For example, at the start of the year, I set my Head of Marketing, Sian an objective to win three new campaigns this year, primarily focused around the SME market. Every week, she will send me an update and outline the steps she’s taken to make this happen. By setting a clear, measurable, achievable and relevant objective, Sian is able to clearly outline her weekly tasks, always keeping her objective in mind.

Apart from setting yearly objectives and goals for your employees, you should also set objectives for the week that align with the ‘bigger picture’. Asking for weekly reports from your team will also help you keep track of progress and identify any struggles people are having that require your attention.

At the end of the day, this is all about giving your employees purpose. Everybody wants to do something they feel gives them purpose, something rewarding and worthwhile. How are they supposed to experience this if they don’t have clearly set out objectives to help them get there?

By James Caan CBE

Serial Entrepreneur and Investor

The sooner they realize that marketing plays just as important a role in their venture’s success as any of the other stated factors, the more beneficial it would prove for them in the long-term.

The First Step in Setting a Marketing Budget

If you want to make a solid marketing plan, you need to start by identifying basic factors like your target market and how to reach out to that market efficiently. If you have little or no marketing experience, you may even hire an experienced marketing professional to help you create a sound plan and then follow it up with a strategy that works.

To make sure that your marketing plan will actually result in positive outcomes, ask yourself if it address these basic five challenges – current competition, future competition, consumers’ bargaining power, suppliers’ bargaining power, and substitute products. If the answer is yes, then your plan will act as a useful guide in the road ahead. If not, it wouldn’t make any difference if you didn’t have a plan.

It may also help to evaluate your marketing plan once it’s been active for about four months. Though your plan may need a year to show significant results, the signs start showing by the end of the first four months.

Setting a Budget

There is no clear and definite answer to how much of your funds must be allocated for the purpose of marketing. To calculate your costs accurately, you will need to first list key parameters such as expected spending on assets, spending on expenses and how much cash you will need to keep the business running the first few months, when the sales will be bare minimum.

Once you have these numbers figured, you will be able to conclude fairly accurately the funding amount your business requires to take off. Setting your marketing budget to about 10 percent of this amount is generally advisable. However, many examples showcase companies who have done very well with a tighter budget and others failing despite reserving a bigger budget for marketing.

Budget Smartly for Higher ROI

Unlike a few decades ago, it has become easier to reach out to varied target groups in an inexpensive manner using social media and targeted advertising tools such as mobile app advertising. Try striking a balance between these innovative options and other traditional choices like cold calling and doorstep sales for maximum ROI.

By

Sankara Narayanan

Head of Operations at Techstory.in