really tell you much about a person. You would only have scratched the surface, and you would need to base all of your beliefs about that person on less than what they’d write on a doctor’s office form.
That’s why top-notch marketers take the time to go deeper. They want to know much more about their Target Market. They want to get into the heads of the people who are buying their brands and understand their behavior. In marketing, this information is called “psychographics,” which sounds pretty heavy, but basically means personal information that tells you what makes a particular person or group of people tick.
How does this apply to personal branding? Well, in general, your Audience is anyone or any company you want to impact with your personal brand. In your job search process, this includes the people who could hire you for the kind of job you want after graduation. Your Audience might simply be the person who interviews you, but you may not know at first who your interviewer or even your potential immediate supervisor will be. So, in the beginning of your job search, your job- seeking personal brand Audience might be the entire company or a group of people within the company, such as the division or department where you’d like to work.
Now, you’re probably thinking: “But how can I know so much about an Audience that I haven’t even met yet? I don’t know anyone at most of the companies where I want to apply for a job. In fact, I don’t even know which companies I’m interested in yet!”
That’s fair. It’s true that when you’re looking for a new job, learning about your Audience may seem challenging at first. Even choosing companies to target can be confusing, especially when you’re looking seriously at the professional job market for the first time. But don’t worry. We’re going to walk through this process together. Learning about your Audience before you land a job is definitely doable, and all it takes is some smart investigating, which can actually be fun if you let it. With a little bit of research, you can find out which companies are the best fit for YOUTM. In fact, you may be surprised how much you can learn about a company and its people with just a little bit of effort.
Getting Ready to Get Ready
When you’re at the very beginning of your job search after (or just before) graduation, you’re in more of a company search than anything else. There are literally thousands of companies out there, so choosing the right ones to target may feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. But as the determined Brand Manager of YOUTM, it’s your task to decide which companies should receive your resume — the ones that will truly turn into an Audience for your job-seeker personal brand.
How do you do that? Start by asking yourself some questions about the “type” of companies you would be interested in. What is most important to you?
•Location?
•Size of the company?
•Culture of the company?
•Learning and training focus?
•Opportunities for advancement?
•Whether the company gives back to the community?
You might even rate these elements from 1 to 6 — with 1 as your highest priority and 6 as your lowest priority. Once you’ve decided what aspects of a company matter most to you, it will be easier to dig deeper and find out more about the companies that feel right to you.
If you don’t know which companies in your field are out there, do an Internet search, and begin to gather names. Then, you can look through their websites and see how they measure up on your rating scale. As you start to see which companies have the qualities and the types of opportunities you’re looking for, you can narrow down your choices.
Become a Creative Detective
Once you’ve selected your top companies, it’s time to do some digging. At this point, the Audience for your job-seeker personal brand is the entire company you’re targeting. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re expected to learn about every single person in a big company! Not only is that impossible, but it’s not necessary either.
Instead, you can think of the entire company as an “individual” with its own set of facts and attitudes. As a great marketing detective, you can take what you learn about a company and begin to piece together a profile of how it operates, just as you would if you were learning about one specific person. You’ll discover if the company has a relaxed, more casual atmosphere or a more structured, buttoned-down setting. You’ll find out if the company thinks that coming up with new ideas is important or if it wants employees to stick strictly to policy — that type of thing. Here are some of the ways you can dig deeper to find out more about the companies you’re interested in:
Talk, Talk, Talk. Take the time to ask your friends and other people you meet if they know anyone who currently works for, or formerly worked for, your target companies (your potential Audience). If the employee is someone your friend knows well, you could even call or e-mail that person to ask them a few questions about the company.
Meet and Greet. If you get the chance to attend an event where you’d be able to meet people who work at one of the companies you’ve targeted, don’t let the opportunity get away! Of course, in that kind of situation, it’s critical to keep up a professional image — even if it’s a casual event — because you’ll be meeting people face-to-face for the first time. If you pick up business cards at these events, make notes on the back about what the person said, what they looked like, and where you met them.
Search the Internet. Thanks to the worldwide web, it’s easier than ever to find out a lot about potential employers. The number of online directories has quadrupled in the past ten years. While looking over the company’s website is the absolute best first place to start, it still only scratches the surface of what you can find out about a company online. With just a few research skills, you can uncover an enormous amount of great information that you can use to put together a more detailed profile of your target companies.
Try typing the following into your search engine to discover more about a company:
[Company name] [your desired division or department]
[Company name] annual report
[Company name] press release
[Company name] event
[Company name] brochure
[Company name] newsletter
[Company name] e-zine
[Company name] charity
[Company name] values
[Company name] culture
Through these searches, you should be able to collect a lot of information, including:
•How does the company present itself in the media?
•What kinds of documents does the company publish?
•When you read the company’s annual reports, brochures, newsletters, and e-zines, what facts and attitudes do they tell you about the company?
You’ll
