Strategic networking can create tremendous value, especially for private equity firms that are built on connectivity. But, while your top level executives are ideal advocates for fostering these relationships and humanizing your brand identity, they’re not the only ones who are a great fit. Empowering your employees to create and grow their own personal brands can add even more authenticity and volume to your firm’s story.

Encouraging and supporting your employees’ voices and personal branding can help promote thought leadership on all levels within your firm, increase brand exposure, and help you forge deeper connections with prospective founders to generate new business and relationships.

In this blog post, we’ll define what personal branding is and discuss how and why your private equity firm should leverage it to build a company blog that serves all of your stakeholders by featuring the expert voices in your firm’s network.

What is a Personal Brand?

While the term “branding” used to be reserved for businesses, personal branding has now become fundamental in defining how you present yourself to the professional world. A personal brand is the unique culmination of the experiences, skills, and values that differentiate you, while also serving as a reflection of how others perceive you. Effective personal branding can help separate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients.

Although establishing a strong *brand* identity is also important, brands and PE firms should not be afraid of putting real faces out in the world to represent them, and ultimately shouldn’t hide behind their logos or only their top executives.

Building Thought Leadership with Your Company Blog

All too often, PE firms that are beginning to create meaningful content through a company blog only feature top executive voices and credit them with bylines. It’s important to remember that there are specialty insights and content ideas that can come from other contributors within your company and network, aside from your leadership team.

Building a company blog that features the voices of all your team members—from top executives and partners to vice presidents and senior associates, and more—can help you excel at providing key insights to your target audiences with quality, engaging content, while also encouraging employees to create and grow their personal brands.

If you are looking to build a content strategy, we recommend that you first identify and build a base of subject matter experts—on all levels—throughout your firm that will contribute ideas and knowledge that will later get developed into content. 

Below are some ideas to help kickstart this process:

• Send a quarterly or bi-annual survey soliciting contributions/ideas
• Coordinate timelines and how topics would fit into your content strategy

Be clear about what would be expected from contributors—they will be providing the insights and knowledge for blog posts but don’t need to submit a perfectly formatted or grammatically impeccable draft—the managing team member or outside copywriter will deliver the final product.

The Benefits of Personal Branding for Your Firm

While personal branding relies heavily on one’s personal identity, it can still benefit your firm as a whole. As your team members add your business name to their LinkedIn profiles, personal blog bio, or to their title at conferences or guest speaking engagements, your firm will be tied to more positive touchpoints that help shape the overall experience. Having their names tied to posts on your company blog can help reinforce this connection. 

In this environment, empowering employees to create and grow their personal brands is a win-win for employees and PE firms alike.

Below are a few of the benefits your employee’s personal branding and byline on company blog posts can have on your firm:

1. It puts names and faces to your private equity firm.
   As human beings, we are drawn to people. Humanizing and showcasing the real people behind your firm will help build likeability and make your brand easier to interact with and trust. It’ll also provide a window view into who prospective company founders will be working with when they partner with your firm.
2. Broadens your firm’s expertise.
   Broadening the base of contributors to your firm’s blog and investing in employee personal brands will allow you to showcase diversity of thought and subject matter. These team members have insights that will offer new ideas, perspectives, and experiences in various expertise areas. 
3. Builds influence and contributes to a stronger corporate brand.
   Personal brand authority over time can help strengthen the overall corporate brand and offer better exposure for your business. Contributors sharing their posts on the company blog to their own audiences will help your firm gain recognition across a wider audience and increase the touchpoints you have with prospective leads.
4. Empowers your team and increases employee retention.
   Encouraging your employees to develop their own personal brand helps them grow within their own careers and become more accountable.
5. Makes the overall workload lighter.
   A larger base of contributors can help your firm be more consistent with a content schedule, providing a greater volume of ideas that can be expanded into rich forms of digestible content.

Giving your team members the opportunity to contribute insights and build their own personal brands over time will lead to a stronger company brand overall. If you’re new to content creation and content marketing, we suggest checking out our Content Strategy Guide for Private Equity for starters. If you already have an active blog and content strategy, now is the time to get to work to make sure you’re highlighting all the voices within your firm, and not just from executive roles. 

We’re here to help you develop a content strategy or optimize and execute an existing strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help, drop us a message.