3 Mistakes High Performing MId-Career Women Leaders Make When Marketing Themselves

“Why can’t I market myself effectively?”

Moving toward strategic leadership and decision making roles isn’t just about hard work.

It’s also about relationships, influence and telling your story, aka marketing.

Here’s the deal: You’ve spent years getting fantastic at what you do. When it comes to your area of expertise, you’re teeming with ideas, plans and cold, hard knowledge and skill.

This is awesome. It makes you a woman of substance, depth; a resource to others.

Here’s why it might not connect to the people who hold the keys to your success:

1) You do good work, but don’t talk about it

“Good work should stand on its own.” Okay… but how will anyone ever trace you as the source of the work, especially in a big company? No one, even your boss, can be expected to know everything you do in a day - unless you tell them by connecting how your work fits in with the larger picture your senior leaders hold. There’s no doubt you’re competent and effective, but key decision makers don’t know how good you are at what you do!

2) Personal branding is aligning folks with a bigger vision (theirs, or yours).

Your talk about your work, but not your future Want to know more about partner marketing? Options trading? Corporate ESG? Like a jukebox of old, feed you 2 cents and you’ll croon your favorite tune on the topic you know best. But when it comes to your own story, long term career path and destination, all we hear are crickets.

3) Good personal brand marketing educates others about a product… in this case: you.

You’re only talking about you You know what you want and exactly what your senior leaders should do to get there but they’re not listening. Sometimes, this is just sexist and/or racist BS and that is a whole kettle of fish. If that’s not what’s at play, it could be that when you’re trying to influence your stakeholders, you’re only giving them YOUR reasons - the ones about you, not the ones about THEM.

Great brand marketing creates win-wins for you and stakeholders in THEIR terms, not yours.

If you’re not a master at any of this: You’re not alone.

Personal branding and marketing - like your ability to negotiate, mentor teams or kick ass at Excel - are skills developed over time. I’ve worked with gifted marketers who had never thought to apply their craft to their own career!

Marketing yourself and your ideas is possible to learn and master. As long as you have a career, telling the story of your work, destination, and ideas is a skill you’ll need to get buy-in that unlocks exponentially higher levels of impact.

Which of these resonates with you?

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