Today’s post is written by Gareth Parkin.
Personal Promotion is all about using the right strategies and the right promotional products to get the results you want. You may be using personal promotion to get a new job or to secure a raise. Very simply, you can be the best (fill in the blank) in the world but without a little self-promotion, skill and hard work isn’t likely to translate into a better job or a fulfilling career.
Women in particular have trouble with self-promotion. Culturally women are taught that modesty is a sign of virtue. Many women have a really hard time putting their flag out there and claiming, “I’m the best!” Thinking about self-promotion in the context of heat maps help to make the entire process more fun and less egotistical. Heat maps are also an excellent marketing tool for anyone who has a website.
What are Heat Maps?
Heat Maps are excellent visual tools that analyze a webpage and tell you whether or not the website will be easy or difficult for a viewer to navigate. The entire idea of using heat maps is to create a webpage that easily and quickly funnels viewers into taking the action you want them to. Simply put, heat maps help web designers develop more effective selling tools.
Personal promotion does the same thing; it is a marketing tool. Your personal assets are like the products sold on the website. Without effective personal promotion an employer or boss will simply pass you over in favor of another person. That other person probably has many of the same qualifications that you do.
There are many websites that sell exactly the same things. Why do some online websites make a lot of money while others fail? Some are easy to navigate and well-built while others take forever to download and are badly organized. Self-promotion, like using a heat map, lets you optimize yourself. Just like the website, at the end of the day your work product needs to live up to the hype. However, the hype itself, the carefully crafted personal promotion, makes your assets easier to appreciate.
Heat maps are valuable visual tools because they predict design flaws whereas traditional analytics tools only catalog what has happened. Similarly, personal promotion can help you to see areas where you need to improve your core assets. Maybe you need to add in additional education or training to make yourself more marketable. Personal promotion, like heat maps, will tell you early on that updates are needed- before you lose the sale, job or promotion.
Let’s look at a visual heat map produced for the website privatejetscharter.com using the heat map tool Attention Wizard. This tool analyzes the design and then uses a visual algorithm to predict where users will click based on scientific visual-optimization research.
The strings in the heat map follow the customer’s involuntary eye movements. Attention Wizard uses numbers to mark where the eye will go to first and then links them with lines. When lines are too numerous they reflect confusion that can cause the customer to leave the site. The lines and numbers combined with the color coded visuals shows the best design locations for call to action points (these are the places you want the user to click).
Now, instead of the website elements, place your own call to action points into the diagram. (It is truly helpful to actually layout a webpage if you have the time and the skill). Is your main call to action point (#1) your work experience or your education? Once you have listed and mapped your personal call to action points think about how you can string them together to produce a cohesive and interesting promotional map about yourself. Then visualize this map as you continue to develop your promotional skills. Maybe you will want to add some promotional items into the mix? Maybe your social media networking skills need to be expanded? Where would you put these things on your heat map?
In the example you can see that the calls to action are strategically placed and simple to understand. The private jet company has lots to offer but their first priority is to present their brand as classy, efficient and trustworthy. Think about applying similar branding ideas to yourself and you will be on your way to a great start in self-promotion. The best part is that using the heat map idea makes it easier to let go of the “me” aspect of self-promotion. You aren’t bragging- you’re just making yourself irresistibly clickable!
Some Affordable and easy to use Heat Map Tools:
- Attention Wizard
- CrazyEgg
- ClickDensity
- ClickTale
- Google In-page Analytics (free tool)
- Omniture ClickMap (Adobe)
Author:
Gareth Parkin is the Managing Director at GoPromotional an international online marketing group that specializes in promotional business gifts and corporate merchandising. GoPromotional’s team has more than 30 years worth of experience in corporate gifts, branding and international marketing and offers an enormous selection of quality promotional items at exceptional prices including: promotional mugs and cups, promotional keyrings, conference bags, promotional Green shopping bags, corporate promotional clothing and much more. At GoPromotional, “We turn your marketing visions into reality!”
