Timea Kadar: The USP is you. Build a strong personal brand as a language professional to help your marketing

Timea Kadar joined us as the first speaker of the day with an eye-opening, insightful talk and presentation.

Language professionals often struggle with identifying their USP, ending up saying some vague statements.

But, as Timea puts it, above all, there’s one thing that makes you unique: your personality. The set of expertise, your methods, your background, and the experience you have. The USP is You!

In her talk, Timea shared a practical guide on how to build a strong personal brand as a language professional. How to get into the press with your expertise, speak at events, publish a book. 

She told us about her personal story: how she built a very strong personal brand in Hungary, but then how she had to start from scratch after she relocated to London, with no connections, no history or background in the UK, and no British accent – as she pointed out.

Through Timea’s examples, we learnt what we can do to be known for what we know – and get clients who don’t ask how we are different.

“Personal brand: to be known for what you are the best at.”

She explained that a strong personal brand can help us shorten the know-like-trust-you route.

Timea pointed out that in the language services industry, a lot comes down on the personal factor and on trust. As an example, she shared the case of an English-Chinese translator. When someone engages one, it’s because they don’t speak Chinese. It’s impossible to evaluate someone’s language ability when one doesn’t speak that language. Therefore, through personal branding, we can increase the trust factor immensely.

To avoid overwhelm and the sinkhole of perfectionism around building your personal brand, Timea suggested that we just start and experiment to find what platforms work best for us. 

“Have a deadline and shoot for the stars, because the stars are not coming down to give you a lift.”

Instead, experiment, rehearse, fine tune, and just – start showing up in your niche expert topic.

She then covered why storytelling is a great way to connect with people and why it’s good to prepare a story library of an origin story, a client story and a future story. (We came back to this at the end of the day where we had the opportunity to connect with each other through storytelling thanks to Timea.)

She shared very practical tips on how we can cut through the white noise, catch the attention of and reach out to journalists who would want to feature you and your stories. 

Timea’s talk was followed by a lively Q&A with loads of tips on how we can show our personality and why mastering the art of copywriting is a skill we all should be familiar with.

About the Speaker:

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