We were lucky to catch up with Hope Brookins recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Hope thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Success is completely dependent on self-promotion.

My own family’s story illustrates that point. When I was 17 my family left a traumatic domestic violence situation & we built a house using YouTube videos. While building the house we were embarrassed and ashamed and didn’t tell people we were building our house with our own hands — it felt like a failure that we had gotten to that point in life. But slowly we started mentioning “oh yeah, when we were building our house…” and were surprised by people’s reactions.

People were impressed.

It took that little bit of self-promotion – of sharing our accomplishments – to realize we needed to really share. So my mom wrote a tell all memoir and I helped pitch the story to the media and we went viral overnight. Our story has over 2 billion media impressions (not even counting tv) and has been shared in more than 100 countries around the world.

With that exposure came numerous opportunities from options for a feature film about my family’s story, reality tv contracts, and numerous business opportunities.

And we owe it all to self-promotion.

Hope, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started my career in politics and realized I loved helping people transform into public figures and position themselves for what they wanted to be known for. After a while, I realized I didn’t love the day-to-day drama of politics. Fortunately, I had grown to love image management, public relations, personal branding, and every detail involved with positioning people as public figures. Since making that transition, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs, fashion designers, interior designers, motivational speakers, Silicon Valley startups (and their founders), wedding planners, digital marketers, fiction and non-fiction authors, publishing companies, attorneys/law firms, photographers, relationship experts, and food brand founders.

My favorite projects to work on are comprehensive packages where I get to have my hands in every aspect of someone’s brand from initial positioning strategy to book promo to website launch to creative direction to public relations strategy. This blend of strategy and tangible deliverables like websites is such an incredible way to be involved in transforming experts into thought leaders.

In short, I help people show up as the face of their brand and go all-in on promoting themselves and their projects. Nearly every project also involves helping clients work through imposter syndrome — a syndrome that tends to impact high achievers.

My 14 years of experience working with public figures and high-profile individuals already makes my resume unique but the biggest difference between me and others in the personal branding/thought leader branding space is my comprehensive approach and cross-disciplinary experience. Typically, strategists in this space have a narrow focus that leaves people with a long to-do list. I work to set people up with everything they need, including all the things they never knew they needed in the first place.

While I’m super proud of the viral campaign I launched and managed for my own family, I’m equally proud of all of my clients who have put themselves out there. It takes a unique blend of confidence and hard work to build a public facing brand so anyone who does that, even with help from experts like me, deserves a huge round of applause.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

To keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty I’m always on the lookout for opportunities that would be a good fit for them. From opportunities to join boards to events they should keynote at to media, I go out of my way to find strategic ways for clients to continue to grow their brands. This is why I regularly work with clients from past projects when they have new projects like a book launch or media campaign.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

The most important thing I ever did to build my reputation was to share on social media. Giving people a behind-the-scenes look at my work and at client projects is an essential type of self-promotion that shows people you know what you’re doing. Creating social content that’s rooted in thought leadership has also been huge (and has actually led me to start a second business that will be launching soon).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hopebrookins.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopebrookins/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hopembrookins
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hopebrookins/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/HopeBrookins/

Image Credits
Lori Sparkman