Building a Personal Brand means taking responsibility for how you present your image on the web. If you're striving to position yourself as an expert or become an influencer within your niche, self-branding can help elevate your reputation as a leader. You can create a personal brand that becomes familiar to your target audience by showcasing your unique personality traits and maintaining an active online presence. This article will guide you through the strategic steps to build conscious and effective personal Branding.
What is Personal Branding?
Personal Branding is creating a brand around an individual or a business entity. Personal Branding is used to advance a person's career by positioning them as experts in a particular field.
By developing a targeted Personal Branding strategy, you can become a proper authority and a reference point for your target audience.
For this to happen, it's essential to provide added value to your followers, which can help them improve their work, sell more products in their business, or create opportunities for their professional careers.
Building a personal brand does not happen overnight and may require advanced planning and months of hard work to start seeing results; sometimes, improving your personal brand is necessary after receiving feedback. This type of Branding is also referred to as self-branding, and in this article, the terms will be used interchangeably.
To grow your personal brand, you can write a personal branding statement. A personal branding statement establishes who your audience will be, the value you want to give to your audience, and why people should follow you (your USP). As you build your brand, you should draw inspiration from this 1-2 sentence statement to ensure you remain true to it.
How to Improve Your Personal Brand
Once you've started working on your personal brand, analyzed feedback from your audience, and ensured that your image is aligned with your message, you can begin to evaluate your progress. Personal Branding has been hugely successful for many people, but without your personal branding statement, it can be difficult to know when you've succeeded in your efforts. Understanding what progress looks like to improve your personal brand is essential.
Follow these steps to improve your brand:
1. Research and create your personal branding statement: At this stage, define your audience and check for competitors who might exist for you.
2. Build a personal branding strategy: Plan how to engage with your target audience and define success in two months, nine months, or two years.
3. Monitor engagement with your personal brand: Encourage positive participation and create an action plan for negative feedback.
4. Develop your brand: Aim to share your brand through social media, networking, outreach, and conversation opportunities. Consider blogging, vlogging, podcasts, and other ways to promote your personal brand so that your audience can quickly consume the content.
5. Have a communication plan: Managing your online presence can be time-consuming, so this plan will help prevent negative backlash and easily provide information to partners you will work with in the future.
6. Regularly measure your success: Set some KPIs for your branding success so you know you're heading in the right direction. Celebrate small victories to stay motivated to achieve more.
So, after doing all this, how do you know if you've successfully built a personal brand? Some valuable KPIs include:
When a sale converts through your blog,
- When you're asked to speak at an event or on a podcast,
- When someone refers you to a potential client,
- When a publication contacts you to guest blog,
- When people start mentioning you online, on social media, their blog, or other major media.
Creating a personal brand can elevate your business to new heights. By following a combination of personal branding tips, such as being authentic, consistent, and social, you can increase your chances of success in your career.
