Are you just starting out your business and are looking into marketing? Or maybe you have been creating a steady business but recognize that you need to dig a little deeper? Whether you are just getting going or having been at it for a while, defining your personal brand is an essential next step in creating a successful business. Today, we will share with you what a personal brand is, why it's important, what to consider when defining your personal brand, and our secret to success.
What is a Personal Brand?
While you have likely heard of business branding, personal branding may be a new concept. To explain it simply, personal branding is how you promote yourself to the public. It is the overall image of yourself you want to project to others.
A personal brand is built based on your life story, including your skills, experiences, passions, successes, and more. It not only reflects what one would see on paper but also your personality; this includes your behavior, attitude, quirks, and more, both good and bad.
Why You Need a Personal Brand
By creating a personal brand, you develop an image for the world to see rather than leave it up to fate to decide. Unlike in the good 'ole days where your "brand" was your business card, you have to be much more careful with how you present yourself as everything available on the internet can be put under a microscope and judged.
By taking action to create a personal brand, you can highlight your strengths, your passions, or anything else that you would want potential customers to see and connect with. In this day and age, customers place their trust in brands they recognize, understand, respect, and engage with. The newest generations are basing their choices on specific people rather than a business as a whole. Take, for example, Elon Musk. On Twitter, Elon Musk has over 58 million followers, whereas his company, Tesla, has only 10 million.
Elon Musk has a strong personal brand that people recognize, which allows him to stand out from the crowd compared to similar people in his field. His brand makes him memorable, and so can yours. When you become memorable, you have the potential to bond with customers and increase your business.
How to Define Your Brand
Defining your brand can not be done willy nilly; it takes considerable self-reflection and planning. Whatever your brand ends up being, you want to present yourself as a leading expert on that topic and consistently present information and imagery that supports your message. For example, a fitness coach is unlikely to post videos of themselves binge eating junk food while lying on the couch. They would instead provide healthy snack recipes, exercises for lazy days, etc. I think you get the point.
Before jumping into building your brand, we encourage you to take the time to answer the following questions:
What are your business goals?
How do those business goals help you achieve your personal goals?
What are you selling?
Services, products, etc.
What is your niche?
What is your corner of the market?
How are you different from other similar brands?
Who are your clients?
What are their demographics?
Age, gender, location, socioeconomics, interests, etc.
What virtues do you want to represent?
How do you want to be remembered?
How to Refine Your Brand
Once you have an overarching idea of what you want to do for your personal brand, it is now time to refine. A critical factor in refining your brand is that you want to be consistent. Consistency is essential so that customers instantly recognize your brand when they see it.
To do this, you must create a unifying theme. Your theme will include your branding colors, fonts, and style. This theme should be pleasing to the eye, memorable, and be easy to replicate across all platforms, including your logo, website, social media, business cards, and product.
It is essential to mention that you MUST be unique and authentic. While taking inspiration from other successful brands is helpful, you never want to copy someone else's work.
How to Communicate Your Brand to Others
The last hurdle that you should address before taking the branding leap is how you plan to communicate your brand to others. To be successful, you need to take advantage of every avenue where your potential customers frequent, whether that is LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, or other social media. It could also be in-person locations, podcasts, radio, and more. We highly suggest that you take the time to analyze your audience to understand best where to put your efforts.
The Secret to Successful Personal Branding
The last thing I want to share with you today is the personal branding success secret. That secret is consistency in all walks of life, not just colors and Instagram posts. Your actions need to match your personal branding. For example, if there were news about a leading psychologist getting into a fight at a bar, that story would be shocking, and that psychologist would likely lose a lot of business. However, if a professional MMA fighter got into a bar fight, no one would even flinch.
Your personal branding needs to be demonstrated across every aspect of your personal and professional life, from social media to how you interact with potential customers (i.e., everyone!). They want to know that you genuinely care and are interested in the subject you present. Audiences will instantly identify a fake, so you must pick something you truly are passionate about and want to have in your life each and every day.
If defining your brand seems like a daunting task to take on alone, it's because it is. It often takes an outside perspective to help you answer the key questions needed to create your brand.
Looking to create or re-define your Personal Brand? Grab a copy of my Personal Brand Document here. Ready for the next step? Make sure to read the next post in our series, How to Design a Business Blueprint.
