Good question! Personal branding is how you present yourself to your ideal audience. We associate certain feelings, values, and expectations to the brands we trust. Every business has a story and an image and the same applies to you and your personal brand as well.
Your personal brand should highlight your human side. Voices and personalities are what sets brands (and people in general) apart. Branding yourself means positioning yourself so that your online persona and your real-life persona come together as one.
Alrighty! Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about how to actually build your personal brand!
How to build your brand in 4 steps
1. Do a brand audit
Building a brand involves having a following. It’s a way to evaluate if what you’re doing is valuable to others. However, you also run into the following enigma of…
You need a job to get experience and you need experience to get a job.
Nevertheless, you can’t establish your brand without followers. So start here:
• How many followers do you currently have?
• Where is my audience most active?
• What are my goals? Views, follows, sales, etc?
I recommend prioritizing your growth one network at a time if you’re doing it on your own. However, if you’re looking for help with social media branding and management, we can discuss this further here about your options for social media management.
2. Brainstorm ways to provide value to your audience
Followers don’t flock for no reason, so you need to give them several.
This will vary from industry to industry as well as the type of audience being targeted. Here are some general ideas you can customize for your own personal brand:
• Educational (aka Evergreen) content (tips, tutorials, how-tos, etc)
• Personal anecdotes and experiences
• Ratings and reviews on products or services related to your audience
• Original art, music, writing
• Motivational content (always appreciated!)
By creating valuable content consistently, your audience will have multiple reasons to follow you.
3. Consistency, consistency, consistency!
On top of creating awesome content that grabs your audience’s attention, you need to be consistent about it. Building a brand also means maintaining it. Regularly sharing and creating content is a must.
As well as having consistent content, your branding needs to be consistent across platforms as well. Under no circumstance should there be a shadow of a doubt whether your website is the same business as your Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn/etc account. Your audience shouldn’t have to question who they’re working with.
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4. Prioritize trust, credibility and authenticity
Why should people work with you? Like I mentioned above, there should be no doubts in the minds of your ideal audience when it comes to working with you.
The key is being relatable and real. You want your branding to reflect yourself in a way that makes your audience feel confident working with you. If your branding looks messy, your audience won’t see you as credible or trustworthy.
So what now?
There’s no official rulebook on how to build a personal brand and that’s because your brand is unique to you! Focusing on the steps above can help put you on the right track.
Don’t want to do your personal branding by yourself? You don’t have to!
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts that go into personal branding and I’m guessing you would rather focus on other areas of your business instead of worrying about how to get your brand to send the right message in the right places.
Contact me today and let’s chat about some ideas on how we can uplevel your branding!
