Posted by Gary Henderson on Nov 7, 2019 2:45:15 PMI'm going to ask you one question, and I want you to think about it for a few moment.
What do you want to be known for?
If someone mentions your name or business, what do you want them to say?
Some people can answer this question in a matter of seconds, while it may take others a lifetime to figure out.
Let me start by stating that personal branding isn't just for someone who owns a business. Personal branding is also essential for any influencer, thought leader, or person who wants to share their story with the world.
Whether you want to be known as the G.O.A.T. of entrepreneurs, the most entertaining speaker, or as the person who spends their life volunteering and giving back to their community, there is no wrong answer.
If you want to make an impact in the world, creating a branding strategy is definitely the place to begin.
I want to start by going over the personal branding definition - then dive deeper into the importance of having a personal brand online, talk about some personal branding tips and personal branding examples.Most people define personal branding with a name and logo, but there's so much more to it than that.
So, What Is Personal Branding?"Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands. It is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression of an individual, group, or organization. Whereas some self-help practices focus on self-improvement, personal branding defines success as a form of self-packaging."Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want your followers to see. It is the telling of your story, and the impression people gain from your online reputation.
Check Out These 3 Personal Branding Tips & Examples1. Create Content With A PurposeMany marketers will tell you the best way to attract more people and buyers to your personal brand is to create and share new content all the time. They'll tell you to create more videos and write more blog posts, and eventually you'll grow into an influential brand and reach the KPI's you have in place.
We've seen that strategy fail time and time again.
That's also one of the biggest and most common complaints we hear from businesses and brands of all sizes - they spent all of this time creating new content, but no one ever saw it or engaged with it, which is a huge missed opportunity.
Sure, every business and influencer will have to create new content at some point, but you don't want to get in the habit of creating new content to check it off your to-do list or to waste your time filming a video for three weeks if you only get five people to watch it.
What works better is when you have a content strategy and budget in place to promote the content you already have (as long as it still aligns with your vision and goals). We need to get more people seeing and engaging with the content that's already out there.
One of our core beliefs and something we teach our clients is:
"If you're willing to post something online, you have to be willing to spend ad dollars promoting it, and if you're not willing to spend money on it, you shouldn't waste your time posting it."Every piece of content you create should be created with a budget and a specific goal in mind. It doesn't matter if you created a new blog post, tweet, Instagram story, or video, you should always spend time getting your content in front of the right people at the right time in their journey.
It is also important to show people the type of content they are interested in, not what you think they want. If you don't know who your ideal people are or what type of content they want to see, click here to learn more about buyer personas.
2. Be Consistent, Show Up & ServeWhen building a personal brand, it is important that your social media channels are consistent across every platform, visually appealing, and represents the type of influential person you want to be.
Gary V is a excellent example of someone who shows up, is consistent, and serves his audience in various ways. No matter which social media channel you look him up on, you will see an overload of free content about side hustles and grinding nonstop until you reach your goals.
He found a niche where he could offer something valuable to the people and then became the most influential and authoritative thought leader in that space.
He serves his audience every day by giving them free content and does it without asking for anything in return. That is what we are missing from most influencers and brands today.
Whatever niche you chose to be in, stick to it, and be consistent. If you want to be recognized as an authoritative figure in the hustle and grind space, the majority of what you post online should be about that. Try to avoid confusing your audience by being overly opinionated about a variety of topics.
3. Find A Unique Selling PropositionYou have to find what is unique and special to your brand that will make you stand out from the competition.
Here is an example of one of the most iconic brands in history who had great success with personal branding.
Coca-Cola was one of the first businesses to incorporate personal branding into their marketing strategy and campaigns. They were one of the first brands to focus on brand personality and emotional advertising.
The brand created an identity that's built around values of joy, experience, community, and happiness. They created a brand that showed people the type of lifestyle that they wanted to be associated with.
Despite how the advertising world has changed over the years, the main values and focus of the company have remained the same for over 100 years. They knew that if they wanted to capture the attention of their audience, they had to sell not just a product but an experience.
And that is what separated them from all of the other competition.
If you haven't created a personal brand yet and are looking to create one here are some questions to get you started or you can book a strategy session with us below:
- How will your brand make people feel?
- What makes you different?
- What are your core beliefs and values?
- What type of company culture do you want?
- What skillset(s) can you offer?
- What's your message?
- Who are your ideal people or customers?
- How are you influential?
- Does your product, service, or brand give people a transformation?
- What problem do you solve?
- What guarantees success and failure to you?
- What's your niche?
- Are you authoritative in your niche?
Why Is Creating A Personal Brand Important?Your Ideal People Start To Find YouWhen you consistently tell your story and share snippets of your personality with your audience across social media, you will notice more people actively engaging, following, and sharing your content.
The more personality you can add to your business, the easier it will get to find your tribe. Over time you will build this community of like-minded people who value your skills and sees you as an expert in your industry.
You will notice that people will either love you or hate you, and that's okay! You wouldn't want someone who thinks you have a weird personality or someone who constantly disagrees with you to be a part of your tribe.
One of the biggest reasons for creating a personal brand is to warm up this powerful group of people who are waiting to take action on anything you have to offer. Once you find your ideal followers, that's when you can really start making a profit and reaching your goals.
For example, let's say you have an event coming up in a few months and the goal is to sell out the event. When you have the right people waiting, you could sell out the event in a matter of minutes.
You Build Trust With People Who MatterWhen it comes to doing business with someone online, studies show that 70-80% of people research an influencer or brand before doing business with them.
People like to feel like they know you, especially before they spend money or do business with you. That's one of the reasons why personal branding is so important. It's a way we can naturally build relationships and connections with people throughout the world.
Because social media has become a place filled with highly reliable and resourceful information about anyone imaginable, it's important always to show our authentic selves. Almost everything we do can be found online, so make sure that whatever story you are selling is consistent across everything you say and do.
Consistency is one of the most significant factors in building trust with someone.
Final ThoughtsYour personal brand helps you stand out from everybody else. Personal branding gives you the opportunity to show current and potential clients your skillset and strengths.
The key to building a successful brand and becoming truly influential is to consistently show up and be so great at selling your story that people have to do business with you.
Now, go show up and serve your audience in every way possible and show them that you are worth investing in. When
People often talk about wanting to improve their personal brand. You undoubtedly know what a business brand is – we refer to brands regularly whenever we discuss influencer marketing. But you probably don’t think much about having a brand yourself. The idea of “personal branding” is unusual to most people. But in this online era, where things, both good and bad, last forever on the internet, personal branding can be considered more important than ever.
Have you ever Googled your name? Obviously, you may find that other people share your name. But when you do see items that mention you, do they show what you want the world to see? Or should you “massage” your online record to make it more acceptable, and present you in a more favorable light?
For that matter, how do people perceive you offline? Do they connect you and your values with your business and the values it represents?
What is Personal Branding:
- What is Your Personal Brand?
- Why Would You Want a Personal Brand?
- Why is Personal Branding Important?
- Considerations for Building Your Personal Brand
- The Importance of a Unified Theme
- A Few Techniques to Build Your Personal Brand
- Your Actions Need to Match Your Personal Branding
- Free Personal Brand Health Checker
What is Your Personal Brand?Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, and attitudes.
You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. Done well, you can tie your personal branding in with your business in ways no corporate branding can possibly succeed.
Professionally, your personal brand is the image that people see of you. It can be a combination of how they look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people gain from the information about you available online.
You can either ignore your personal brand, and let it develop organically, possibly chaotically, beyond your control, or you can help massage your personal brand to depict you as the person you want to be.
In the pre-internet days, your personal brand was really just your business card. Unless you were high profile in the media or somebody who featured strongly as the face of advertising, few people would have heard of you. In today’s highly public world, where every little action is discussed at length on social media, you are far less anonymous.
Why Would You Want a Personal Brand?Your personal brand can be vital to you professionally. It is how you present yourself to current and potential clients. It gives you the opportunity to ensure that people see you in the way you want them to, instead of in some arbitrary, possibly detrimental, way.
It gives you the opportunity to highlight your strengths and your passions. It helps people believe they know you better, and people have much higher trust in those they feel they know; even pubic people they have never met personally.
This is particularly evident at election time. While many people seek out candidates’ views on issues important to them, other voters have less interest in the process. Instead, they vote for a name they recognize. It comes as no surprise that candidates with strong personal brands succeed in politics, regardless of their political views or beliefs. Regardless of your opinion on Donald Trump as a president, for instance, you can’t deny that he has built a strong personal brand, which helped encourage many people to give their vote to him.
Why is Personal Branding Important?You need to create a strong personal brand if you want to be considered influential. Your personal brand helps you stand out from everybody else. You can use your personal brand to demonstrate your knowledge and skills about your areas of expertise.
In many ways, your personal brand is what makes you memorable. It is your personal brand that helps you stand out from the thousands of other people like you.
Millennials, in particular, have a distrust of advertising. 84% of millennials trust neither the advertisements nor the brands that create them. Yet, they are prepared to believe people they feel they “know”– even the business people behind the brands they detest so much.
This has meant a major rethink about how businesses market themselves. Indeed this is one of the reasons why influencer marketing has become so successful over recent years.
There has been a movement towards personalizing the main people in a business. Obviously, this is easy for a small business – there is little difference between a sole trader and his business. It can be more difficult for large companies. But some people manage it well. Steve Jobs used personal branding well before the phrase was even well known to distinguish himself as the face of Apple. Similarly, Elon Musk’s personal brand is probably better known than Tesla’s corporate brand.
It makes sense that any business owner or manager should bond with potential customers first on an individual basis before he or she tries to deliver the company’s message.
Considerations for Building Your Personal BrandCreating a personal brand requires extensive self-reflection and introspection. It helps if you know yourself – which surprisingly few people do. Most people find it extremely difficult to describe themselves, although they often find it easier to explain how they want to be.
If your ultimate aim for personal branding is to improve the performance of your business, you first need to ensure that you know who your target customers are. You want your personal branding to match your targeted clientele.
This isn’t new. Business people have been doing this for many years, long before the internet. Think about the image that Hugh Hefner portrayed for virtually all of his adult life. He probably never heard of personal branding, yet he let himself become the face of the Playboy empire and lived the lifestyle that the readers of his magazine envied. He could not have lived his type of lifestyle, however, if he helmed a more conservative company, targeting more politically correct customers.
Ultimately you want to build a reputation as somebody who cares about the types of people that make up your potential and existing clients. It's crucial to find, listen and engage with your potential clients. This is where a media monitoring tool like Brand24 comes into play, which can help you monitor, be present and responsive 24/7. A crucial part of your personal branding is to make sure you come across as being human, with the same issues and problems as your target market. The only difference is that you can show that you have found a solution to some of these problems – which you are willing to share with others.
You don’t want to come across as being like a stereotypical used car salesman – even if you are in the automobile sales business. Cynical consumers see businesses as being all about selling. The whole purpose of personal branding is to step back and deemphasize selling.
Nowadays, you can’t ignore the importance of social media. Part of your personal branding should include having social media accounts on all of the social networks where your audience spends their time. And you will want to accept friend requests freely – you won’t want to set your accounts to private. If you really want to run a Facebook account just for your friends and family, you should consider setting up a separate one in a different name for this.
The Importance of a Unified ThemeYou want your personal branding to be consistent. At all times you want to stay true to your brand.
This is not just a matter of you consistently behaving in a way that matches your portrayal – although that is important. It also includes factors more reflective of business branding. You will want to decide on a consistent color scheme and fonts. And you will want to use these color and fonts everywhere. They should be the same on your website, social accounts, business cards and anything else you have that is printed. If you represent a business, these should match the colors and fonts of your business.
You will want to look at everything you use publicly here. You should even look at things like the footers in your emails, your stationery, accounts and invoices, and any brochures you hand out. You might even go as far as buying a car that fits your preferred color scheme and wearing appropriately colored ties or other clothing to any public event you attend.
A Few Techniques to Build Your Personal BrandDon’t forget the offline world. Your personal brand needs to encompass all the places where your customers could encounter you. Old-style business cards are just as crucial to your branding, as your social pages are. Just remember to keep your theme consistent on these.
Carry business cards with you wherever you go. This is as relevant now as it was forty years ago. Take out a card whenever you see the opportunity to network with somebody new who matches your target audience.
Ideally, you will want your personal branding to encompass all of your public life. So this even covers how you dress whenever you are in a public situation. I couldn’t imagine Donald Trump wandering down the street in old jeans and a tee-shirt, any more than I would expect a rock star to go shopping in a fancy suit. You want your whole public image to match the persona of your personal brand.
Your Actions Need to Match Your Personal BrandingThe secret of successful personal branding is an underlying consistency. You are trying to establish an external depiction of “you.” This means that you need to act consistently with that depiction.
This is also the reason why the public can react very differently to the news of two people doing the same type of behavior. It is possible that an act that would shock them if done by the first person may be entirely consistent with the expectations of the second.
For instance, imagine the reaction to news that a particular politician took drugs. In most cases that would be the death knell on their political career – it would be completely incongruent with their personal branding and public expectations. On the other hand, suppose you heard that a heavy metal rock star took drugs. It would hardly be news. It would most likely tie in with your expectations, and may even enhance his reputation with his core audience.
The average person representing a small business probably doesn't have such extreme viewpoints about their personal brand. However, you still need to act in ways that match your perceived image. If you portray yourself as being caring and interested in your customers, then it is crucial that you do listen to their complaints and try and fix any problems they may encounter with your product.
Above all else, though, you do want your personal brand to be relatively authentic. Sure it may ignore a few of your personal warts, and you may have to massage it a little to match your target audience perceptions, but it needs to ring genuine. It is not hard to spot a fake person, living a lie of a life.
You want your personal brand to match what people say about you when you are not around. If people don’t believe your personal brand, then you face a distinct lack of credibility.