Think of a personal brand as an asset that will live on in the digital space for your entire lifespan. If you are an entrepreneur, we bet you already know about the leverage that personal branding holds in the market. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you manage to crop up a respected and trustworthy image of your brand in the market space, more people will be keen on hiring you and paying you more for the time you contribute. We are going to give you a tell-all on how to do personal branding along with some tips for creating a personal brand identity via social media marketing.
What is personal branding and why is it important?
The scope of a brand is no longer just limited to imagery, logo, color scheme, and font types. It extends to how the audience will define it. Hence, branding yourself will involve communicating the values of a brand to the audience. Through this process you must answer questions like; “How are people going to perceive you as an entity?” and “What is your personal brand all about”
One must understand that when a personal brand is constructed, it should position you for what you believe in and what you stand for. To be able to achieve that, an individual needs to build a brand identity, brand style, and assets, and focus on increasing the audience reach.
Ace Entrepreneur Justin Wu says that “Building your own brand allows you to take control of your own narrative and story that you want to convey to your community,”. He is known to be associated with NASDAQ, Wall Street Journal, Intel, CES, and many more giants. According to him, building a personal brand in correspondence to your business will enable you to establish a community around your expertise, experiences, and processes. Building a personal brand will place yourself and your business as a cult favorite authority because of the value that you provide even before you make a sale.
Personal branding is a very important tactic to keep your business running in the long run. You must encourage all your employees to do self-branding because they are the faces of your brand in their personal or professional walks of life. If all the employees manage to do self-branding effectively, you will gain more exposure in the market and your goodwill will translate via every employee that you have.
What are the benefits of personal branding?
Some of the key benefits that creating a personal brand identity offers are:
1. Establishes your business’s credibility
Once you manage to build your brand presence online, it will act as your portfolio, digital reputation, and communication platform. All the facts, figures, and work samples of your brand can be shared via this brand portal, making you accessible and valuable to people looking for you. A nicely constructed brand presence will establish your work as highly credible and resourceful.
2. It will earn you more premium
Once you manage to establish a solid brand presence in the market, all the factors like your experience, skills, and reputation come into play and give you a status where you can charge more for your services. Having a potent brand presence will allow you to reap the commercial benefits of your work in the future if you plan to.
3. Portrays your unique standing
Your personal brand is a persona of who you are and what you believe in. It stands on building blocks of goals, values, experience, aspirations, and skills. It will speak volumes about you as an entity. This itself allows you to have a unique place in the market. You will have a direct edge over someone who hasn’t invested in self-branding.
4. Extends your network
Once you develop a personal brand in the market, it will translate everything about you including your identity, your work, and how you can be of use to others. People will be able to spot you easily and will see the value in connecting with you. Your network is yours and can be extremely resourceful. It will take consistent efforts to build a circle that listens to what you have to say and that can be trusted.
5. Gives some weightage to your career
When you successfully attain the process of branding yourself, you will end up creating a professional and public image for yourself. This will put you on the maps for people to find you or headhunt you for your expertise in an area. Branding yourself will help create a clear image of you in people’s minds in the industry, giving you some leverage in the job market so that you don’t have to struggle for opportunities.
6. Solidifies your influence –
The kind of online presence you manage to build will decide upon the degree of visibility of your brand, logo and influence that you would have on people. If you succeed at defining your niche and the stand you want to take in your field of expertise, you will be able to educate your audience throughout the process and achieve a more powerful presence. When people hear you through the noise and manage to recognize your opinions distinctively, you will gain more leverage as an expert in your field.
Tricks and tips to master personal branding on social media
When you have weapons like Top Social Media platforms at your disposal, you do not have to worry about elaborate and expensive marketing plans. Social media marketing can get you to great places without breaking the bank. It is indeed one of the most cost-effective ways to draw people to your brand. This is why personal branding on social media is the way to go if you are just getting started or even when you are established in the market. Here are ten tricks to incorporate in your personal branding strategy if you want to rule on social media:
1. Be more real, more human in your approach
Extensive usage of jargon and hyperboles is not something we suggest you do. The netizens today detest clichés and that is why, when you produce content you should make sure that you are real, very straightforward with your language, and that you avoid anything that falls under the “cliché” category.
2. Produce genuine, original content
Respect your readers every time you produce a piece and refrain from being flashy, made-up, or sounding too perfect as a brand. Your content should speak of who you really are and what you believe in.
3. Filter out suitable social media channels
Any personal branding strategy execution will call for the selection of appropriate social media channels. Not every social media platform is suitable for every narrative or information dispersion. Check out the top social media sites and select the ones that you think will make your content translate the best.
4. Ensure a crisp presentation of your profile
The quality of presentation of your brand across all your social media profiles should be consistent and crisp. The images you use should be of good quality. The color palette should be tasteful to give visitors the feel of a standard brand when they land on your pages. You can consider hiring a brand photographer for achieving this.
5. Communicate your expertise and talents as they are
Don’t shy away from showing what you got in terms of skills and talents because that is how people will discover you. If you sit around doing nothing and waiting for people to learn about you, you are in for the long shot. Show everyone what your brand can offer and give them proof to back it.
6. Engage with others and create a sense of community
Always make conversation a two-way street, creating maximum engagement on your audience’s end. Make conscious efforts to connect with people you think are capable of contributing and optimize your networking abilities.
7. It is always a good idea to define your target market
Personal branding without a goal is like running a race without a finish line. You will not reach it if it’s not there. To build your brand effectively, you need to clearly define your target market. This will help you tailor your content as per your target market’s preferences, making your personal brand management razor focused.
8. Focus on creating thought leadership
Positioning yourself as a thought leader in your market will give you a good degree of power to influence customer decisions by building trust in their minds. Personal branding can be a very rewarding practice and thought leadership complements it in every way.
An example of powerful thought leadership on Twitter:
9. Keep an elevator speech handy
You only have about thirty seconds to hold someone’s attention before they wander off in their own world or skip to other content that intrigues them. That is why you must have a killer but short introduction of yourself ready at all times.
10. Conduct thorough research to ensure success
Before you embark on the journey of personal brand management, you should do your homework. You should do some research and find out about the top players in your market. Observe the kind of content they publish and draw from that. This will help you create your own positioning by designing distinguished content.
Let’s look at some personal branding examples that have been done to perfection
Elon musk –
A name hard to miss, creates storms whenever it hits Twitter. Musk has managed to make a name for himself that stands independent of Tesla. Despite being a public figure, his photos are nowhere to be found on Tesla’s official handle. Yet, you will feel his presence in every nook and corner of the website.
Billie Eilish –
The one pop star that can be picked differently from the leagues of pop stars is Billie Eilish. She has an extremely distinctive personality in her music as well as who she is in person. A blend of awkwardness and ego can be sensed in everything she pursues. Her website is bizarre and disoriented in terms of navigation, just like her compositions. Her brand reeks of quirk and rebel, making it highly recognizable.
Martha stewart –
Her brand is uniform and sophisticated because almost everything that she does is in sync. She has varied pursuits like cooking, interior design, and gardening. And her website has an abundance of content pertaining to these interests.
Developing and maintaining your personal brand demands time and commitment. But Personal Branding per se can be extremely rewarding in the long run. The initial hard work that you put in will reap benefits for you by giving you a competitive edge in the market. Building your own story and communicating it to the masses will give you the powerful tag of an influencer. You will be able to manipulate and drive people’s decisions in the market if you do personal branding the right way. A vast pool of opportunities can open up with efforts of this kind.