7+ steps to build your personal brand.
Do you know building a personal brand can be easier than you though it was?Well, it is super easy to do this.
A personal brand is a unique value proposition that includes a combination of your skills, your work experience, your values, how you stand out from your peers in your industry, and the results you achieve for your customers or company because of this unique combination of strengths and experiences.
It’s how you choose to promote yourself either using platforms like Tailor brands or how you choose to share your skills, personality, and experience with the world. A personal brand is about visibility and the values that you outwardly represent that can influence public perception of you and have an impact.
The purposes of personal branding are many. Among them is boosting your career by positioning yourself as an expert within a specific industry.
By building an enviable personal brand, you can among other things, grow your social media following, sell more products or services and open the door to career opportunities.
At this stage, you can also use your website builder software to make your website that stands out from the crowd.
The importance of building a personal brand.
Personal brand helps you develop personal and professional scope. Your brand is how you present yourself to both your current and potential customers.
You can highlight your strengths, passions, and weaknesses and help people to know you better. Some of the privileges are explained below:
–Establish trust and authority-when people feel like they know and understand you, and those people tend to trust you. A personal brand can lead to more career advancement opportunities and business opportunities.
–Building a network-personal branding should articulate who you are, what you do, and how you can help those who associate with you. This makes others feel they can connect with you. Effective branding can maximize your potential by helping you to build your network both online and offline.
–Attracting more clients-when you establish yourself as a successful personal brand that people go to because of your expertise in a specific niche, field, or industry, you attract more people who become your ideal clients. These clients will refer you to more clients.
–Owning your story-when you define your brand and state and explain what makes you unique, you change how people perceive you and you show the outside world what you stand for. This helps because it doesn’t leave you vulnerable to people’s assumptions about who you are.
–Get featured in media-It’s worth noting that there are specific media outlets that are always searching for the next big thing; a leader or specialised expert in a field. A strong brand and online presence make it easy for outlets to find you and make you share your insights with their audience.
The steps are as follows;
Ultimately, you can create your brand to be unique and show what you have to offer. However, there are a few guidelines that should be followed to ensure you have successful personal branding.
1.Start with a solid foundation.
A solid foundation that you can keep building on as time goes by is very important. You need to lay such a foundation and do so by remaining true to your authentic self.
Don’t be tempted to create a fake persona that portrays you as who you are not. The foundation of your brand should be a true reflection of who you are.
Branding is about showcasing what makes you unique to your audience and potential customers so you need to take an inventory of the fundamental elements that you already have. These include:
–Skills and Credentials-the talents that you have acquired throughout your life should be showcased in your brand. You need to also illustrate the training you have undertaken as well as the awards you have received in your life.
–Passions and interests-these include the topics and industries that you find fascinating as well as elaborating on what you find a lot of passion in doing.
–Values and beliefs-these summarise what you stand and believe in and what your core values are. It also, to a larger extent, comprises what you stand against.
Next Is to identify the details of your brand. This includes narrowing down your brand vision, writing a personal brand statement, cultivating a mission, and developing a unique personality.
You can also build your foundation by auditing your search results. You need to establish where you stand in Google and other search engines’ parameters.
You need to take time and google yourself and after analysis, you can unpublish and delete some posts that don’t favor your current status. Some content might be damaging to your brand. These include:
–content that shows unprofessional behavior and poor communication styles.
–photos and posts hinting at excessive drinking, drug use, or criminal behavior.
–Polarizing views that segregate race, religion, politics, or gender.
-Content that shows violence, bullying, or bigoted behavior.
The last step in building a foundation is claiming your space. After all these, you now need to have an online presence. You of course need a personal website.
But on top of that, you should consider having between 6 and 10 professional profiles. When deciding which social elements to build for your brand foundation, you should consider a personal website, t
Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, Pinterest, and Snapchat. You need to keep the information useful for your audience by using your full name and even where you are located, that is if it doesn’t look damaging to you to reveal your whereabouts.
2.Choose a target audience or area of expertise.
You now need to focus on who you think your target audience is. Remember that however much you try, you can’t appeal to everyone.
So not everyone can be your ideal client. You should therefore try to attract your perfect clients by identifying a specific target audience.
You should build your brand based on what they want based on their Ideal Client Profile{ICP}. You need to ask yourself these questions;
Demographics-what is their average age, gender, profession, relationship status, education, or income?
Challenges-what are these people currently struggling with? Is there something that is holding them back from reaching their fullest potential or achieving their set goals? And is there a remedy for those tribulations?
Desires and aspirations-what are the dreams, hopes, goals, and aspirations of your target audience? Do they align with what you are promising to offer them?
The more you know about who your ideal customer is, the better you are at attracting them. This is because you brand yourself in a manner that resonates with what they want to achieve.
After all these, you can now choose the area of expertise based on what you believe your target audience needs.
3.Create an interesting offer.
Up to this level, you already know what to attract to your brand. You should now strive to entice them with an irresistible and exciting offer.
Remember you’re in the business to help solve your potential customers’ dilemmas. So what you are selling should help your audience towards solving a problem they initially had.
If you get a specific result, it shows your audience that you aren’t just another person in the industry; you are a specialist in your field.
You can offer your customers a specific outcome with a specialized offer based on what they are looking for as already established.
You should also take time to consider what you are good at doing as well as what your audience wants most to be able to offer them what they need at the best level.
4.Build your brand website.
It is only on your brand website that you can showcase who you are. You have authority over your website and so you can use that authority to your advantage by outlining and showcasing who you are.
It’s through your website that your clients have the opportunity to have the first impression of who you truly are. It’s through your website that you can tell your clients how you can help them solve their problems.
Your website should be optimized with specific elements directly to your homepage; several professional photos of you, your social proof and testimonials, and a clear Call-To-Action{CTA} that ignites the customers to take action.
After the homepage, you should consider adding an ‘about me’ page, a products or services page, and a contact page. All these help in identifying you and what you promise to offer to solve your clients’ problems.
5.Content matters.
After the completion of building your website, the focus now shifts to content. Having a robust content strategy makes you earn the trust of your target audience.
The content you create should help to position you as an expert in the field. This content could be in the form of videos, articles and blogs, webinars, podcasts, infographics, case studies, customer stories, worksheets and checklists.
On top of running your blogs, you should also eye guest blogging opportunities. You can utilize opportunities of writing guest posts on websites that are aligned with yours. This also helps in boosting your brand.
6.Establish a community.
You need to make an effort at being a community leader in your specific niche or area.
When you build a community of like-minded individuals, you’ll create a place where you can interact with one another, share ideas, have exciting conversations, and support one another.
Establishing a community needs a lot of time and effort and it’s not done in a short while. A few ways that can help you establish your community are:
-Use social media to follow others in your industry and engage with them often to see what their perceptions and ideas are.
-Take part in live events like workshops, retreats, and conferences.
-Join groups such as Twitter chats and Facebook groups where your audience already is and participate in transformative conversations there.
7.Research your industry and imitate experts in the field.
Even though you need to be unique, it’s still important that you know the major players in your field. You need to spend some time reading up on business strategies and information about the industry you are interested in.
Find out who the experts in the field are. Look up their blogs, websites, or anywhere else where they contributed their ideas about the industry. You can use their expertise to build your brand.
You can use the internet to find resources in the field. You can also try to find out how an expert you admire started and ascended the ladder of success.
8.Create and apply your list of strengths and weaknesses.
When building a personal brand, you need to ask yourself questions that direct you to establish the areas you excel and the roles that seem to drain you the most. You can also find out the areas that don’t suit your established talents.
You need to brainstorm and think about industries, jobs, and challenges that motivate or exit you. You can now use your list of strengths and weaknesses to help you narrow down your industry to what you can perform best.
You can assess your strengths and weaknesses and relate them to the industry or career that you work in. You will be able to find a specific niche in your industry that best suits your talent and passion.
SUMMARY.
A brand, in simple terms, is a promise. So having a brand means that it’s a promise that you make to both yourself and your audience and you intend to keep it.
If you are trying to influence someone, your brand means that you will keep the promise as perceived by the other party.
A good personal brand makes people pay more for your goods or services and argue less because they trust you. Branding yourself means developing your professional identity to align with your values. You, therefore, need to stand for some values.
These could be quality, excellence, teamwork, innovation, leadership, and any other value. But what you need to start with is integrity.
You need to understand that the greatest reputation is developed when other people say that when they do business with you, you always fulfill your promises.
Just remember that everything you do either creates and builds your brand or weakens and destroys it.
