Personal Branding: How to build your personal brand?

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?

Personal branding is the process of creating a brand identity for a person or a company. As the name suggests, this is a brand for you or your business.

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.

Essentially, it is how you project your brand and its values to the world and ensure that your target audience knows who you are, what you stand for, and why it’s worth choosing you over your competitors.

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.

Personal branding is not just about marketing but about being your marketer. It is about standing for yourself and your business to command respect and confidence from your peers and customers.

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.

The word “branding” can have a negative connotation when used in the context of businesses.

However, applying the correct principles and strategies will help you create a brand identity for your business and help you stand out from your competition.

Why is Personal Branding Important?

In an era where people’s attention spans are getting shorter by the minute, the need to make an impression is more important than ever. And the best way to do this is by creating a solid and memorable brand identity.

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. 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.

Unfortunately, most business owners do not realize the importance of personal branding because they think it’s a lot of extra work.

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.

However, the truth is that if you want to create a successful business, you must create a successful brand.

People who know you and your business will trust you more and will buy more products and services from you.

How to Improve Your Personal Brand

Once you have started to work on your personal branding, feedback and ensuring your self-brand is aligned with your personal branding statement will help you improve on your progress. Personal Branding has been hugely successful for many different people, but without your personal branding statement, it can be hard to know when you have achieved success in your endeavors. It is essential to know what progress looks like to improve your personal branding.

Follow these steps to improve your personal brand.

1. Research and create your personal branding statement: Define your audience at this stage and audit competitor that may exist for you.
2. Build a personal branding strategy: Plan how to engage with your target audience and define what success will look like for you in two months, nine months, two years.
3. Monitor your personal brand engagement: Promote positive participation and have a plan of action for negative remarks.
4. Develop your personal brand: Aim to share your personal brand through social media, networking, outreach, and speaking opportunities. Consider blogging, vBlogging, Podcasts and other ways that you could promote your personal brand in a way that your audience will consume the content quickly.
5. Have a communication plan: Controlling your presence online can be time-consuming so this plan will help you with negative backlash and help you to easily provide information to partners that you will work with down the line.
6. Measure your success regularly: Set some KPIs for personal brand success so that you know you are heading in the right direction. Celebrate even small wins to remain motivated to achieve more.

So after doing all this how do you know if you have been successful in building a personal brand? A few valuable KPIs include:

• When a sale converts through your blog
• When you are asked to speak at an event or on a podcast
• When someone refers you to a potential client
• When a publication reaches out to invite you to guest blog
• When people start mentioning you online, on social media, their blog or other important media

How to Build a Personal Brand

Step 1: Figure out what drives you.

Start by asking yourself the following questions:

• What motivates you to get up in the morning and go to work?
• What skills or talents are you most proud of?
• What skills are you curious about but have yet to build?
• What kind of tasks or projects energize you?
• What subjects most pique your interest?
• Ten years from now, what do you want to have contributed to the world?
• What do the people you most admire have in common?

Write down your answers to these questions and pay attention to any overlap or alignments you discover. This exercise can help you identify some of the values, beliefs, or goals that are currently driving you.

For example, perhaps you figure out that you’re great at productively managing conflict, love brainstorming new ideas, and enjoy collaborating with others. Maybe you learn that the people you most admire display curiosity, compassion, and creativity.

Identifying and reflecting on what drives you, as well as what you want to achieve, will help you harness your existing skills and competencies to deliberately demonstrate behaviors that make your greatest strengths and passions outwardly visible. You can also use this knowledge to reflect on what new skills you might need to develop in order to get to where you want to go.

Step 2: Align your values to the organization’s goals.

You’re off to a great start, but if you want to grow within your current role, it’s important that you find ways to connect your brand back to your organization’s goals. Start by looking at the people who are successful and admired within your company. Observe the behaviors and traits they consistently exhibit. What are their most valued strengths? How does their behavior help the business move forward?

Now, turn back to step one, and reflect on the goals and values you identified. Do you see any alignments between your current skills and the qualities your organization rewards? If so, focus on developing those areas. If not, you may need to expand your competencies. Either way, this exercise will help you envision a personal brand that aligns both with your aspirations and the strategic goals of your company.

Sometimes it can be useful to choose a keyword or attribute to help drive your brand, for instance: leader, innovator, creative, or techie.

To continue building on our original example, let’s say you join a Research & Development (R&D) team at a consumer goods company. Maybe you observe that your organization regularly brings the most cutting-edge new products to market and values leaders who challenge the status quo and think outside the box. How do your current strengths align with the company’s goals? You see yourself as a creative person, who loves solving complex problems. Given that, you may decide on “innovator” as your key personal brand attribute.

Your next step, then, would be to identify the specific traits and behaviors you need to develop and consistently demonstrate to be seen as an innovator. These might include observable characteristics such as generating creative, resourceful solutions to problems, integrating ideas and inputs from different sources, and building on other people’s suggestions during meetings.

Ultimately, your goal is to align what you’re passionate about with the core values of your organization and use that passion to drive your professional growth and reinforce your personal brand.

Step 3: Map your stakeholders

Just like in the commercial world, a brand can’t succeed if no one is aware of it. Like my client Mike, if you fail to showcase your brand to a broad audience — especially key decision-makers — you’re unlikely to land those bigger and better opportunities.

To increase your visibility in the organization, try creating a stakeholder map. This is a tool that helps you identify the influencers in your organization and strategize on ways to connect with them, both formally and informally.

There is no “right” way to create a stakeholder map. It could be a simple list of people you want to know or people who can help you progress at the organization. It could even be a more intricate document with the names of influential organizational leaders, their roles and responsibilities, and how they might be able to advocate for you.

However you choose to collate this information, the most important aspect is to understand who you want to reach out to and why. Often, your leadership team’s success hinges directly upon individual contributors, like yourself, doing an excellent job. This means you have a natural opportunity to reach out and learn more about them: their interests, professional challenges, problems they’re trying to solve, involvement in alumni networks, charities, and personal and professional affiliations. You can use the knowledge you gain about these stakeholders to position yourself as someone who adds value to their lives and who has the ability to make a larger impact on the organization.

Step 4: Make yourself visible

Once you have your stakeholder map, the next step is to reach out to the people on it. When you’re new, this can feel a little awkward, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. Reach out to your boss, a senior colleague, or a teammate who’s worked in the organization for a while to help you make a few introductions.

When you connect with them, see if they would be willing to meet for a quick (virtual) coffee or lunch. You can frame your ask around seeking their advice on a topic within their area of expertise, or maybe even call out some similarity within your backgrounds — a shared hobby, aspiration, or alumni affiliation.

Better yet, if you have ideas around how they can approach a challenge they’re facing, don’t be afraid to mention it in your message. Highlight your skills and interests and how those competencies might benefit them and their work. Think of this message as a first chance to showcase your personal brand. Articulate what you stand for and, most importantly, how that relates to making a difference for the organization.

Say, for example, you’d like to connect with the VP of marketing at your firm. Your message may look something like this:

Hi Jennifer! At a recent town hall meeting, you spoke about the importance of getting better customer insights to help us develop and execute our business strategy more effectively. I am passionate about data analytics and have worked as an analyst for the past three years. I’d love to share some ideas on using interactive data visualization to translate pools of data into actionable information for our existing digital marketing campaigns. Can we schedule a 20-minute virtual coffee to discuss?

The key is to demonstrate a sincere interest in your colleagues: what they care about and what problems they’re trying to solve. This allows you to highlight and frame your own strengths in a way that can help them, without making it seem like you’re primarily interested in your own advancement.

Building a personal brand may seem promotional at first glance, but it’s not. Your personal brand is how you define the distinctive value that you bring to your career. It has the potential to strengthen your connections and engage more deeply with colleagues. Being able to articulate your brand will help others understand who you really are, what you stand for, build authentic relationships, and ultimately, realize your goals.

Reference: nfluencermarketinghub , searchenginejournal , hbr.org