Many people think that personal branding is for businesses and companies. It is equally significant for a person, business coach, or influencer that wants to share their story with the world. Today, we’ll discuss what is personal branding; its importance, how to improve it, and tips with examples.
What is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is the process of creating and developing a brand around a business entity or an individual person. People employ personal branding to rank up and advance in their careers and position themselves as a professional expert within the industry. However, when a person develops a brand, they can grow their social circle in order to exploit more opportunities to advance in their career, sell more products, and secure a better job.
It requires a lot of hard work and planning in order to see the results. Sometimes, you have to make improvements to your brand after receiving feedback from the customers. You can call it “self-branding,” and some people use it interchangeably with personal branding.
You write down your personal brand statement if you want to increase the influence of your personal brand. The personal brand statement would help you to target your audience, the values you want to convey to your audience, and why people should go after you. However, when it comes to building a brand, you should come up with 1-2 sentence statements and remain true to them.
Importance of Personal Branding
- When you share a picture of yourself or your personality with your audience on social media platforms; you would notice that people would share your content, follow you, and actively engage with you
- It would be much easier for you to create your own network of people if you have a personal touch to your business
- You can establish a community of likeminded people over time that perceives you as an expert in the industry and value your skill
- You should keep in mind that people would either love you or hate you, and it’s completely okay
- If someone in your network disagrees with you all the time and considers you a weird person, and you don’t want such people in your network
- One of the main reasons for establishing a brand is to create a group of people that would welcome anything you would offer
- After developing a group of ideal followers, you would meet your goals and objectives and start making a profit
- When the right audience is waiting for you, then you can increase the sale in a short time
How to Improve Personal Branding
When you start working on the personal brand and feedback of customers; you should make sure to align the self-brand with the personal brand statement. It would help you to improve your growth and progress. Personal branding is highly successful among different types of people, and it is difficult to know whether you have achieved success in your endeavors or not without any personal brand statement. Some of the main steps in improving your personal branding are as follows;
- Create Your Brand Statement: you should define your target customer market and evaluate the competitors that exist for you
- Build Brand Strategy: you should know how to engage and connect with your target customer market and define what success would be like for you in the upcoming years
- Monitor Engagement: you should encourage and promote the participation of the audience, and develop a plan of action for negative
- Develop Brand: your focus should be to share your brand through speaking opportunities, outreach, networking, and social network. Podcasts, vlogging, and blogging are some of the top ways that you could promote your content so that your audience would connect with it immediately
- Communication Plan: managing your presence online would take a lot of your time, and the communication plan would help you to deal with the negative backlash by offering the relevant information to your partner that whom you would work later on
- Measure Success: you should develop some KPIs (key performance indicators) for the success of your personal brand that would let you know that you’re moving in the right direction. You should celebrate your smallest wins in order to keep your motivation level up
Some of the important KPIs are as follows;
- People would be mentioning you on their blogs, social media, online, and other media platforms
- A publisher invites you for the guest post
- Someone would refer you to the potential client
- They invite you to speak at the podcast or the event
- Conversion into sale at your blog
Tips for Personal Branding with Examples
Some of the main tips for personal branding are as follows;
Content with a Purpose
Marketers would offer you the best strategy to attract buyers and people to your brand in order to develop new content all the time. They would ask you to keep creating content in the form of written blog posts and videos; and eventually, your brand would grow and become more influential.
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses and brands make is that they spend all of their time on content creation. They forget to engage with their target audience, and they miss out on a great opportunity.
However, the best content strategy is to allocate a budget for the already produced content and promote it on various channels; as long as it aligns with the goals and visions of the company. If you’re posting content, then you should be willing to pay for its promotion. If you don’t have the budget for content promotion, then you should avoid posting it.
Consistent
If you’re establishing a brand, then it’s significant that your content should be relevant to the social media platform and the type of audience you’re targeting. It’s like visually appealing to the type of audience that you plan to influence.
It doesn’t matter whatever social media channel you select; you would see a lot of free content on those channels about categories until you reach your objectives. For instance, you find your niche and offer something interesting, and then you would become an influential market leader in that category.
Many influencers are creating content nowadays and offering it to their audience for free without asking for anything in return. It doesn’t matter whatever niche or category, you should stick to your field, and be consistent with it.
Unique Selling Proposition
The USPs are those factors that would help you to differentiate yourself from the competitors. Coca-Cola is of top leading companies that have incorporated personal brands in their campaign and marketing strategy. However, it focuses on the emotional advertisement and brand personality.
Brands have developed an identity that focuses on happiness, community, experience, joy, and value. The company has been in business for more than 100 years, and it has always attracted the attention of customers. It focuses not only on selling the product but also on selling the unique experience.
Conclusion: What is Personal Branding? Importance, Tips & Examples
After an in-depth study of what is personal branding; its importance, how to improve it, and tips and examples; we have realized that branding requires a lot of hard work. If you’re working on a self-brand, then you should follow and practice the above-mentioned tips.
Ahsan Ali Shaw is an accomplished Business Writer, Analyst, and Public Speaker. Other than that, he’s a fun loving person.