??5 Questions To Ask Before Creating Your Personal Brand Strategy

To develop your personal brand, here are five questions to ask yourself to establish a solid foundation.

1.??????What am I passionate about?

There should always be a key focus behind your personal brand that you genuinely feel passionate about. Identify both personal and professional passions, as your personal brand should be a blend of your current expertise infused with stories and lessons learned from your real-life experience.?

When laying the foundation of your personal brand, be sure to focus on using your strength to your advantage. Define what areas you know you’re strong in and don’t try to be something you’re not. Authenticity is key in personal branding; you want to showcase your genuine true self to your target audience.

2.??????What gives me credibility?

There’s a saying, “Brand yourself before others do.” Think about what skills you have acquired throughout your life experiences. What training, credentials, certifications, awards or proven success stories do you have to help establish your credibility?

No personal brand is worth anything unless you have credibility. Start thinking about where you’re already credible or what you need to do to become credible. The formula for building credibility has no short cut. It involves combining your values with action.

Your values are what you believe in. What is so core to your moral fibre and your DNA, that if it wasn’t there, you wouldn’t be you? Ask yourself what do you believe in that you would fight for? And then, how are you showing up? How are you behaving that’s consistent with those values? Credibility is the ‘walk the talk’ idea of being able to tell people what you stand for and then showing action.

Moving from just being credible to influential, however, takes one further crucial step. Many of you might be doing good work, making good decisions, and living a life of integrity, but if you’re not telling people why you’re doing it, then you’re not attaching that action to value, and you’re not capitalising on enhancing your credibility.

3.??????Who are my target audience and how do I want them to feel working with me?

When you’re thinking about your target audience, it’s really important to understand: what do they need me to deliver? Maybe they need you to be on time and on budget and have certain technical skills, but what do they need to feel from you? What emotional connection can you make with them to be able to build a relationship and to be able to build influence??

Most of the time people just want to feel safe and able to trust you. Ideally, they also want to feel a sense of collaboration or affinity with you. Ask yourself: How do I make myself attractive to them? How do I put myself in the best light, in the best situation to start that relationship?

If you don’t have a clear and strong value proposition, then it’s really difficult to positively influence those people who are making those decisions about giving you that next job.

4.??????What are my personal brand goals?

Your specific goals will help your personal brand mission and strategy take shape. Examples of popular personal brand goals are to get your project financed, to secure a career-progressing role in a great company, or to increase media exposure for your completed project.

As you start to put pen to paper to answer all of these questions, your brand foundation will start to take shape.

When you’re clear about your value proposition, about your target audience, and the goals that you have, then you’re able to build influence.

Building influence with decision makers and collaborators means you’re not only able to identify and respond to their needs, but you also have a strategy for how you want to be known.

5.??????Networking your personal brand

Often when we think about networking, we look to connect with people we call ‘decision makers’. These are the people who can transact with us and hire us but there’s other types of people that we want in our network who are going to add value to our strategy. I call them ‘second category information sources’. These are people who may or may not be decision makers, but they have insights and industry information. A third type of person to focus your networking on are supportive people who are going to be your allies and your advocates. It takes a lot to build a personal brand and getting a support system in place is really important.

When we look at networking as a concept, it’s all about win-win. The networking relationship has to be mutually beneficial. It’s not just about what I can do for you or how you can help me, it has to be reciprocal. When you identify who you need to know and where they are, then your networking strategy allows you to build relationships to connect you to those people or those communities.

Networking is a relationship tool as it allows you to highlight your value proposition and stand apart from competition in a way you design.?Here are three tips for building an intentional networking strategy.

• Be a resource: Focus on building the relationship and meeting your contacts where they are, not just by focusing on what you need. Build up your credits in the emotional bank accounts of as many people as possible so you can call on their help in the future.
• Stay in touch: Don’t just think of networking as a onetime thing that you use to get something. This is about building a relationship and it will come back to reward you over time as your career grows and you find additional ways of building synergy with those contacts.
• ?Always be genuine: Authenticity and genuineness is critical for networking. If you show that you’re real and human and you have hopes and dreams and you have questions, people are going to want to help. If they suspect that there are ulterior motives, or somehow you’re not being genuine, then this puts their guard up.?