Beyond the Resume: Mastering Your Personal Brand Symphony

The Art of Influence: Building Your Personal Brand Legacy

What Is Personal Branding?

A personal brand encompasses the experiences, competencies, actions, expertise, or achievements that make a person known within a community, professional field

The process of creating or maintaining (and at times, even re-inventing or promoting) a personal brand, on the other hand, is called?personal branding.?

Your personal branding is a combination of:

• How people see you in real life.?
• What your product, service, or experience stands for.
• What your online personality reflects.

Why Should You Build a Personal Brand?

Especially when it comes to the professional world, personal brands matter.

A personal brand will be of help when:

• You’re an employee looking to get hired
• You represent a company looking to sell a service or product?
• You’re looking for business partners or investors?

So, based on your situation, strong personal branding can help you by:?

• Making you stand out from the competition
• Generating professional opportunities
• Building up your credibility?

Personal Branding Strategy - Path to Create Your Brand

Discover Who You Are

The most important step in the journey of personal branding is to recognize yourself. And we don’t mean that metaphorically, or in some philosophical sense. Rather, knowing yourself means:?

• Knowing what makes you unique?
• Knowing your strengths and capabilities?as well weaknesses
• Knowing what distinguishes you from the rest

Only then can recruiters, customers, investors, take you seriously. Why??

Because this knowledge is crucial to determine your personal brand’s vision, story, message, and worth, among other things.

Instead, start by answering the following questions:?

• What are my core values??
• What is my message and my story?
• What are my passions?
• What are my skills?
• What makes me different and better than my competitors?
• Where do I see myself in one year, five years, and 15 years?
• What is the purpose of this personal brand?
• What problems can I solve and why should my target audience listen to me?
• How do I want to deliver my message?
• Who can help me reach my goals?

Determine Your Assets

The said assets are what you will then base your personal brand on.To make things easier, categorize the information as follows:?

• Competence
• Values
• Goals???
• Identity?

It encompasses your knowledge and experience, your skills (both?soft skills?and hard skills), and your professional attributes and abilities.?

Values

Your values represent what you stand for, or the beliefs that you hold most that guide you through your professional life.

They are the characteristics and morals that guide your decision-making process, your work ethic, and your communication process, among others. For example, one of the core values of your personal brand might be integrity.?

This is why it’s important that your values are as genuine and achievable as possible - otherwise, they might be hard to uphold.?

Goals

Your goals include your desired future achievements, plans, and outcomes. To be as realistic and achievable as possible, make your goals specific and quantifiable, as well as set yourself a time limit, or deadline, to achieve them.?

Thus, the goals guiding your personal brand can change as your professional journey progresses.?

Once you achieve that minestrone, your goal might become to find advertisers that can potentially fund you for promoting their products on your social media accounts.?

Identity

Your identity involves the things that make you authentic or the distinct traits that give you an edge over your competitors.?

As we mentioned earlier, for a personal brand to be successful, it should distinguish you from other competitors in your niche. So, for example, if you’re giving wellness advice to women, you should determine your point of difference compared to other wellness providers.?

Your identity can be anything that makes you uniquely you and that benefits your personal brand.?

Decide Your Personal Brand’s Mission and Your Vision Statement

A vision statement states a personal, business, or brand ambition in the long term. It explains why your personal brand matters and can help your career decisions stay aligned with your ultimate goals.

• To create your brand’s vision statement, write down your long-term vision (10+ years), your purpose and core values, and your definition of success. In the best-case scenario, your vision statement will be clear, brief, and memorable.?
• To create your mission statement, use the assets you collected from answering the following: “what do I do?” “What are the skills, experiences, and competencies that help me do it?” and “what motivates me to do what I do?”??

Tell Your Story

Your personal brand’s story is an excellent way to connect with your target audience on an emotional level.?

When you know someone’s back story, their motivation for doing something, and the events that led them to a certain decision, you are more likely to sympathize and relate to them.

Sometimes, it might even happen that a personal brand’s story is so on-point, it gains popularity, recognition, and appreciation even from people outside of the target audience.?

Create Your Personal Brand Identity and Image

Your personal brand’s success relies on the quality and consistency of your online presence as much as it does on your experience, skills, and vision. As such, the channels that you will use to show your personal brand should follow a similar color scheme, style, logo, etc.?

• Your brand identity consists of your brand’s visual elements. These include your logo, color scheme, tagline, typography, form, website and social media, packaging (if applicable), etc. These are all elements that can help others distinguish and remember your personal brand.
• Your brand image involves your brand’s non-visual elements, particularly its reputation, impression, and the emotions it evokes on the target audience. Do you want to be thought of as someone who will fight for what is right, no matter what? Or someone who comes up with innovative solutions? Your brand image defines all that!

Build Your Online Channels Branding Strategy

They enable direct access to people and products to recruiters, clients, and investors and simultaneously allow you to be in control of your online image and presence (if you correctly follow our guide on personal branding, that is!)?

In addition to using a personal website or blog, you can also take advantage of Facebook,?LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit.?

Keep in mind, however, that building your online channels is not enough. You need a firm strategy in place to ensure that your personal brand doesn’t just fade away in the virtual world.?

To meet your personal brand objectives, you need to engage your target audience with relevant brand activities, achievements, and topics. Otherwise, these channels will only serve as typical social media accounts and will not meet your personal brand’s objectives.?

What we’re saying here is, instead of just creating a LinkedIn profile and leaving it as-is, you need to actively “brand” your profile:

• Add a cover image with your mission statement and logo.
• Use a catchy professional title. Instead of “SEO professional,” you can do “SEO Pro Helping Businesses Hit 5-Digit Traffic Numbers.”
• Post your case studies, testimonials, and achievements.
• Publish articles on LinkedIn that portray you as an expert.

Or, to give you another example, let’s say that your personal brand aims to distinguish you as a fashion guru. It’s not enough to have a website where you show how well you dress and what awesome style you have.?

Rather, it should also include:

• Fashion news.
• Blog posts with fashion advice and tips.
• Recent trends in the fashion industry.
• Polls, newsletters, and more.

Measure Your Impact

This step is particularly important because it can let you know whether you're doing things right or you need to change the direction of your personal brand. It is not uncommon to change certain aspects of your personal brand, such as its mission statement or its identity, when these things no longer work, or when your target audience changes.

Similarly, you may need to rethink certain aspects of your outreach and social media strategy, the channels that you use or the story you are telling, if your personal brand’s impact doesn’t meet your desired objectives or long-term ambitions.??

Website: Your website will allow you to check the number of visits, the demographics, your audience’s location, the level of engagement, mobile and desktop traffic, as well as users’ search behavior, devices, and interests, among others. You can also gain insight on how your audience finds you (directly, or through referrals and social media channels, for example).?

Podcast: If you promote your personal brand through a podcast, you have insight on your subscribers, listeners, number of downloads, social shares, conversion rates, trends, etc.?

Social media: Your social media channels allow you to check the number of likes, shares, followers, growth rate, impressions, mentions, reach, response rate, Click Through Rate (CTR), and much more!?

Search engines: Google and other search engines will offer you insight on organic traffic, conversion rate, average session duration and time on page, page errors, keyword performance, etc.?

Takeaways

Let’s go through the most important points we covered for good measure:?

• A personal brand encompasses the experiences, competencies, actions, expertise, or achievements that make a person known within a community, professional field, or at large.
• The process of creating and/or maintaining a personal brand, on the other hand, is called personal branding.
• A strong personal brand can help you by making you stand out from the competition, generating professional opportunities, and building up your credibility.
• To begin your personal branding process, discover who you are, determine your assets, write down your mission and vision statements, tell your story, create your brand image and identity, build your online strategy, and measure your impact!