Building your Personal Brand

I recently completed a fantastic Linked-in learning course about building your personal brand. Chelsea Krost's knowledge of the topic and great tips were very insightful and I decided to write a short article summarizing some of what I've learned from this course!

So, the first thing to note is what a personal brand is: a personal brand is a complete extension of who you are and what you stand for. It is what differentiates you from everyone else. Your personal brand is your single most important marketing tool.

Now you might be asking yourself, "how do I go about creating my own personal brand?" Well, it definitely does not happen overnight but here are four questions to consider when starting to craft your own brand:

1. What am I passionate about?
2. What am I good at?
3. What gives me credibility?
4. What are my personal brand goals?

When it comes to crafting your brand, Storytelling is imperative. People remember stories, not statistics. Your story should give the consumer a good understanding of who you are, what you have overcome, what your current mission is, and what makes you credible.

Krost refers to this storytelling aspect as the three C's of storytelling:

• Character: Who you are, your background, and what led you to the "spark/event"?
• Conflict: Get personal, get vulnerable, and share difficult experiences that lead you to a breakthrough moment.
• Conclusion: State the result of the conflict/breakthrough, what you learned from the problem, how you solved the problem, and why you are now equipped to help others with this same problem.

The key to this storytelling is to not be too overly promotional. Tie stories back to the pain points of the audience and reveal how you could be the solution to their problems.

Another important aspect of your personal brand is to define your target market: the specific group of people that are more likely to need and buy what you offer. Four tips to define your target market are to:

1. Research your current customers
2. Know your product or service inside out
3. Create buyer personas
4. Discover where your audience is on social media

The next topic is all about content creation. Valuable content is crucial to driving profitable action. You may have heard of the popular phrase "Content is King". Here are five steps to creating a valuable content marketing framework:

1. Define your objective.
2. Consider the audience.
3. Craft the Brand story.
4. Roll out the Content strategy.
5. Measure your results.

Then another important aspect of your personal brand is your social media channels.

1. Does your social media handle align with your brand, business, and persona?
2. Is your brand into up to data and that same across all channels? We want consistency across all platforms.
3. Are you posting on a regular basis?
4. Do you have analytics to track the growth, progress, and engagement of the community?
5. Are you using the 80/20 rule? The 80/20 rule is the balance between non-promotional and promotional content on social media: 80% of your content should be engaging, conversing, and commenting, while 20% of your content should be about promotions.

An important thing to note is that it is imperative to brand yourself. There is a well-known saying about this, "brand yourself before others do". Taking charge of that narrative and sharing the expression of who you are is imperative if you want to be successful at sharing your story and ultimately, selling what you have to offer of value.

In this Linked-in learning class, Chelsea Krost gives tons more insight into personal brands in general, how to monetize your personal brand, and tips to consider when accepting speaking positions and roles. If you are interested in learning more about this topic I highly recommend you check out her course on Building your Personal Brand!

If you have any other tips, questions, or insights, let me know in the comments below!