Competitive analysis is a way to make a stand and… find like-minded people

Hi there! ??

Today I will move from the philosophical and psychological part of personal brand building to more practical and rational. I will share the way how you can set your personal brand positioning using competitive analysis tools like:

— Target Audience Map

— Brand Positioning Map

— Tone of Voice Map

— Also, I will share with you a methodology that will help you structure all gotten on the competitive analysis stage insights and structure them to enhance your brand assets and make your promotional plan effective. As a bonus, I uploaded my presentation on Google Disc to save your time during your own process. Download it at the bottom of the article and fill it out after reviewing the methodology.

When I started to build my personal brand one year ago, I faced such a problem: I needed to figure out what kind of brand strategists were my competitors. There are thousands of them over the world. Therefore, I decided to limit my analysis to ten people with different personalities to get a helicopter view of how people connected to branding position themselves.

It’s tough to realize who your direct competitors are when you are not in your niche’s top 50 famous people. Therefore we can analyze benchmarks instead.

Benchmarks are people who already have a well-recognizable personal brand and are pretty famous. It can be personalities from your niche or famous people with character and brand attributes you enjoy. When I was in the competitive analysis stage, I chose some branding stars and some various personalities that I found accidentally on the Internet and analyzed those elements for every character:

1) Verbal messages that a person broadcasting

2) Communication channels that a person uses to communicate

3) Products that they promote and sell

4) Visual Identity (non-verbal messages)

5) Do's and Dont's (according to your situation and your vision)

This is what that part of the analysis can look like.

This is quite a time-consuming process, but the results will pay off the time spent. I recommend you choose at least ten competitors and benchmarks. Then try to analyze every competitor and benchmark one by one, and remember to analyze your personality. Let's take a look at how I looked compared to others.

Don't criticize yourself if you are unsatisfied with your current personal brand! Use that just to set our starting point and to be inspired by exciting examples.

So, after you described every benchmark using the stages I’ve mentioned before, it’s time to use four powerful frameworks for summarising findings and making conclusions that will be useful for the next steps.

1. Target Audience Map

Look at what target audience your competitors/benchmarks are focused on. Go through their communication channels: website, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Sometimes it is written down on what audience people focus on. Sometimes you must define it by secondary signs, like clients, portfolio, tone of voice, and visual identity.

Make a map. Any visualization is appropriate. If you feel better about tables, use such an instrument. The main goal is to see the whole picture. After, try to listen to yourself: what target audience do you want to work with? What was your best experience when you worked with a specific segment? What are the main characteristics of such a target audience segment? And add yourself to the map.

2. Brand Positioning Map

When going through personality’s communication channels, you meet repeating patterns: verbal and visual which can lead you to summarize and systematize all benchmarks you analyze. If a brand is consistent, you will 100% see the main topic to which a person gives the most attention: caring for the world, spirituality, money, challenge, etc.

Try to divide them into sectors by any identification and define benchmarks’ brand positioning territories. You can name those sectors as you wish. Then, if you have already made the self-exploration stage , try to identify what brand positioning territory will be comfortable for you. What are you about? If you haven’t made a self-exploration stage, don’t worry! Make a hypothesis about what brand positioning territory can fit you.

It's crucial to choose a brand territory that is connected with your mission and values. Otherwise, you will look unnatural.

You’ll be amazed when you discover a bunch of like-minded people, building relationships with whom can be transformed into meaningful collaborations, partnerships, and even friendships.

3. Tone of Voice Map

The third framework is designed for your tone of voice identification. Do you want to communicate more friendly or official with your target audience? It depends on your target audience’s preferences and your authentic characteristics. Make that scale and stick to your tone of voice to support your personal brand consistency.

4. Conclusions which are divided into two parts: product and promotion

Finally, all the collected information above should be used for your profit, eh? How can we structure all that information and transform it from the presentation into a set of actions? I propose you separate all the data into two areas: product and promotion. Why is that so? Because it is crucial to divide your personal brand building process into strategic and promotion parts.

Marketing is about product development and following-up promotion. The product consists of an artifact created by a human and a brand — the emotional brand assets with which a human empowered this artifact. And promotion is about delivering those artifacts’ characteristics (rational benefits) and brands’ assets (primarily emotional benefits). It is crucial to start building your brand from the product (strategic) part.

Therefore, collect the Do’s and Don’ts that you have written down. We will put all the information connected with brand positioning and visual identity (and other brand attributes) into the product section. And all data related to communication channels and content goes into the promotion part. Those are mine last year’s findings.

As promised at the beginning of the article, I’ve uploaded KeyNote and PowerPoint presentations to my Google Drive. Feel free to use it. Just replace my benchmarks, maps, and conclusions with yours.

Also, I want to share a comprehensive video where I review my benchmarks and competitors, showing all the analysis steps. There are many grammatical and lexical mistakes because it was one of my first attempts to make a video in English. Still, I hope each step’s immediate sense will be understandable.

Feel free to write your questions in the comments or DM about the competitive analysis stage of the personal brand development process. In the following article, we will use self-exploring and competitive analysis outcomes to form a brand platform. This strategic document will help you to create all your brand constants. Good luck on your path! ??

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