How To Build A Powerful Personal Brand

Branding is such a crucial component of success. Think of some of the largest companies in the world from Nike’s “swoosh” to Apple’s icon, everyone is familiar with the brands they created.

Today, building your personal brand is just as important as building your company’s brand, in fact, it might even be more important. Consumers want to hear the story behind the founders, the failures, struggles and the success. This means putting yourself out there and marketing yourself in addition to your business.

Your personal brand is how you appear to the world. Therefore, it serves to reason that a strong brand is preferable to one that is unpolished and uninteresting. Once people know who you are and begin to identify you with a specific area of understanding or expertise, you'll be well on your way to becoming the go-to person in your niche or industry.

Why is Personal Branding Important?

Personal branding is important because it helps give a person more credibility. It’s never been more competitive to land a new job or earn a paycheck. With more people building personal brands, you need to put yourself out there to get noticed. Personal branding can let recruiters find experts like you with ease and help clients find the expert they’re looking for.

If you’re trying to land a higher position at a new company or increase you revenue as a business owner you can showcase key data such as the number of followers you have, how much traffic your website gets or other vital metrics which can give you a competitive advantage over other candidates and businesses. Think of it almost like an online portfolio about yourself. Branding yourself allows more people to get to know who you are and how you bring value.

It can also help you land new opportunities like business deals or marketing partnerships that you wouldn’t otherwise have, especially if you’re a person of influence. Self-branding instills trust and credibility in your knowledge and your abilities, so companies know that partnering with you will improve their brand awareness. Branding yourself in an authentic way by showing your personality is an excellent way of differentiating yourself from others in your field and developing your personal brand.

The question is, how do you become more recognized? How do you build your authority and your following? If you're looking to build your personal brand, here are some ways to go about it.

Become an Expert in Your Niche

The first step to crafting your personal brand is to lay a foundation that you can confidently and authentically build upon. The key principle here is authenticity. Branding is not about positioning yourself as something that you are not. It’s about purposefully and strategically showcasing your authentic self to your audience and your customers. Your personal brand should be a true reflection of your skills, passions, values, and beliefs.

Your business is only as good as the people running it, yourself included. It’s important that you understand your industry inside and out -- common sense. But this also means staying up to date on latest trends, breaking news and your competition. When you do this, it helps to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, elevating your personal brand to a higher level.

Branding yourself can be hard when you don’t have an area of expertise. Every influencer has his or her own niche. If you have an online store selling tools you might want to make sure you’re an expert in carpentry, furniture design or some sort of relevant niche. If you sell car parts, you should probably build up your expertise in the automotive industry so you can provide value. Another way to look at it is to build a brand around your own area of expertise. Say you worked at a hair salon for five years, you might build a personal brand where you share your expertise on hair issues while selling hair products.

Having a personal brand makes it easier for you to pitch and be found by media (online publications, magazines, television, radio, podcasts, etc.). The media is in constant search of experts that can share their insights with their audience.

“People need to know who you are and what you do in the most simple way possible. Keep it simple. You should be able to brand yourself in 5 words or less.”

– Grant Cardone

Choose Your Target Audience

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as you build a personal brand is trying to appeal to everyone. In reality, not everyone is your ideal client.

To attract your perfect clients, you must be willing to repel those who you do not want to work with. This means identifying a specific target audience and building a brand that is attractive to them.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you try to be liked by everyone, you will attract no one. You must be polarizing to stand out. Not everyone that is exposed to you or sees your message will like you or resonate with you, and that is perfectly fine. You don’t need to reach everyone to build a successful business. You just need to reach your perfect clients.

A valuable exercise that I recommend doing is creating your perfect client profile (sometimes called a client avatar). The more you understand about your perfect client, including their desires and challenges, the more prepared you will be to create products and services that they truly want and need.

Here are some questions to help you develop your perfect client profile:

? Demographics: What is their age, gender, education, relationship status, income, profession, etc.?

? Desires and aspirations: What is their desired future? What are their dreams, goals, and aspirations?

? Pain points and challenges: What are they struggling with? What is preventing them from achieving their goals?

“The foundation of a strong personal brand is how well you understand your audience and the problems they face. Then you can define why you care and how you solve those problems, which is what you’ll be remembered for.”

– Kyle Gray

Be Visible and Accessible

You can’t hide in your office behind your computer and expect to build a personal brand. You need to get out and make yourself visible and accessible. Attend industry conferences, even if it’s just to network and socialize. Make your social media profiles open to the public and allow incoming messages. Hold live video Q&A sessions on social media and interact with your followers. The more visible and accessible you make yourself, the stronger your personal brand.

Personal brands can’t be built without human interaction. Of course, many influencers eventually reach a point where they interact a little less with their fans. But if you’re just starting your self-branding, you probably want to respond to messages from your followers. It’s just good for business. Take the time each day to interact with your followers on social media. Did someone tag you in a post? Respond to it. Was one of your articles shared on social media? Thank them. Does a customer have a question about your product? Answer them. People want fast responses. It’s important to humanize your personal brand.

Don’t use social media as a 100 percent sales channel. It’s fine to throw an offer out there or promote your company occasionally but focus on showing the real you. If you come across as a robot or unauthentic you will push people away. Consumers love to see the other side, what you do on the weekends, where you eat, what your hobbies and interests are, etc. This makes you appear more human, which attracts more people to you.

Become a Trusted Source of Information

You know your personal brand is strong when you become a source of information. Strive to be the person media outlets and journalists contact when they need expert advice or information on a popular topic or breaking news. Start by sharing news and information that you feel is useful on social media and send it to your email list. This can also help to build your following, which leads to people viewing you as a trusted authority in your industry. Ultimately, this will attract more people to you.

Experts say you should have a robust content marketing and content promotion strategy across a number of channels. That advice isn’t wrong, but it’s a little lacking.

Watch some of the ways your audience digests content and then become a master of engagement and production value on that channel. Think in terms of how Gary Vaynerchuk focused on video to grow his family’s Wine Library business. It is not a coincidence that the most successful personal brands today (Grant Cardone, Marie Forleo, Gary Vaynerchuck, just to name a few) publish significant amounts of content online to help build and nurture their audience.

Develop a Strong Value Proposition

Every major company has a value proposition and you should too. What makes you, as a person, attractive to potential customers or clients? What is it that makes you special? Why should someone work with you? Once you have this established, make sure your audience knows what it is.

When people say provide value it usually sounds like fluff. Here’s what it means: Say you’re selling makeup products. You could either be the brand that solely runs ads. Or you could build the personal brand where you create makeup tutorial videos, write articles about common makeup questions, host a stream of makeup inspiration ideas for different seasons or events. While a customer could very well buy from a brand that solely runs ads, they’ll be more likely to buy from an ad run by an influencer who provides value. Why? Because that influencer helped them and taught them something new even before they were ready to buy. That brand is at top of mind.

Make the Commitment and be Consistent

One of most difficult things to do when building a brand is to stay consistent. Too often, people quit marketing their brand right before they’re about to break through to success. You must commit to the process and stay dedicated over the life of your business. Eventually, when more success comes your way, you can hire an agency or a freelancer to create content and promote your brand for you, but in the beginning, it’s all about focusing on getting yourself out there and becoming recognized as an authority in your industry.

Consistency is the secret sauce that winning personal brands have in common. Consistency isn’t only about posting on social media every day. It’s about unifying the brand look and messaging. Do all your social media posts look different or do they look the same? Some will tell you that you need to have variety with your content, but truth is the more consistent you are the easier it is to grow a following. If your favorite pop singer suddenly created a jazz album, you’d probably lose interest because you prefer the original music they created. Same with personal branding. Your audience will fall in love with the way you present content. If you change tunes, they’ll jump ship.

Start Building Your Personal Brand

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Thanks to the internet and technology, the barriers to entry to entrepreneurship are practically non-existent. Anyone can build a brand and an audience online and create products and services to sell to their audience.

As a freelancer or entrepreneur, you have competitors. As a personal brand, however, you don’t. When you build a personal brand, there is no real competition. Sure, there might be other people and companies selling similar products and services as you, but they are not you. In fact, there is no other person in the world that is exactly like you. As an individual, you are 100% unique.

This is why building a personal brand is so powerful. When you build a personal brand, you immediately differentiate yourself from your competitors because YOU are different than your competitors.

“We all have a personal brand whether we think about it that way or not. So, let’s be intentional about it. A strong brand to me means that your message is identifiable. When you have something you are known for, it lessens the perceived competition. That’s huge!”

– Kathy Klotz-Guest