Personal branding is essential for marketing your talent to the world. Which, in an increasingly competitive world, makes it essential to learn how to get personal branding right.
Personal branding helps individuals to communicate their value to potential clients. It creates a unique identity for yourself and represents you as a valuable asset to the world. Just as you opt for brands instead of some lesser-known companies, clients also want to offer their projects to freelancers with proper personal branding.
In this article, we'll share some of the best personal branding tips to make sure you establish authenticity in your chosen field and present the best possible version of yourself to the world.
1. Discover Your Personal Brand
Personal branding requires everything that a regular brand does. Know why you want to have a personal brand in the first place. Also, be definite about your target niche. Don’t settle with choosing a broad domain like content writing.
Choose a specific niche like technical blog writing for enterprise-level tools. Decide on your brand kit that includes a logo, color scheme, and font. Combining all of these, you should have a distinct and memorable brand kit that will remind people of your brand.
2. Set an Objective for Your Personal Brand
Don’t start working on brand development without having some definite goals in mind. Besides being the reflection of your existing skills, it also represents the objectives you want to achieve.
By assessing your strengths and weaknesses using the SWOT method, you can find the niche where you want to see yourself being successful in. This analysis will not only help you realize your unique skills and traits but make you understand where you need to improve to advance in your career.
3. Discover Your Target Audience
Another crucial point to consider before starting personal branding is your target audience. Not everyone will be interested in your brand, and neither will you want to impress all of them. So, decide who you have to convince and start crafting your story for clients, recruiters, or entrepreneurs.
As soon as you determine your intended audience, you will know which platforms to use for branding. You can create your portfolio website for attracting clients, while professional networking will work better to land a dream job. If you’re about to launch a business, social media and email marketing are beneficial means of personal branding.
4. Create a Brand Framework
After determining the above points, you can start working on your brand strategy or framework. Depending on your audience and expertise, you need to decide your story for branding.
It needs time, effort, and understanding of your personality to find an effective brand framework. Find out your top qualities that add value to the work you do. Only when you showcase how you and your skills will benefit your clients will they start to listen.
5. Ensure Your Brand Is Visible
For the audience to know about your brand, it should be visible. There is no better way to grab attention than to be present online. Having your own website will work as your portfolio while increasing your credibility.
Optimize your website by including all of the necessary elements and making it responsive. While designing your website, make sure to use any trending color scheme that goes well with your brand.
You can also use social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., to increase the visibility of your brand. Use attractive graphics in your social media posts to force people to stop and read while scrolling. You can also become active in forums to improve brand visibility.
6. Research and Follow the Industry Icons
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule for personal branding, and different people can find success using different methods. Before creating your strategy for branding, research thoroughly on the experts of your target niche and find out how they approach things.
However, don’t end up following the niche experts blindly. Analyze their strategies and add necessary tweaks to create your own personal branding blueprint. Your goal is to be unique with your personal branding. To do so, combine your creativity and touch of personalization with the experience of the experts.
7. Come Up With an Elevator Pitch
You may not want to restrict your personal branding to online channels. Whenever possible, brand yourself during face-to-face interactions such as any formal or informal gathering, networking event, or seminar. For that, take some time to prepare an elevator pitch.
It should tell your story, including who you are, what you do, your strengths, and future ambitions. Keep it concise and crisp since you should be able to deliver the pitch within 30 to 60 seconds. Focus on the key points and skills that will add value to your clients. If you want, you can also record and use it as a video intro on your website and social channels.
8. Get Endorsements From People You Know
Rave reviews testifying your knowledge, hard work, and punctuality will help your brand become credible and trustworthy. Ask your former and current managers, colleagues, clients, and/or professors to endorse you on your website and on professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn.
Tell them to include detailed examples of the work or projects you did for them. Also, they can highlight your skills and competencies while recommending you.
On LinkedIn, you can also ask other acquaintances for endorsements. LinkedIn is a globally trusted platform, and recommendations made here will easily catch the attention of potential clients and employers.
9. Create an Online Presence
In this era of digital communication and social networking, you should have a strong online presence to establish yourself as a brand. Whether you are looking for a job or not, people should be able to easily communicate with you online.
Be present on all the available social media platforms with the maximum footfall of your target audience. Instead of using social media for marketing yourself, 80% of your content should be informative. Regularly check your DMs to know if anyone wants to contact you.
You can also enlist yourself in various online directories. Thus, your contact number and email address are available to everyone. If you use a separate business email, it’ll represent your brand as a professional one.
10. Build a Community Around Your Brand
You can become a brand only when you have an engaged community following you. Your blog or social media profile should be the platform for people to share their problems and resolve issues others face. Thus, people can share their experiences and learn from each other.
You can also participate in webinars or go live from your social profile on your preferred niche. Also, replying to comments on your posts will help to increase your follower count.
Give Your Career a Much-Needed Boost
Everyone should have a personal branding strategy in place. As doing so will help you to advance in your career. Follow the personal branding tips above to master the art of personal branding and develop a strong reputation. This strategy should help you bag more clients than ever.