In today’s ever-evolving world, having a personal brand is important. Whether you're a potential entrepreneur or a job-seeker, your personal brand will help you in so many ways. It can increase your credibility. And it can also help you get noticed.
But for you to achieve them, you must create your personal brand the right way. In this article, we offer you some tips in creating a favorable personal brand.
1. Define your personal brand
One of the best tips for personal branding is to remain true to your attributes and skills. You won't stand apart from your potential competitors if you don't do what comes naturally. In other words, you need to use your own set of skills and talents. Flaunt what makes you, you.
Think about a mantra you use daily in your personal and professional life, and seamlessly incorporate that into your individual branding strategy. There are a couple of different elements to your personal brand to consider:
- What you stand for: You need to be clear about why people will want to listen to what you have to say. That will be a central part of your brand identity.
- Your visual identity: One of the best ways to become instantly recognizable is with coherent visual branding. That involves defining the type of colors you’ll use for visual assets, and creating a logo among other things.
- Your brand voice: The brand voice is how you communicate with your audience. Do you have a corporate identity and will create formal marketing material, or will you be informal and funny?
The combination of what you stand for — your visual identity and your brand voice— is central to your personal brand. For example, consider Melyssa Griffin, a well-known blogger and marketer.
Within seconds of landing on her website you get a sense of her personal brand.
It seems like she’s sassy and fun. You want to convey the key parts of your brand to your target audience just as quickly.
2. Identify your target audience
If you want to build your personal brand, you need to be clear about who you are trying to impress. Your target audience might be your professional peers, colleagues at work, or people who fit the demographic of potential customers or clients.
One of the best ways to define your target audience is to create an audience persona.
An audience persona is a singular representation of your target audience where the archetype is composed of your audiences’ key traits. Here, you will have to define basic information about them such as their age, their position at a company, interests, gender, etc.
At the end of your research, you should create something that looks a bit like this:
Source: ebizondigital
The audience persona is a good reference point for your marketing efforts. As you develop a strategy, you can look at your audience persona and ask the question, would they find this useful? As you define your target audience, utilize an email finder tool to find the emails of your leads and enhance your outreach efforts.
3. Design a site that converts
For many individuals, a central part of their personal brand identity is their website. The website is a digital flyer where you share information about yourself. You might even sell products or services through the site.
One of the most important pages on your site is the homepage. The homepage will be the first thing your viewers will see. If they don't find your homepage interesting or visually pleasing in any way, they are less likely to carry on browsing through your site.
When designing your homepage, prioritize simplicity. You need to convey quickly:
- Who you are and what you stand for
- What you do/ your expertise
- Why a person should listen to you
Sujan Patel, who owns several SaaS sites, does a good job of this on the homepage of his website.
When you land on his site, his expertise is immediately clear. That messaging will resonate with his target audience.
You can use a web design tool to design a nice homepage for your site.
Your site's homepage should include a call to action (CTA) that is easy to spot, too.
Consider speed as well. Your conversions will considerably decrease if your website loads slowly both via the web and mobile. The following graph shows the impact of speed on conversion rates:
Source: Section.io
Try to convert site visitors onto your list of verified email addresses. An email verifier can be beneficial in ensuring your emails reach your recipients and don't get lost in their spam folders. Email verification helps maintain a clean and accurate mailing list, improving deliverability and reducing bounce rates, which ultimately enhances your email marketing effectiveness.
4. Offer various types of content
Content is king in personal brand building. Past research found that businesses publishing more than 16 posts a month experienced online traffic 3.5 times more than businesses posting zero to four content pieces.
Quality content on multiple social media platforms can widen your reach and increase brand awareness significantly. It can also expand your customer base.
Create the best way to engage with your target audience and share your expertise. Your goal should be to create content that establishes your expertise and is useful for your target audience.
Concentrate on subject matters your customers will find valuable. You can create a content calendar to keep you focused and help you organize your marketing efforts.
The content you create should align with each stage of the consumer life cycle. That means sharing information that helps people who are learning about a niche and creating content for experts.
Focus your efforts on a limited number of marketing channels and try to develop a relationship with your audience. Remember: the more you connect, the stronger relationships you'll build.
Source: whatagraph
Also, don't be afraid to ask for help as there may be more experienced people in the market who can give you valuable advice about reasons behind their success stories. Learn, reflect, and apply accordingly, but don't lose your own brand's authenticity in the process.
5. Use social media to promote your brand
In today's technologically advanced world, it is almost impossible for your brand to reach its fullest potential without social media. Social media is your best friend when creating your personal brand and the ideal way to reach a large audience.
If you only have a limited social media presence, do the following.
First, identify the industry giants in your field.
Once you’ve created a list of niche influencers, you’ll need to do some basic competitor analysis. Your goal is twofold:
- Identify which social media channels they use. If everyone is very active on one channel, you should probably focus your efforts on that.
- Look at the type of content they produce and what content resonates with their audience.
Competitor analysis will help you understand what is working in your niche. It should also provide you with plenty of inspiration for the type of content you could produce.
Remember, your goal isn’t to imitate these influencers. Instead, you need to create an original spin that fits with your personal branding goals.
As you conduct this research, look for opportunities to develop relationships with your industry peers as well. Befriending niche influencers is one of the best ways to grow your personal brand quickly.
You’ll see this happen a lot on YouTube. Influencers with a large following will often partner up with other people who are operating in their niche. Those collaborations are a chance to expand your reach.
Finally, make it a point to update your social media channels regularly.
Neil Patel is a nice example of a marketer with a strong personal brand with a social media presence across multiple channels.
He regularly updates his LinkedIn. The content he shares is targeted at and resonates with his audience - people who are actively involved in digital marketing. It’s part of a considered strategy.
Source: Boohoo
The content he publishes through his LinkedIn account always gets a lot of engagement. Make sure to track what types of information get the most engagement.
Your brand tone and voice must also remain consistent across all your platforms. When using social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, make sure you only use relevant and catchy images to grab users' interest. Like Boohoo, use hashtags as well.
Past research has found that 71 percent of consumers said they were likely to purchase from a brand they followed on their social media platforms.
Consider the following graph:
Source: learn.g2
Social media marketing is crucial in building and promoting your brand. The image above perfectly demonstrates its various benefits.
Bottom Line
Actively building your own personal brand is pivotal because it is the only way you can have complete control over your brand. Suppose you don't exercise authority over your brand by uniquely creating your brand voice. In that case, you leave the ethos and goals of your business open for interpretation.
This article gave you five personal branding tips you can follow. Use your personality to create a unique voice, identify your target audience, and design a site that converts. Offer various types of content, and, finally, use social media to promote your brand.
Your personal brand is your story, which means it's only yours to tell. So, take charge of the narrative and build your brand to help you get noticed. Do justice to the vision you imagine.
Written by DesignCrowd on Wednesday, July 28, 2021
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.
