What is a personal brand?
Building a personal brand is the process of defining and promoting who you are as an individual, what makes you unique based on your experience, skills and values to reach your target audience and ensure they choose you over your competition. It is how you mindfully present yourself and show up consistently to deliver meaningful value to your target audience that prompts them to take action.
Why you need a personal brand
As an independent or small business owner in the creative and technology industries, you will more often than not be selling your skills to provide a service to your customers.
While creating a business name and building a brand around your offer can be fruitful if done correctly, with time spent on building awareness and trust with your customers, rather think of yourself as the product and build your personal brand around you as an individual.
Having a relevant skill in today's world is the biggest advantage you can have, the ability to monetise your skills and present yourself as the product is where unbelievable opportunity exists. Your personal brand will provide you with the focus you need, a brand that is recognisable to your network and the ability to maintain complete flexibility on how you want to present yourself and your offer.
At the end of the day, people buy from people. We have all spent our lives building relationships, networking with others and gaining trust from people based on who you are, our experiences and our skills. So why not leverage that narrative to promote your product to your audience.
Your personal brand will have some clear benefits:
- Get 10 x the reach from sharing content via your personal channels
- Your content will be shared 24 x more frequently via your personal channels
- Leads will convert 7 x higher when generated via your personal channels
How to build your personal brand
Lay your foundations
Building your personal brand foundations is vital to setting yourself up for success in the long run because it is fundamentally based on who you are as a person. You will need to define your personal vision and what outcomes you want to achieve in life, you need to set yourself goals on how you plan to realise your vision as well as understand your core values that make you who you are and keep you grounded.
Find your whitespace
We all have our place in this world, but understanding how to define that can often be tricky if you don't have a purpose in life, if you don't understand what makes you different from others and if you don't know what people actually need from you. Your whitespace is the intersection between these three elements that are often overlooked when positioning ourselves.
Define your strategy
Once you have built your foundation and discovered your whitespace, you will need to clearly define your target audience and unpack their personas to understand what problems you can solve for them. Your competition is equally important to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and how you can fill that space. Lastly you need to capture your unique story and how you are going to place your personal brand in the minds of your audience, what are your key messages you want to deliver and what is your tone of voice that resonates with your audience.
Create your identity
Building your personal brand identity and bringing it to life is important as it gives you the ability to resonate with your audience. Your logo, typography, colour palette, image style and graphics all act as vehicles to connect your brand together and are the doorway for people to discover your brand's essence.
Build your assets
Your personal brand website is the central hub for you to provide information and inspiration to your audience to further engage or convert. No matter your website objectives, owning your personal domain is a smart move when considering your personal equity online, it also allows complete flexibility to pivot as your career evolves. The ability to present information, create products, sell services and collect data are endless when you have your website in place.
Promote your product
Remember, you are the product so marketing yourself online can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but remembering that only 1% of users on LinkedIn actually create and share content presents a massive opportunity for you. No matter your objectives or channels you choose to use, always reference back to your foundations and create valuable content that solves problems for your audience. Planning ahead and having a clear content calendar developed will help you be consistent and present a considered offer to your audience.
How we can help build your personal brand
The People Studio is a digital product studio that designs personal branding solutions for people. We leverage over 20 years experience in product, branding and marketing to deliver value to our customers through development and management services.
We take a holistic approach to developing personal brands for people by delivering the end to end elements needed to build and grow your personal brand online. From brand foundations, to strategy and identity, we build your website as well as give you the marketing framework to help you succeed.
Because we understand what a challenge it can be, we also offer management solutions to take care of your content production and delivery on a monthly basis.
For more information, visit our website: The People Studio
