What is personal branding? How is it different from your company brand? 

The difference between branding for a company and branding for yourself is just that – you. It represents you as an individual in a professional space, through social media, a website, or even your email newsletters. 

Your personal brand is important – even if you belong to a larger corporation. You can represent yourself as a thought leader, industry expert, or branch out into other areas of expertise that you feel represent what work you want to do. 

1. Ask Your Circle

Go to people within your close circle that you know will give it to you straight up and ask them two things – first, what five words would they associate with you? Second, what would they believe to be your biggest shortcomings? 

When they answer these questions, remain unbiased and listen without objection. It can be hard for us to listen to criticism – sometimes it feels more like an attack on our character. 

However, if you ever plan on growing as a person, you have to be willing to absorb what people may tell you without attaching negative emotions to it. 

2. Set Your Personal Branding Goals

Are you trying to reach a larger audience? Do you dream of being a keynote speaker at events? Whatever your long-term goal may be (which can change as well so don’t stress about it too much), you’ll want to have a good idea of the end result you’re striving for. 

Once you have it in mind, you can tweak your presentation to cater to this goal. Take a look at other people you admire who are living your goals – how do they speak to their audience? What value do they offer? 

Not everything will match up with what you want to do and that’s okay. In fact, I encourage you to spot those differences and see what you can use to separate yourself from your competitors. 

3. Narrow Your Reach

I know this tip always sounds strange to people just starting out in developing their brand but trust me on this – if you think you’re reaching more people by trying to connect with everyone, I guarantee you’re being tuned out more than you realize. 

When you put yourself out there as the “Anything you ask, I can do” type of person, your potential customers are completely turned off. 

They don’t want someone who can do it all. They want an expert that will serve them above and beyond because they know how to do their one thing better than anyone else. 

By niching down, you’re actually reaching more people, and typically they’re all people who are interested in what you have to offer. 

4. Know How To Talk To Your Audience – And People Who Aren’t

People crave authenticity when they’re looking into brands they want to support or work with. Working with or for someone who seems distant is no one’s biggest dream. People tend to work with someone who makes them comfortable. 

Since you’ve niched down, your audience knows what to expect from your personality. It resonates with them and they choose to consume your content because they believe you’re authentic. 

But what about the people who aren’t quite a part of your “ideal client” base – but they still want whatever product or service you have to offer? 

Keep in mind that not everyone speaks the same and might not have the same interests as you but still see value in what you produce. Sometimes you have to adjust your language or your energy level to make sure this type of client gets everything they need out of your services. 

5. Be Consistent

If you decide you’re going to post a video once every two weeks, or go Live every Friday – keep that commitment. 

Staying consistent with your content creation and posting schedule will help whatever platform you’re using recognize that you’re an active member of the community. Thus, the algorithm will be more inclined to give you a boost.

 Not only that, but people judge whether or not they want to follow you or engage with your content off of how often you post. If you haven’t posted in two months and before that another two months, people won’t believe they have much to gain from following you. 

Decide on a posting goal for each week and do whatever you need to to make sure you meet it. You can schedule out content or set reminders. 

6. Promote and Build Your Online Presence 

Whatever platforms you choose to be active on, continue to be present there.

Let people know where you’re most active online. They’ll be able to find you easily and will want to engage with you there because it feels more personal and genuine.

Engage with your audience. Connect with others on the network, liking, commenting, and sharing their content.

When you’ve established yourself a bit more, reach out to other creators, business owners, etc. to collaborate.  Here are some other promotion options that work great. 

• Guest post on a highly respected industry site.

• Speak at an industry event, which for the near future most likely means a virtual event.

• Connect with others in your industry on social media.

• Join groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.

• Appear on a podcast as a guest.

7. Analyze Your Branding Content Periodically

To truly understand what works and what doesn’t you have to look at the numbers. The numbers never lie.

Maybe you posted a photo of your vacation and through analytics, you can tell that post did better than your others that week. This lets you know that people enjoy getting those personal looks into what’s going on behind the scenes. 

Say you posted a video of you talking about your top 5 tricks for getting out of writer’s block and it gets 4k views. Now you know that people like these easy to consume but valuable and shareable videos and you can plan on posting more of them, which in turn grows your niche audience. 

Wrap Up –

Developing your personal brand doesn’t have to be tricky or overwhelming – just start with these 7 tips and you’ll already have a solid plan to work off of.

If you’re looking for more tips and ideas for boosting your presence online, check us out on all of our socials (linked below).

Thanks for reading,

The A Team