Differentiating Personal Brand : If you are striving to position yourself as an expert or become an influencer within your niche, personal branding can help you increase your reputation as a leader.
You can use any of these marketing strategies to build your personal brand:
- Set your message and goals
- Promote your best attributes and skills
- Actively maintain a positive online reputation
- Stand out from the competition
- Create useful content
- Build relationships on social media
- Why is personal branding important?
Personal branding can make it easy for recruiters to find experts like you. If you are trying to get a higher position in a new company, you can show key data such as the number of followers you have, the traffic your website receives, or other vital metrics that can give you a competitive advantage over other candidates.
Audit Search Results
Before you start thinking about your personal branding strategy, you need to assess what’s already out there about you on the internet. Are you dealing with negative search results? Have you been the protagonist of a business scandal? Are your search results dominated by someone else with the same name?
Thoroughly research search results and work to remove negative or irrelevant content. The following types of content are especially harmful:
- Illegal activities/problems with the law
- Documented use of alcohol or other substances
- Use of foul language
- Bad spelling and grammar
- inappropriate photos
Build Your Space
Once you’ve analyzed the search results, it’s time to establish a presence on social media and on your own website. Although it is not necessary to be active on all social media platforms, you should at least create a profile on the major sites.
Here is a list of some of the main social platforms where you can create a profile. Make sure to use a unique and exclusive biography for each one of them.
- Snapchat
- Quora
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- TikTok
- Tumblr
Define Your Personal Brand
Once you have created your profiles on social networks or websites, it is time to imagine your personal brand.
This is the step where you should brainstorm the different aspects of your brand, including why you want to be known and how you want to make a difference in your niche or sector.
Ask yourself questions like :
- What makes me unique?
- What is my vision of my personal brand?
- Why am I developing my personal brand now?
- What are my professional goals? How will my personal brand help me achieve these goals?
- Who is my target audience?
- What problems do I want to solve?
- How am I going to solve those problems?
- Why would anyone come to me for news/tips/recommendations/etc? instead of someone else?
Once you’ve spent some time thinking about the essence of your brand, spend some time collecting evidence of the things you’ve already done that support it.
The key to establishing your personal brand is creating quality, unique content that ranks well in search results.
Here are some content tips to help you boost your brand:
- Post Unique Content – Posting unique content increases the chances that you will rank well in search results.
- Stay consistent – Schedule a time each week to post content about your personal brand.
- Take advantage of the different platforms: Don’t stay in one place. For example, post to Facebook, Twitter, and your blog the first week. The next one writes a guest post for another site. The following week focus for example on Instagram, and Twitter and publish another post. Don’t be afraid to experiment! Of course, analyze your actions and choose what works best for you.
- Have a Strategy – Make sure you always keep in mind where your audience is on the internet. While it’s important to mix platforms, that doesn’t mean posting content anywhere you can think of. Post only where your audience is likely to see your content.
1. Build your credibility
By exposing yourself and showing that there is a face behind your brand, you are showing your target market that they can trust you. They want to see that you can do what you say you will and that you are the person they are going to buy from. By having a strong personal brand, you are building your personal credibility in the marketplace.
2. Form vital relationships
As we discussed before, it’s vital to show your target market that they can trust you, but it’s just as crucial that part of how you do it is through building genuine relationships with potential customers.
3. Turn your passion into a business
If you’re on Instagram, you’ve probably heard of Chiara Ferragni. This young Italian started out with a trend blog and quickly became one of the most influential people in fashion with over 25 million followers (and counting). Now she is paid by brands from all over the world to promote her brand on her Instagram profile.
4. Free advertising
If your personal brand is out in the open and you have a rapidly growing social media presence, you’re basically getting free publicity just for posting regularly. In times when ads can be bought for thousands of dollars, we’d say that’s a pretty nice perk.
