Five steps to build your personal brand (#44)

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

A personal brand is an impression you communicate about who you are, what your values and skills are, and what you want to achieve in the future.

A strong personal brand is an important asset. It gives evidence of your experience, track record, values, and skills. It tells others that you are competent, you are interested in building relationships, or both. Your personal brand can help you advance in your profession, gain more clients, expand your network, discover new opportunities, or establish a positive reputation.

Much of your professional success, whether you are self-employed, applying for a job, or asking for a promotion, depends upon your personal brand, which is a narrative people hold about you. That’s why you should aim to make sure that the story written about you is truthful, logical, engaging, and distinctive.

Drawing from academic literature on personal branding and my own experience of carving one, here’s the map of a personal branding process you can use:

Discover your purpose

Building a strong personal brand takes time and effort. So why bother unless you know what your personal brand will enable you to do? Are you looking to transition into a new industry, or change jobs within the same industry? Are you planning for a promotion in the same organisation? Are you interested in starting a new business? Are you launching a new product? What problem are you trying to resolve? Whatever your goal is, be clear on that before you start building your personal brand. If you don’t, your motivation may rapidly fall as the time passes.

Asking yourself “Why am I doing this project?” is a simple way to determine the goal of your personal brand. When you arrive at the answer, ask the same question again. According to Toyota Founder Sakichi Toyoda, asking this question five times can open up a meaningful answer to your question.

Figure out who you are

The next step involves finding your identity. How well do you know yourself? Unfortunately, a lot of us neglect to stop and think about ourselves in today’s fast-paced society. A little self-reflection is essential to creating a strong personal brand.

Take a piece of paper, and on it, jot down concrete responses to these questions:

1. What do you do at work?

2. Why do you do what you are doing?

3. How do you do your work?

4. What makes you unique?

5. What exhausts you?

6. What motivates you?

7. What skills or qualifications have you got?

Think carefully and be honest with yourself. These questions will help you dig deeper into what you do, how you do it and why you do it. These are raw materials that you have to work with to start building your brand. Be mindful that your response to these questions will change as you learn and develop.

Next, do some research to know whether other people share your perception of yourself. Identify who are your main audiences. Then, select a few from them who can give you unbiased specific feedback. Discuss your strengths and weaknesses with them. Invite them to rate you on your desired attributes. Compare your own views with theirs. Identify the gaps. Create an action plan to fill them. One of the ways to fill the gap can involve building the necessary skills. Doing so will give you the confidence to share your story and the credibility needed to do so.

Know your audience

Knowing who your audience is helps to identify your niche. No matter how in-demand your product is, “everyone” is not your potential customer. So who are people who might be impacted, people who you want to share your brand with and those you want to reach out to?

According to social entrepreneur Marcos Salazar, you can decide who is your target audience by considering the following three questions:

1. What is the goal of your personal brand?

2. Who can gain most from what you share?

3. How exactly can you see yourself helping them?

Without understanding who you want to reach out to, what their wants are and how you can meet them, you cannot build a strong personal brand.

Do some market research. Engage your audience by leveraging surveys and social media. Get some inputs and use them to make your brand stronger. Your audience is constantly changing, your brand must adapt to keep them interested.

Craft a personal value proposition

A brand is not a description that people imagine about you. Instead, it is based on the meaningful stories that you have shared and that your audience has understood. That’s why you must carefully craft the story that your brand represents.

Create an attractive personal value proposition statement. It can have these four parts: what are your unique capabilities, what you do, who your audience is, and what change you create in the audience’s lives.

For example, I am a writer and vocational instructor who specialises in strategic thinking. I teach early career professionals how they can foster their analytical, questioning and decision making skills so that they can be more productive and creative at work.

Use this personal value proposition statement to help you guide how you talk about yourself when you meet someone in-person or share content virtually.

If you are changing careers, highlight the value your experience brings to the new role instead of describing your move in terms of your change in interests. For example, you used to work for a large bank and now looking for a job at a small business. Don’t say ‘I was bored working for a big bureaucratic company and decided to try something else’. Instead, you might say ‘My experience working at a bank gave me a unique perspective about what small businesses struggle with. I can use my skills to help address those challenges.’

Share content

In today’s digital age, it is critical that your personal brand has an online presence. Set time aside each day to create and share content. An easiest way to start is reposting news or articles that relate to your brand on social media platforms like Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn. But don’t just repost. Include your perspective when posting news and articles online. Before you start sharing content though, ensure that your headline, profile and so forth in all your platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Twitter, personal website, and so forth) are consistent and up-to-date. There are many social media platforms. Instead of being on all, choose ones that align with your goals and where your target audience spends most time.

Build your personal website. It allows you to take full control over your online reputation. It offers more flexibility in sharing your brand and values to others than your social media.

After creating your strong online presence, try to collaborate with the top companies in your industry. Make an intentional effort to publish in reputable publications, provide keynote addresses at trade shows, or assume leadership positions in your industry associations. You’ll gain visibility, contacts, and credibility.

Building a personal brand is a lifelong endeavour. You have to be consistent and dedicated as you move forward. You need to check regularly how your story and unique promise of value fit into your context and how people are responding to them. Then, you will need to adjust them as necessary.