Getting Started with Personal Branding in the Competitive Business World
Personal Branding is a language that even kids, barely three years old can understand. Take a kid to a particular restaurant, say MacDonald’s, and the child will grasp the restaurant’s golden arches.
You’re likely to notice that anytime you approach the same restaurant, the kid will shout out the name of the restaurant, though he’s not old enough to read. The kid will associate the burger fries with the golden arches. How can that be? Because of the power of branding!
A brand lends itself to being anything, say a symbol, design, website development, sound, reputation, etc, that makes one thing stand out. The golden arches in McDonald’s became their brand, which separates its products from all other restaurants. Although branding on a business level has been a common practice, today, branding on a personal level is becoming equally important.
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Why Is Building Personal Brand Important?
Given today’s competitive business world, the best way to stay ahead of the pack is to stand out through a unique brand. People should be able to point out what your unique promise of value is once your name pops out.
Often creating a recognizable personal brand can lead to a better job, professional opportunities, better clients for your business, industry recognition, etc. For instance, if you’re looking for a better job, your potential boss should associate your personal brand with what his company needs.
Start with these expert tips for creating an impressive LinkedIn profile. If you’re into business, you want your clients to associate your personal brand with a sense of trust and long-term satisfaction and success. Currently, the world has no place for “just another face” in the crowds. You must stand out in what you offer to command a better segment of the audience.
This is only possible through the creation of a recognizable personal brand. This guide is made to make you succeed in building your personal brand. However, not everything will apply to you – you’re likely to find something that doesn’t fit your vision and goals.
Just the information as a guide and apply it in your own way. This guide tries to answer some of the questions about establishing a personal brand, with advice from some experts we consulted.
They will try to answer these questions:
- Which one action, decision, or choice has impacted greatly on their personal brands’ growth?
- In case you’re building your personal brand from scratch, what 3 things would you consider to offer the biggest ROI?
- Which 3 influencers would you recommend to those wishing to build a strong personal brand?
Throughout this guide, you will find answers and actionable tips offered by the experts.
How to Create Your Personal Brand Vision
Just the way businesses create vision and mission statements, creating a personal begins with the creation of a personal vision. While your life is a product of a combination of many factors, some of which you have no control over, you can create a long-term vision and develop steps towards its fulfillment.
For instance, how would you like to be 20 years from today? Here you consider the elements that would define your life by then, a family, a home, a corporate job, etc. Create a Personal Brand Vision.
How to Define Your Target Audience
Now you have your vision ready, right? It’s now time to determine your target audience. If you’re looking for a job, your audience is potential companies. You could also be selling something and here you have potential clients as your target audience.
However, your audience goes beyond clients and employers. You have to need to build a community – employers, peers, influencers, etc.—who are instrumental in a number of ways. In this guide, we will show you how to define your target audience, and how knowing your specific audience makes it easier to reach them through your personal brand.
How to Build Up Your Offline and Online Assets
You need to be armed with some tools to effectively build a successful personal brand. These are:
- Domain names and websites—they help control your personal brand on search.
- Social media accounts– to control your personal brand on social networks.
- Knowledge on how to build and manage these assets, among others.
This guide will give you important online and offline assets for building your personal brand, with step-by-step instructions to building a strong community.
How to Build Your Brand through Outreach
When starting out on your personal brand, it’s difficult to get exposure. You need to know where your target audience hangs out most, then target those areas. This guide is meant to help you gain exposure through earned media and advertising among other strategies. Learn “How to Build Your Brand through Outreach” and also how to create appealing content for your target audience that establishes you as an authority.
How to Get Free Press Coverage
Still, on exposure, free press coverage comes as an important way to help build your personal brand. You can make use of several tools which can help you connect with moderators, journalists, and bloggers. Here is the comprehensive guide on How to Get Free Press Coverage
How to Connect With Mentors
If you want to succeed in anything, you just can’t overlook the importance of mentorship. The same applies to creating your personal brand. Every smart person in any particular area is a result of learning from veterans and experts in that field.
Mentors come in handy when creating your personal brand in that you will learn tips and strategies they use to become successful. This guide will enlighten you on how to connect with mentors to help you with your personal brand.
How to Monitor Your Brand
After you’ve established your personal brand, you need to monitor its faring. Is it growing? Does it communicate well? Is the target audience associating with your industry? How does your community feel about you? Etc. In this guide, “How to Monitor Your Brand”, we’ll give you some monitoring tools and show you how to use them to know the feeling of your target audience towards you.
Personal Branding: Be Yourself Because Everyone Else Is Taken
This chapter stresses the essence of being unique. Although you will want much from mentors and other people, there is a need to be unique — be yourself. Separate yourself from the masses. Learn how to identify your uniqueness with personal branding and use differences positively to attract people. Head straight to this guide “Be Yourself Because Everyone Else Is Taken” and build a unique personal brand.
