If you ask any entrepreneur about the importance of branding for the growth of the business, they will give you an impressive briefing on how branding has established a unique value to their business in the industry. But have you ever thought about building a personal brand that reflects yourself as an individual?
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As a successful individual with interdisciplinary working experiences, never underestimate the importance of self-branding. Most of the successful personnel who have done it right found personal branding as the most significant asset they have. This article would guide you to build a personal brand and boost your appearance across social channels.What is personal branding?
In a nutshell, personal branding is building an image and reputation about you to the outside world and representing yourself as a brand in the public eye. In other words, it will be the story that people would talk about you in your absence. First, you would feel uncomfortable thinking of yourself as a brand, but in reality, for each one of us, there is a personal brand that has already been established among the public. The brand built around you would be present in both the physical and virtual space.
The most exciting thing you need to hear is that there is full control in our hands to manage the brand built around ourselves in both the physical and virtual space. Simply, how do you want to see yourself when you search your name on Google, would even fall under the category of personal branding.
Discovering and having a clear vision
Why are you building a brand?
We all possess numerous skills that we have learned in different stages of our lives. But you need to ask yourself, “is it important to boil down everything and ask how you want to be known?” Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily have to be what you do or what your company is doing; it’s all about what you want to be and what drives you every morning to hustle the day. Dig into the deepest edges and corners of your persona and seek all the strengths and weaknesses you have. Jot them down on paper and start connecting the dots. You would witness undiscovered patterns, which would help you get a clear vision of yourself.
Creating Content
The whole brand identity would revolve round the content we are creating. No one is better than creating your story than yourself. A common mistake most people make is that they start talking about themselves before creating any content that impresses the audience to seek in their life story. Creating content that consumers could first relate to would be the pathway for gaining conversions towards you.
It could be anything that you are good at to start with, such as posting photography tips, teaching programming, being comic or anything that is not recognized of you as yet by the audience.
Once you start creating content, you would start realizing how consumers are revolving around them. A little bit of analytics would help you figure out how the audience has shown the interest towards the content you are creating.
Brand story and brand framework
Before telling others our story, you need to sketch down how the story should look and which parts would impress consumers the most. Create content by looking at factors such as why you need to get known for, why the community should take your service over others and what key factors unique for you would give you a more significant edge on building a niche audience around your personal brand?
There are key elements that you need to focus on when creating a personal brand framework or story. At first, it’s important to be clear about the purpose behind your personal brand. What motivated you to do what you are doing right now? Then you need to build a core value system around it. Core values could vary upon a wide range, starting from integrity and respect to creativity and innovation. The more core values are built around yourself, the more respect and trust you get from the audience.
After establishing the base, then you need to give reasons for the customers to trust you in this process and also give a reason for them to work with you. For that, you need first to figure out all the soft skills and hard skills that you could bring to the table. All the teachable and measurable skills would fall under hard skills such as programming, teaching, coaching, marketing, etc. Soft skills could be presentation abilities, strategic thinking, communication skills, etc. You need to come with tangible or valuable evidence to support these facts. It could be any education qualification, testimonials, recognized media featuring, awards and any other evidence that you could come up with to impress your audience.
Finally, you can focus on more prominent and visible features such as brand name, logo, colours, templates and any other tangible branding material that goes along with that.
Following all the above steps would give you a 360 degree view of planning your personal branding strategy. After creating the basic top-down structure of your personal branding strategy, it’s essential to find a suitable virtual space to share your message with the target audience. Brief research on social media audiences and how they operate would help you figure out which social space would be ideal for you to implement your branding strategies bmd
Dilshara Hasanka Hetti Arachchige
Freelance journalist and software engineering u ndergraduate