Personal branding is creating a brand around a person rather than a business entity. By developing a personal brand, you can have the world in the palm of your hands.
You can grow your social media following to help you secure a better job, a higher salary, sell more products, and ensure better opportunities in the future.
Even Oprah Winfrey went through several branding styles before she established herself as one of the most influential personal brands in the world.
Now, it’s your turn. Done right, personal branding is a powerful tool in achieving a competitive advantage. In a world that’s full of ads and promotions, it almost seems impossible to establish yourself and stand out, but if you follow these upcoming tips, you’ll master this art.
Today, we’re going to teach you the subtle art of personal branding in a world filled with ads and promotions.
Contagious
by Jonah Berger
⏱ 14 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
Be Genuine
In a world full of ads and promotions, of impersonal advertisements that target a broad audience, you can stand out by being genuine. This is the simplest and easiest way to establish a personal brand.
Take it from Monica Lin, who works as the head of marketing. She says that “People can see right through a disingenuous act.”
This will help you stand out amid similar brands. If you’re a copycat, people will notice. And this will even make your job handling your brand easier on a day to day basis. Your content should amplify who you are. Skill gets your foot in the door, but reputation and likeability will build your brand.
Gather All Your Info in One Place Online
Before we get further into how to stand out as a personal brand, we need to establish a powerful online presence that will lead people to further investigate what you’re about. Social media profiles aren’t just a spot to post promo pics; they represent your amazing personality.
Depending on preference, your Instagram may be where you talk about more personal things. Facebook may be more about your content and professional ventures and experiences. Twitter may be where you communicate with others, and LinkedIn is where your resume is located online.
So you have all this amazing stuff, but it will take people’s effort to look up what they need to learn about you. They may not even have the time.
The solution is establishing a personal website to make it so that when someone googles your name, your website will be the first thing that pops up. If the website is built on an online domain connected to your name, it will give it an SEO boost.
Your personal website should show your professionalism, credibility, personality, and skills. Write about what you’re passionate about, show the things you have worked on.
Finally, make it so your email, name, and social media handles are easy to access.
Consistency is Key
Next up, we have consistency. This dramatically affects your brand and how you compete with corporate advertisements and promotions. You need to create content and brand voice around it very consistently.
This applies to being consistent both online and offline. To be effectively consistent, you’ll need to make appearances and communicate with your audience regularly. These small things either dramatically increase your brand’s growth or hinder its progress.
This applies to you personally, not just to your content. So you’ll need to be consistent– visually and personality-wise.
Whether that means you have something remarkable that people associate your brand with or not, that’s up to you. Some people have catchphrases, taglines, and things they say after appearing in a video or caption.
Follow Examples
Never copycat other people’s work, but you can learn valuable lessons from them. Following someone successful in the same niche as you are can do wonders for your popularity.
If you’re interested in personal branding, then you need to start marketing yourself like celebrities, and those influencers do. There’s a reason why people look up to these people every day.
Study those whose brand resembles yours and see what those successful individuals are doing across social media and put your own unique twist on them. And don’t just stick to one example; follow several across all social media platforms.
Use the Word of Mouth
Speaking of using other people in your strategy to stand out, then consider this valuable method. How about letting other people talk about your brand?
When other people, people from your audience, step in, then the rest of the world knows you’re genuine and that you’re caring. Aaron Orendorss, the editor in chief at Shopify, once said that “Personal branding is the story people tell about you when you’re not in the room.”
Don’t Ignore Your Followers
People don’t expect big corporations to answer a letter or an email– other than maybe getting annoyed to death with their customer service, so allow them to come to you. Once you have them paying attention, never ignore them even after you grow as successful as you want.
Let’s say you have established for yourself a small following. Earn their loyalty and love by actively listening to what they have to say– even the negative feedback. So if you ever have a product that most of your audience doesn’t like, listen to them; find out why. Maybe it isn’t the best product to promote right now.
Keeping up with your followers also applies to social media. Read the comments on your posts. Use a search engine online to look up your name. Maybe you’ll stumble upon something that will immensely help you if you didn’t know it before.
Your Brand Should Tell a Story
There’s a stark difference between you and all those advertisements: you’re you, and you need to show it. For our next tip, we advise you to make it so that your brand tells a story.
If your brand isn’t telling a story, then you may have already lost half of your future audience. Creating a narrative does wonders for establishing your brand as something unique.
So don’t just write “single-character monologues” on your social media posts. Create and engage your audience with a story, one that’s woven around your brand. Now how do you do that?
You can start by making content like videos. Take it from the experts: “the most personal way to communicate online is with video. Simply use your smartphone to video message your clients, make a personal connection with prospective clients, and connect with coworkers. After all, you always have a smartphone on you.”
The power of storytelling is remarkable. It transforms a brand’s presence and identity. People connect a brand with the story they know about it. Even the human brain has been proven to respond to stories’ descriptive power as it affects the sensory and motor cortex.
Have a Focus
Having a key message and sticking to it is what can make your brand take off. Often, people are too confused and “unfocused” when it comes to press and coverage. They try to be everything and please everyone, and that’s not possible– not when they could be achieving more success having a specific focus.
Depending on what your brand is about, then you probably always know your target audience and demographic. When you focus on them, it’s a lot easier to create content while meeting their needs.
So find a niche, create it if you have. Some of the best personal brands are very specific. This way, people will remember who you are.
Live By Your Brand
What greatly puts you on another level, leagues away from the other advertisements and promotions, is that you can live your brand in a way that shows your authenticity.
Your personal brand amplifies your personality, and what you believe in, right? It should be with you wherever you go, so this means that when people see you living your brand, they’ll be tempted to do the same.
What does your brand reflect
For our final piece of advice and the most important one, to make your personal brand stand out, then ask yourself these questions:
What does your brand reflect? Is it a representation of what you love? Of what you do best? And all of that combined with what your audience most? Then you’re doing things right.
Now, if you want to stand out from the competition immediately, then you’ll, of course, need to give your brand, your project, and your service a unique and memorable name.
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