What is Personal Branding? How to Build a Personal Brand?

Personal Branding is not an instantaneous work; it takes a lot to build your brand!

You Are Your Own Brand!

What is a brand? Is it a name, symbol, or service that adds value to the end-user? Is it something that delivers quality and satisfaction? It can be said as a ‘collection of perceptions’ that is designed to influence the customer. Whether you own a Fortune 500 company or something unique in yourself, creating a strong personal brand is what differentiates you from others and makes it successful.

Let’s Understand the Meaning of Branding Yourself

When you brand yourself, you offer the best of you to the audience or customer. Here, branding yourself can be taken as personal branding. Personal branding means that an individual wants to present himself and wants to be perceived in a certain way.

How Do You Define the Process of Building Your brand?

Building your brand means an intentional effort to create a public perception of you among people and industry by positioning yourself as unique, valuable, and credible thus advancing your career, increasing your influence circle, having a more significant impact, or achieving what you want through your brand identity.

Process of Building a Strong Brand Image

Your actions define your brand image. Your vision acts as an internal compass and drives you in the right direction in all your efforts. Hence, you must have a clear personal brand by having a clear understanding of what you are all about.

So, How Can One Create a Personal Image?

People want a brand image when they want to be seen or perceived by their peers in a certain way. If you are interested in creating a personal picture of yourself, you have to build your brand that effectively communicates and presents itself to the public eye.

Here are some personal branding tips

Research and Reflection:

For your branding, your actions will define your brand. What you wear, your body language, your attitude, your activities, the way you handle yourself in business, your styling, grooming, etc. forms the foundation for your brand. The first step is about discovering yourself, defining it, and deciding what message you want to deliver.

Define Your Brand Details:

Be it your branding or that of your product/service; decide on the branding details like name, logo, tagline, and the start step. Remember, the details should be on promoting your brand and not to confuse people about it. Be authentic and transparent.

Develop Your Online Reputation:

Social media is the go-to place for brand promotion. Create your website and use your branding here. Update details on online local business registries also. Share posts write blogs or post pictures. Be consistent and strategic about your brand.

Association & Participation:

Brands flourish when you partner with other brands, individuals, or organizations that complement it. Participation in social events is a strong point for promoting your brand. You need to get your name out in the social media by writing guest blogs and commenting on other posts.

Constant Reinvention:

Your brand image needs continuous involvement and engagement. Try out new things to keep the viewers hooked to your brand. Your narrative, your posts, and videos – everything has to offer something new each time.

How to Strengthen Your Personal Brand?

A brand is a customer involvement and experience related to its quality, features, pricing, promotion, and place. For you to strengthen your brand-

• Align with customer values
• Demonstrate your passion
• Make your brand mission-based and driven
• Know your customers well
• Be unique about your competitors.

Strengthening your brand is through hard work, dedication, involvement, and passion. You should not let these fizzle out.

How to Pen Down the Right Personal Brand Strategy?

Having a brand strategy helps you to plan, build, and shape your brand. There are three main phases while you develop your branding strategy.

Discovery: 

What is the aim of your brand? What is your target? Make your objectives clear. List what you want to achieve with your brand.

Identity: 

Once it is clear about your brand building, start on the creativity side. How are you going to build your image? Make a list of to-do things that will help in your brand creation and promotion.

Execution: 

Execution is mainly marketing of your brand. This is by effective communication of your brand value proposition to the audience.

How to Write the Brand Guidelines?

Before you start to write a brand guideline to build a sharp brand image, analyze your audience, competition, and your uniqueness. Creating your brand guideline should not be much of a hassle if you work on it diligently.

• Mission and Vision- Write about why your brand exists and to which level you want to reach with your brand.
• Values- These are the guiding principles for your brand existence.
• Brand story– Write a simple summary to give insight into your brand.
• Logo, tag & design– Your brand logo and tag should resonate with what your brand has to convey. The design should be clean and minimalistic.

A reliable brand will make you stand out from the crowd and give you a good advantage. It is the way you want to market yourself to the world.

How to Build Your Brand at Work?

As the workplace becomes more and more competitive, one needs to develop one’s brand by-

• Differentiate yourself from others
• Have a balanced approach and talk tactfully. I appreciate it when required.
• Highlight your strengths
• Be passionate in your work
• Work in unity and be sympathetic to others needs
• Be authentic and nice
• Be positive and energetic
• Be respectful when dealing with your seniors or juniors
• Communicate well and collaborate with all the team members as well as the other staff
• Do a self-audit on enhancing your strengths and working on weaknesses.
• Invest in yourself. This is the best way to build your personal brand in the workplace.

What Does It Take to Make One’s Brand a Success?

A brand becomes successful when the end-users develop a positive perception around it. If you are to make your product or service noticed by your clients, you have to look into its strengths and work on it. The positive traits are to be excelled and elaborated to enhance the brand.

25 Free Personal Branding Tools for Entrepreneurs and Experts

1.Namech_k:

Search the name of the brand and know its availability on all other social media platforms. Through this, you can find competitor performance.

2.LinkedIn:

By using LinkedIn, one can create professional branding, find the right audience, better audience insights, and find the leads.

3.BuzzSumo:

BuzzSumo helps in analyzing the content, finding the potential influencers, and collect the content ideas.

4.Google Analytics:

Google Analytics helps in finding the overall website traffic insights that mean to understand the website visitors that are coming from and the audience engagement at your website.

5.Empire.Kred:

You can find the influencers on social media and make complete analytics.

6.WiseStamp:

By using the businesses can create the email signature by adding all intended details within minutes.

7.Hubspot:

HubSpot is the #1 business brand growth generation, and by using this platform, you can build useful email signatures.

8.Rebrandly:

You can brand the shorten links of your business blog by using your domain.

9.Twitter Analytics:

You can easily trace the performance of your twitter profile tweets, the increment of the followers, and the audience insights.

10.InShot:

You can add the textual content to social media videos, which helps to attain the audience’s attention.

11.About.me:

One can build the professional single page website listings in creative ways.

12.Twitonomy:

An in-depth analysis of Twitter analytics can be done by using this tool.

13.Signature Maker:

With the help of this SaaS tool, one can create the most customized business signature that includes all details.

14.Buffer:

Buffer is the most user-friendly tool that all businesses intended to use it for social media scheduling and finding the activity of any digital channel over your business.

15.Hootsuite:

Hootsuite is one of the top trending social media posts scheduling tool, and it offers reports of your business performance.

16.Talkwalker:

It is the best social media channels analytics platform that helps in the optimization of your business brand.

17.Hipster Logo Generator:

The creation of astonishing business logos can be done by using this exclusive logo generator tool.

18.Brand Yourself:

Find a fast and straightforward brand reputation report regarding the growth of your business in the market within seconds.

19.Google Alerts:

Place the set of keywords that are relevant to your business to set up the alert and know who is talking about it.

20.Squarespace Logo:

Create excellent logos for your website free of cost.

21.Logaster:

It is the SaaS tool that can be used to create the most professional online business website logos.

22.Google Trends:

You can identify the trends on search engines like Google through which the other social media channels find the audience engagement, and it helps to improve the business performance.

23.Logo Crisp:

It offers more than 10,000+ pre-made website logos, and you can choose them to customize.

24.Speaker Hub:

Launch your free speaker profile on this platform, which can let the event organizers hire you to engage their next event audience.

25.Google Search:

To what extent your business brand is well-known for online audience engagement can be found by searching your brand name.

In a Nutshell

Remember, the customers will like your brand if it resonates with their needs and interests. Personal branding is not an instant or a one-time process. You have to build it, grow it, and maintain it gradually.

Certainly, brands are not built overnight – they are rather cultivated over a period of time!