How to build your personal brand

How do you want the world to see you?

Building your personal brand means marketing yourself through your skills, talents, knowledge and personality – the things that make you an individual.

Today, people use their personal brand to become influential in their field, usually through social media, as a way to promote their products or services.

If you want to build your personal brand, here’s how you can:

1. Who are you? What’s your advantage?

It’s important to first understand what goals you want to achieve. Once you know the path you want to be heading, determine how you will promote yourself as a brand to stay on that path.

Personal branding is about using yourself to draw attention and engage an audience. To showcase your strengths, you first need to figure out what makes you an individual.

You need to question who you are as a person and what you can offer to capture an audience. Ask yourself things like: what makes you different to others? What gives you an advantage?

2. Don’t be fake

Make sure you remain authentic because in modern digital marketing promoting a fake you simply doesn’t work. This is because people can tell when someone isn’t being genuine and will lose trust in your brand. So it’s important your personal brand needs to reflect who you are not what you want people to see.

When it comes to personal branding, many think they should develop an artificial persona of what they think people would like rather than simply being themselves. However, being authentic is more powerful than for example someone who is clearly not experienced in the field trying to give advice. You’re the one who has the knowledge and ability to teach others what someone else can’t.

Aim to reach your audience by expressing your individuality because this will successfully develop positive impacts. At the end of the day, you can’t be someone you’re not, so remaining genuine is key.

3. Build up your profile

How? Social media is the answer!

Determine what social media platforms you want to use and set them up. Before posting too much content you should build up a network so you have an audience to actually speak to.

You can do this by joining groups relevant to your field on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram is ideal. Also make sure you are continuously active in them. It’s a good idea to reach out to influential people and share their content so they exchange the favour.

Once you have your follower-base, it’s important to post consistently to generate the attention needed to continuously build your personal brand. Daily posts with inspirational quotes or helpful tips about the field your branding through yourself are some examples. Even showing people your daily routine, the work you do or snippets from interviews.

To be recognised people need to come across you more than once, which is why consistency on multiple social media platforms can increase your personal brand awareness. It’s also beneficial to keep content simple so viewers don’t get distracted from the key messages.

4. Own the space

Engage people by teaching your expertise while at the same time answering any questions your follow-base might have. Always remember to be entertaining, you don’t want your audience to fall asleep! The best ways to provide this content is through creating knowledge-based videos, photos, blogs etc…

Another key point to remember is to be accessible. Attend a lot of conferences and events to socialise and continuously build up your network. Make sure your social media sites are not private and can be viewed by the public. It’s also a good idea to interact with people who are making the effort to communicate with you.

Content needs to be uploaded consistently to keep the attention of your audience, so you should always have some ready to go. It’s even handy to get someone to film you and capture the moments that best represent your personal brand.

When updating your social media content consider whether the content reflects who you are while also presenting information in a professional way.

5. Convert interest into transaction

Once people start to get to know your personal brand, they start to identify you through their understanding of the content you post. This ends up attracting people who share similar interests leading them to go check out your website and convert that interest into a transaction.

An easy way to drive traffic onto your website is to include a link to your website in the description box of each uploaded posts to tempt those who are viewing it.

When your content resonates with your audience, it’ll be shared with others within that space, creating, and then expanding your digital community further.

6. Monitor

Don’t expect to get immediate results, it takes time and effort to successfully build your personal brand.

A tip to remember is to build as many relationships as you can along the way. The bigger your network, the bigger your audience.

Take the time to Google yourself to see if your personal brand is being presented the way you want to be. You’re then able to see what changes and improvements need to be made. Also know what people are saying about you. Your personal brand represents you so you will want to know what is being said and have a chance to respond to any comments.

Using personal branding to promote business will only continue to grow. But remember – if you’ve developed a good personal brand, it can’t be copied because it’s about what’s personal to you.