Are you aspiring to carve a niche for yourself and build a strong personal brand by riding high on your skills and ambitions?
If yes, you are aiming for personal branding that involves shaping a favorable perception of yourself in the eyes of your prospective audience.
It means building a sterling reputation, creating an image that others recognize, and developing highly marketable products or skills.
While it seems like a tall order, there are strategies you can use to build a strong personal brand.
5 Effective Ways To Build a Strong Personal Brand
Your choice of shaping your personal brand depends on the image you want to project about yourself and what you intend to accomplish.
The steps discussed below will help you in this endeavor by offering insights into the much-treaded yet most effective ways to promote yourself as a vibrant brand.
1. Make A Bold Statement About Your Persona
As a brand, your identity will shine through the credible and forceful representation of your strengths and passions, along with the values and ideals that define you.
For this, nurture an authentic brand image strategically and purposefully through renowned digital touchpoints.
But before that, you must figure out and shortlist your assets like:
- Innate and acquired skills
- Certifications
- Awards and citations received
- Training you underwent
- Passions that spur you on
- Industries or niches you are interested about,
- Authoritative command over areas of expertise
- Core values
Once you know your USPs, craft the following things for your brand:
- Vision – How you will set out to render invaluable services to customers for far-reaching and lasting impact
- Mission – Goals you seek to accomplish in the short and long run, including the people your brand will cater to, etc.
- Message – The focal point that shall serve as the cynosure for your followers
- Personality – The way you want to present your brand with a unified underlying theme that shall consistently feature in all your communications
You can confidently showcase your brand persona through a professional network like LinkedIn. Armed with all the essential information that will serve as an anchor for potential customers who would like to explore you before forging an association, you may do the following.
- Create a hypnotic profile on a professional networking site
- Put up a profile picture that complements your expertise
- Post a killer and hard-hitting headline
- Summarize your skills and expertise with a focus on how you resolved client issues successfully, and how your professional interventions enjoy an edge over competitors
- Add your contact details, and social media handles
- Upload infographics, videos, or rich multimedia snippets to showcase your ingenuity
- Conclude with a CTA (call to action)
Here is an example of a LinkedIn profile making a bold statement from Chris Gayomali’s article in Fast Company:
2. Take Control of Your Performance, Image, and Exposure (PIE)
Hinge your personal brand on the pillars of PIE by constantly mirroring the superlative aspects that set you apart.
Performance matters. Hence, update your online profile regularly with the latest information about helping your clientele. You may post a concise case study underlining how your qualitative support could decisively address the client’s pain points.
To offer an immersive experience, you can post videos depicting your success story. A good website to edit videos will offer you all the required tools under one roof to streamline your job.
Brand image building is a continuous process that involves presenting a tailored overview of your brand’s high points to steer the opinions of others in your favor.
In this context, you can leverage the potential of positioning statements that reflect your brand’s cutting-edge offers that can influence new prospects.
The success of such a statement lies in the following.
- Proper research about your ideal audience
- A strategic portrayal of your brand’s value proposition
- Showcasing how your authority is pre-dominant in your niche segment
- Exhibiting how you fare better than contemporaries
- Showing your command of advanced technologies or ideas
- A passionate display of your commitment to making lives better for clients without using inscrutable words or bragging about yourself
Exposure is all about ensuring that your personal brand is getting discovered by interested prospects. For this, you need endorsements of your skills by your brand advocates on your profile.
You may open personal pages or channels on popular social platforms and online portals to interact with new leads.
Check out this personal branding pyramid from Personal Branding 4EUth.
3. Use Your Story To Reinforce The Framework of Your Brand
As a brand, you can weave a story around your expertise and accomplishments to create a robust brand framework.
For this, you need to define:
- How do you comprehend professional success for yourself and your clients
- How you are blending innovation, technology, integrity, and other values to empower your clients
- What emotional and functional advantages do you intend to deliver
- The array of soft and hard skills you shall leverage
- Evidence like rewards, recognitions, customer reviews, media features, etc., to make prospects believe your words
- The tangible trappings of your brand, i.e., logo, font, color palette, style, etc.
An engaging video created with any good online video editor will help showcase your brand story in a compelling way. Videos have an irresistible charm that the audience can’t ignore.
4. Make Your Brand Profile Search Engine Optimized
The ease of discoverability of your brand is important to ensure that your brand’s charm continues to entice new prospects.
For this, focus on SEO (search engine optimization) so that your profile can be found whenever a new lead searches online for a brand that matches your characteristics.
Here are some of the best SEO practices to build a strong personal brand:
- Find out the short and long-tail keywords that organic leads used to search for something similar to your brand. Refrain from making assumptions about keywords’ efficacy.
- Think from the perspective of the potential audience. You can also use a keyword research tool to discover keywords most used on search engines to find the industry, role, or benefits your brand can offer.
- Incorporate the keywords strategically in your brand profile on LinkedIn and other online platforms with your presence.
- Make keyword assimilation seamless in your content and steer clear of mindless stuffing. The meta tag, header, personal positioning statements, and body must have keywords in a reasonable quantity.
- Start posting quality and relevant content on popular and authoritative sites and social pages. Include a link to your main profile at the end. This will get you ample backlinks, which will further boost SEO.
5. Create Actionable Content and Focus on Networking
Your brand will command the attention and respect of audiences when you give them matters to ponder and wonder about.
This calls for creating high-quality, meaningful, and relevant textual and video content regularly and posting them on touchpoints you use to interface with leads.
You can also comment on and share relevant content from others.
Showcase your unique perspective to let people appreciate your out-of-the-box thinking and functioning. For example, if you are rooting for better search engine result page ranking of your client’s websites, you can create content on “X ways to exploit loopholes in Google algorithms to make your post rank better”.
Follow a schedule for posting content. A personal tone will help audiences warm up to your brand better.
Highlight your brand’s salient aspects prominently so that clients cast away the idea of abandoning you in favor of others.
Don’t be away from public glare for a long time as you risk being sent to oblivion by even loyal followers, as competition is stiff in every niche.
Keep networking, i.e., offer regular fodder for thought to existing clients and approach new leads through content sharing, conferencing, or industry events.
Conclusion
Your personal brand will always ride on an upward trajectory if you strategically pursue your vision with intent.
Have a clear roadmap of how you will build a strong personal brand and you will continue to polish your brand’s image. Seek inspiration from others whose personal brands are valued in the online landscape.
Nothing can stop you from becoming a brand juggernaut with a distinctive flair for success if you carry out branding purposefully.
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