The concept of personal branding has gained traction and momentum over the past few years considering the trend of an increase in entrepreneurs within Australia. Personal branding is the process of creating your public persona for your intended audience. It requires expressing your values, beliefs, goals, and purpose with precision and care. Prior to building digital assets for personal branding, more than half of the job is accomplished by recognising your passion and the audience that will resonate with it.
Benefits of Personal Branding
- Extra layer of trust
When your prospective clients understand the root of your career motivation, they are more comfortable entrusting you with their demands. This not only fosters trust, but also conveys the message of your intentions being genuine and clear.
- Higher perceived value
In the journey of establishing your personal brand, your clients will start connecting with the brand emotionally at a deeper level whilst increasing your value to them. moreover, being actively involved in your field and producing “credibility boosters” promotes you as an expert, increasing your demand.
- Sets you apart from the competitors
Building a personal brand has never been more relevant than now. Your personal brand will act as a competitive edge that separates you from the competition and gives your business more meaningful conversions.
- Known as expert in your field
By incorporating personal brand building techniques your professional network will grow. The network can be leveraged to capitalize on increasing your client base.
- Attract opportunities
The brand’s authenticity will attract people who share the same values and objectives. Personal branding not only raises the likelihood of receiving inquiries from prospective clients, but also screens out prospects that do not align with your brand’s mission.
Why should you leverage social media to build a personal brand?
Social media is one of the greatest assets for any brand to capitalize on as it provides a medium to reach millions of users who might resonate with your brand. By harnessing the power of social media, you can optimize the way in which your brand is presented to others, and it allows you to control the brands narrative. Diversifying social media handles for personal branding serves as an opportunity to build and maintain online reputation which acts as a social proof at the time of business conversion. The most used platforms for personal branding are LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Tips to utilize social media for personal branding
- Consistent brand image and voice across all social media platforms
Consistency is the crux of personal branding. With maintained and defined personas across all social handles, trust, and memory to recall the brand amongst the viewers will increase. While establishing the personal brand, finding the right tone and brand-kit may take some trial and error, however, consistent message and image must not change. Preparing a guideline to follow across all social media handles will be beneficial so that all posts made revolve around it. Moreover, integrating multiple social profiles like Facebook and Instagram will help with consistency of the message. Furthermore, the most important is visual color scheme. The visual consistency will allow users to identify your brand across social media accounts whilst allowing them to easily recognize and recall the brand.
- Designing a content and social media posting schedule
Content marketing is a great technique to build brand persona and grab attention of your target audience. Extremely frequent posting even with good intention can backfire as it may annoy followers. You need to understand that less is more and prioritize quality over quantity. In the initial stages of building your brand you might take some time to find a sweet spot in terms of sharing content. Each social media handle has their own peak engagement hours and days which should be utilized for sharing your content to achieve higher exposure. 3 to 4 posts a week is a sweet spot for most brands around the globe. The posts may be educational, informative and your journey-based content from which viewers can learn and gain value.
After the initial trial and error, it is critical to shape the content strategy according to what works best for your brand. Scheduling posts can come in handy once you have enough content. It not only increases the work efficiency, but also helps in staying on top of your content game.
- Online reputation management through social media
Social media can help by interacting with likeminded people who follow and resonate with your brand. Replying to their comments and engaging in comment threads can pose a great deal in managing the online reputation of the brand.
- Personal branding website
Social Media can also be leveraged to shift traffic from social media handles to the personal brand website. The website may consist of content which provides a holistic view of the personal brand by showcasing the content in story mode.
Overall, let your brand genuinely tell a story of who you are, your achievements and what you stand for. To define and differentiate your personal brand is no mean feat in a world full of competitive personalities. For successful online personal branding you need defined core values, a strategy, set goals and a plan. It can take years to build and seconds to lose. Most importantly, find the balance you feel comfortable with and work with specialists who understand this.
When was the last time you thought about the online personal brand you were projecting and how this was affecting your value or others perception of you? Feel free to call if we can help www.wordpress-600454-3548069.cloudwaysapps.com
- Audit your brand online
- Define your personal core values and what you stand for
- Create a personal brand strategy
- Action the initiatives
- Measure and monitor
“If you are not controlling your online personal brand, someone else may!”
Sharon Williams CEO Taurus Marketing and Personal Branding Expert