With all the noise and competition in the world, it can be challenging to stand out. As a brand, you have to showcase your identity, skills, and values in a relatable manner whereby your audience easily connects with you. And when you tell a captivating story, it is easier for you to build a good reputation. To succeed in personal branding, all you need is to establish a distinct foothold within your field.
This enables you to gain trust, create opportunities that align with your personal objectives, and gain the desired perception. Personal branding empowers you to seize limitless opportunities, expand your influence, and transform people’s perceptions of you, thereby simplifying the process of achieving unimaginable feats. In this blog, we get into details on crafting a personal brand that makes you stand out and guides you toward achieving your goals.
What is a personal brand?
Personal brands and corporate brands are closely intertwined, explains Gresh. A personal brand encompasses a person’s entire being — who you are, what you stand for, the values you embrace, and how you express those values. A personal brand, like a corporate brand, helps express an individual’s identity and the value they offer, in this case to employers or clients, aiding in ‘standing out’ amidst prospects.
Why is personal branding important?
Everyone has a story, and that story, in some cases, can determine whether a person is employed or not. Personal branding in this context plays an important role in defining and building a career. In fact, hiring managers often report that a candidate’s personal brand plays a role in hiring decisions.
The story of your career (personal brand) is meant to showcase one’s career strengths, reputation, and established trust tailored to one’s industry. It tells whether or not a person is fit for the role. If curated well, a personal brand will indicate a signal employers question if this person might be the right fit for the role.
Personal branding is crucial if you want to shift to a new career. You need to explain to your employer why you are making the shift and how your experience lines up with the various roles. In addition to your powerful resume and cover letter, your personal brand helps you tell your story to these employers.
Creating a personal brand
A personal brand is something that already exists even if you haven’t created one on your own. It is the sum of all your brand’s online and offline activities. Still, there are a number of things you can do to adapt your brand, such as:
- Set objectives for personal branding: Select specific goals on what you would like to be known for and what you would need to do to create that identity.
- Audit your existing brand: Conduct a search on yourself and determine what it is people are already saying about you. This will give you an idea of how much you have to change.
- Create a strategy that can be executed: Figure out how to identify (blogging, interviews, social networks) your identity and try to stick to a schedule.
This is not to say you should present a fake persona or designed character. Effective personal branding is about showcasing select elements from your life so that you optimally manage your reputation within your social network.
5 Tips for developing your personal brand
1. Determine your identity
Identifying your personal and professional life requires thinking critically and developing an authentic brand that captures various aspects of both. Start by asking, What am I as a person? You can reflect deeply and come up with a list of things that you consider to be your strengths or weaknesses.
- What do I do best in my field of work?
- What gets me excited to start my day?
- What compliments do I gratefully receive?
- What do persons support me on to do repeatedly?
- What roles are life draining?
- What energizes me so that I can work for long periods of time without feeling tired or drained?
For someone who faces challenges answering these questions, talking to people who know you best, like friends, family, or colleagues, will help answer these questions. Through self-awareness, you can change and decide how to better brand yourself.
Take into account that quite a few individuals find it difficult to select a niche because they do not want to box themselves in. Understand that your personal brand, as with many corporate brands, will transform over the course of your career. The best approach is to decide on a specific component of that brand and allow it to change over time.
2. Figure out what you’d like to be recognized for
Your personal brand is a lot more than who you are at the moment; it is a guide of where you wish to go. Alongside the existing skills and competencies you possess, Gresh recommends analyzing the strengths and weaknesses relevant to the industry or career you intend to pursue next.
This way, you will identify the defining skills and characteristics as well as the things you need to learn so that you are able to progress. Consider where you aim to be in the next five or ten years and the attributes you would like to be known for so that you can determine what steps are needed to achieve that.
3. Define your audience
Identifying the audience you are targeting is paramount when building a personal brand. Are you trying to reach industry influencers? A specific company employee? What about company recruiters? Defining your audience as early as possible will make it easier for you to tell your story, since you will know what story you need to tell and where.
If you are a graphic designer trying to expand your clientele, telling your story on a personal website or portfolio would allow you to showcase your talent in a more elaborate manner.
4. Research your desired industry and follow the experts
Gresh advises creating a list of experts and researching them as you start outlining the careers you intend to pursue.
To reap the maximum benefits from any field, first, find who the thought leaders are and don’t just follow them blindly. Look out for their online blogs or other places where they share their insights. Study successful people and see what is working for them. Try to copy them but do one better.
While constructing your personal brand, the main aim is to be unique; however, you have to make sure to account for the existing capital in order to know how to leverage it to get to the top.
5. Networking
Networking is a vital step in creating an ideal personal brand and growing professional connections. You can meet people already in the industry as well as contemporaries during formal and informal networking sessions or workshops.
From these networking sessions, if you are capable of giving value in return for value, it is more likely that your personal brand will gain recognition. Additionally, there is a large number of jobs that are filled through networking, which is why attending these sessions regularly is helpful both brand-wise and career-wise.
Do not be hesitant to ask other participants to schedule an informal interview or simply a coffee chat. And if you did not meet anyone on the day of the event, go ahead and send them an email or connect with them on LinkedIn.
Benefits Of A Personal Brand
Crafting a personal brand can be very helpful to one’s professional and personal development in life.
After all, what do you have to say about yourself when you are not around? It defines your image from a professional point of view. Developing a personal brand can significantly impact your career trajectory.
1. Helps You Stand Out From The Crowd
Establishing your personal brand helps define your specific attributes in the industry. It can be your skills, experiences, accomplishments, or even personal values.
This is guaranteed to make you stunning when it comes to new prospective employers, clients, or business partners. It boosts your chances of being accepted in the job market and being paid better.
When a brand is well established and developed, it will increase the likelihood of being perceived as the most suitable candidate for new projects and endless opportunities.
2. Increases Your Visibility And Recognition
Strengthening your personal brand helps you amplify your profile and positions you as a sought-after expert in your area of practice or scope of work. This recognition comes with added visibility that often extends beyond even your local network and follower count on social media.
As a case in point, a motivated person can be noticed through media, employers, or even customers by industry leaders who are currently or in the future associated with the niche, if they persistently share strong insights and valuable content.
In simple terms, your personal brand serves as a vehicle to leverage your exposure for greater career advancement.
3. Bolsters Your Credibility
The top reason to develop your personal brand from the psychology perspective is it enables you to gain the trust of your audience, which makes a great difference.
By posting insightful content, engaging in meaningful conversations, demonstrating unique skills, and sharing deep ideas, you are strengthening your brand image among professionals as one who is knowledgeable and trustworthy.
The more credible you become, the more supportive new opportunities flooding your way will be, as many will rely on your opinion, advice, and collaboration.
Conclusion
From buzzwords to branding, personal branding is already in use and is a useful tool. Personal branding allows people to build credibility and connect with others while creating their identity. In today’s world of competition, your story, values, and skills bundled form your personal brand, which makes you stand out.
Having deep knowledge about oneself, along with knowledge about the audience, helps curate a resonant narrative, which in turn leads to the creation of an impactful brand. A brand that is authentic to the individual. Networking, showcasing, and content creation all contribute towards establishing an impact. Amplifying who you are shouldn’t require pretending. Pretending to be someone else is not the objective of personal branding.
Keep consistency and genuine self while embarking on the personal branding journey. How a person can be remembered is through their purpose and passion. While embarking on the journey of personal branding, enabling the world to witness one’s unique brilliance will set them ahead. In the end, what matters is that standing out doesn’t require being unique; it’s actually about being oneself.
