A personal brand is the identity of the brand. A personal business brand may have been deliberately cultivated or grown organically based on its daily approaches to the world, how the media portrays the business, and the impression people gain from direct experiences or indirect experience, primarily online. A personal brand encapsulates the business’s unique personality, skills, experience, technical know-how, and how these features tell the brands’ overall story. There is a solid drive to cultivate a personal brand as it highlights the business strengths, beliefs, attitudes to its target customers, thereby making the business influential. Additionally, a solid personal brand can grow its audience, making the business appear more trustworthy and accessible. It also sets the business apart from other competitors. It marks the business as more memorable, making it more likely for customers to recommend the brand to friends and family, significantly when millennials have grown more distrustful of media like advertisements.
Strengths and weaknesses will be better understood by finding your target audience, creating content aimed at the target audience, and engaging with your audience to make the interaction personal.
Planning a personal branding strategy
Planning a personal brand strategy will help manage the business brand’s perceptions, ensuring others do not brand you rather yourself -package your best attributes to the business world. A personal brand strategy is an asset you can develop and wield to set a course down the ever-changing business world for years down the line.
Contextual research
Defining your specific audience
Developing a personal brand strategy will involve first uncovering your target audience. The main aim is to find specific people your business aims to add value to before machining a sales pitch. A personal brand strategy should aim to be first personal as per the name. The business should aim to take a further step to find and then understand the specific audience to create relevant relationships. The aim is to resonate deeply with a specific audience through their likes, dislikes, and problems the business aims to alleviate. Adding value first before calling your target audience to action is a proven strategy to creating a successful personal brand, as demonstrated in Gary Vee’s book “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”
Determine your business area, competitors, and marketplace
Market research will better help a business better map its position concerning competitors in the business area. The best module to determine the business area, its competitor, and where it is placed is through the eyes of the people you are helping or wish to help. You can better place yourself by analysing the people you are helping and their reactions to your business and competitor’s business, primarily through social media. Emphasize the reactions of your prospective customers and learn from their positive and negative experiences. Customers are socially vocal. Analysing their messages will better take you through customer experience and journey. These will form the basis on how to place your identity regarding your competitors in the market.
Defining yourself:
Building a successful brand strategy will start with a candid self-assessment. The assessment will better frame the business’s personality, giving your brand authenticity when interacting with prospective audiences via social media. This self-definition will ebb deeper into how the company displays itself moving forward.
You are defining your overall goals and aspirations.
A business should understand that it must set goals and aspirations that are individualistic for it to be unique, totally dependent on the business. Brand development is dependent on the clarity of the goals as they give it direction. However, goals and aspirations should be flexible and continually reviewed based on market changes. For example, if a business were to reach the initial goal, it should define a new goal to communicate. Knowing and defining the business’s goals will better reveal the personal brand. A business should set attainable goals to boost morale. Customers are more likely to rally behind goals they believe in, thus improving the personal brand.
Determine your self-brand attributes, your values (beliefs)
Determining the self-brand attributes is important as the brand’s core values and beliefs drive what brand identity is and most business activities. Moreover, the values and beliefs are the guiding basis of the business activities as they help steer the business. People do business with people and relate to brands through human characteristics. Consumers are demanding businesses to speak to them more as a human. Thus, business brands are evolving. Inauthenticity can be spotted from a mile away; you need to self-assess spot attributes that appeal to the target audience.
Identify your uniqueness and strength(s)
Privy presentation is the reason you give your audience to choose you over your competitors. Your differentiation strategy is why your audience should listen to you, not necessarily only listen to you but give them a reason they should listen to you. It will also depend on how you deliver your content, unique perspective, unique personality, and unique voice. How you deliver your unique content. Find something that is unique and develop a message around that unique point. It entails finding your personality, perspective, opinion within your marketplace and developing your personality.
Defining your brand positioning (statement)
Brand position statement essentially answers what space the brand occupies in the customer’s mind in respect to the business competition. The completion can reposition the business brand hence the importance of constant reviewing. The unique position should be simple without excessive jargon. The personal statement should have an orientation; the statement should define to some extent demographically the target audience. Thirdly it should be believable and credible. The personal statement should be unique, defining a free space not occupied by the competition; the free space will be found through research. The personal statement should aid the business make consistent marketing decisions.
