5 Steps to Build Your Personal Brand
Here are the five steps for building your personal brand, and some tips on how you can use them effectively. If you want to skip the reading, you can watch the YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhD9wjxbtNg
Your personal brand is largely dependent on how other people view you, which is largely dependent on how you portray yourself, which should be a reflection on who you really are. Here are five straightforward steps that will help you to build a successful personal brand by focusing this process on creating a truly better brand rather than just on trying to promote one.
Step 1: Know Yourself
You need to conduct a personal raw materials assessment by examining your (a) current strengths, (b) potential strengths, (c) faults and bad habits, (d) motives and motivations, (e) personality, and (f) core values. You cannot effectively build your brand if you don’t know what you’re starting with. Remember that it’s not just your opinion that you should solicit when assessing your personal raw materials, but also the opinions of others who know you so that you can get an overall perspective of both who you are and who people think you are.
Step 2: Know Your Target Audiences
In marketing, branding is approached with particular target audiences in mind. The same goes for your personal brand. Who are you trying to connect with or impress or do business with or employ? As you start to delineate who your audiences are, you need to understand what attributes, skills, traits, values, etc. they find important or appealing. This helps you to understand the type of brand that you can build that will provide you with the most value in reaching your goals.
Step 3: Focus on Reality, Not on Perception
Many people will tell you that “perception” is the most important factor in any type of branding, whether personal or organizational. They’ll tell you to “fake it until you make it” or to create an image that isn’t the real you. But there’s a significant danger in focusing on perception rather than on reality: eventually, people will figure out that you really are NOT who you say you are, and that will be devastating to your brand. The better strategy is, first, determine how you want your brand to appear, and then, if your reality doesn’t match the preferred perception, change your reality so that there is indeed a match.
Step 4: Create Your Story, and Communicate It
The story you tell about yourself can greatly influence how people view your various skills, qualities, traits, values, etc. The beautiful part of this is that your story is yours to develop. So take the time to tell the story in a way that emphasizes what’s important to YOU as well as what’s important to your target audiences if their opinions matter to you. Then use digital resources and social media marketing to tell your story in a way that attracts, intrigues, and motivates your audiences.
Step 5: Consistently Evaluate and Continually Improve
Good marketers regularly assess how their brands are being perceived as well as how the reality of their products are living up to the brand perceptions that have been created. You need to consistently evaluate how others view your personal brand, as well as how your skills and actions are matching up with the brand that you’ve portrayed. In addition, you need to put into place an ongoing plan to continually improve your knowledge, skills, productivity, habits, etc. Be flexible in understanding that your goals, your audiences, and even your brand, can change over time to reflect who you are and who you want to be.
In Summary…
Follow these five steps as a rigorous process and you’ll see your personal and/or professional brand grow significantly.
Remember… To build a strong personal brand, you need to (1) know yourself, (2) know your audiences, (3) focus on reality instead of perception, (4) create and communicate your story, and then (5) consistently evaluate and continually improve.
Thank you to Anthony Miyazaki – a brand strategist and marketing educator based in Miami, Florida, USA – for permitting us to share this here. You can find him on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/AnthonyMiyazaki
Note that this was merely a test page for a test campaign for this test website, but the content was real and so is the linked YouTube video, so hopefully you were satisfied and learned a little something to help you along your journey.