You’re marketing yourself as a business owner. To build a personal brand that resonates with clients, follow these five steps.
As a brand owner, you must develop and maintain your brand. You may believe you’re pitching your investors, division heads, partners, or workers a product, a service, or a financial strategy. Those are, without a doubt, important aspects of your business.
But individuals invest in people. Therefore it’s truly all about you. Every action you perform contributes to how people perceive you. Personal branding may help you cultivate your tribe as well as your consumer base.
When you want to develop your tribe, how do you make an impression on others? Is your personal brand helping you or hindering your progress? Is it getting you closer to your objectives or getting you further away from them? To take charge of your own brand, follow these five steps.
1. Decide what you want your brand to achieve.
The first step is to be absolutely clear about what you want to accomplish. Ask yourself if you wish to introduce a new product that expands your company’s market reach.
Do you need to secure funding for a large project? Do you want to assemble a dream team to assist you in turning your small firm into a worldwide franchise? To attain that goal, who do you need to be? What image do you need to present in order to entice people to join you?
You are in control of your image. There is no algorithm or AI platform that can create your individuality. You must do it yourself. By yourself.
Sure, you can ask for advice and look at other personal brands that you like. However, in the long run, you must put in the work to create you. So ask yourself every day, until you can answer in your sleep, “Who am I? Am I who I want to be? Is there someone else inside me, trying to get out?”
2. Evaluate your current situation.
What is your current position in relation to where your brand needs to be? What is the gap, and what adjustments do you need to make to close it?
To respond to this question, ask the five individuals with whom you spend the most time to characterize your brand.
Then expand your pool to include those with whom you’ve had fewer contacts. Information from more distant acquaintances may be more important because it’s based on more rapid first impressions. Such knowledge can be therapeutic on its own. And enlightening. And don’t be afraid of a few sour notes!
3. Recognize the impact of your everyday routines on your personality.
People judge you by your appearance, etiquette, and level of organization. The appropriate presentation indicates that you’re prepared and proud of who you are and what you do.
When someone is physically strong and takes care of herself, for example, she appears to be disciplined, devoted, and likely to follow through. People may immediately see and hear the energy in her physical presence.
Even if it’s only the fit of your clothes or the warmth of your handshake, small details matter, and you have influence over them. The small details become, in effect, your brand.
4. Use technology to help you define and strengthen your brand.
When someone puts your name into a Google search box or goes to your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter page, they will be exposed to you for the first time. They’ll see the photos and videos you post of yourself, as well as what you’re interested in.
Make the most of these resources. Otherwise, your brand will seem tedious and pretentious. Or else your social media will be labeled as nothing but clickbait. Not as a valid personality.
5. “To thine own self be true”
An authentic approach is crucial to building a personal brand. People will find out if you try to pass yourself off as someone you’re not, and your credibility will suffer as a result.
Be unique and inventive. Show yourself as a real, stylized, but pure representation of yourself. Don’t strive to be someone or something you believe others want you to be. You want investors and consumers to say to themselves, “This is a person I want to do business with.”
