Your personal brand is more than just a resume. It’s more than an elevator pitch or a social media bio. It’s your essence, organized as a formal expression of your professional self to the outside world. It’s a symbol you live by in every way you interact and behave in the world.
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand is essentially your story. The personal brand encompasses who you are, what you stand for, your strengths, and how you use those strengths to add value to your community. It can be conveyed in multiple formats and stretches across all the ways you present yourself online, including the color palette of your personal website, the music played on your podcast, and the writing tone of your LinkedIn bio.
Why does an effective personal brand matter?
Creating an effective personal brand that resonates with your target audience relies on a blend of authenticity and storytelling. A strong personal brand tells people what you do, your core values, and your connection to a specific field. The voice of the personal brand seamlessly weaves through a blog post, personal LinkedIn profile, and social media content.
How to build a personal brand in 8 steps
You likely already have a personal brand. However, you may not have documented it. All the little choices you make when interacting online (and even in real life) accumulate to form an image or brand that audiences form an opinion about you.
It’s important to be more intentional in your personal branding strategy to present yourself in the way you want others to see you. Whether you’re job hunting, an entrepreneur seeking funding, an emerging creator, or really anyone doing life and business online, a thoughtful approach to personal branding will help you open the right doors.
1. Get to know yourself
There are many questions you may not have asked yourself directly throughout your life experiences. However, some of these answers hold the keys to understanding your personal brand. This is a crucial step in building your personal brand statement and narrating your story.
Interview yourself in the medium where you feel most comfortable expressing your thoughts, or ask a friend to act as your interviewer. Ask yourself:
- What relates to you? Gather your hobbies and interests, the industry or role you desire. What excites you?
- What doesn’t relate to you? What qualities do not describe you at all? What do you want to avoid people thinking about you?
- What are your distinguishing traits? Ask your friends and family to describe you and compare their answers with your own.
- What are your values? What social issues or causes do you consider important? Do any of these issues resonate as central to your personal brand or goals?
- What makes you unique? This will help you define the value you provide later.
- What are your short-term and long-term goals?
- What are your strengths? Is there one thing you do exceptionally well?
- What impact do you want to achieve – on your audience, your business, the world?
- Do your personal brand and your business brand overlap?
2. Define your target audience and focus
Once you’ve gotten to know yourself, answer your “why” question. Why are you building a personal brand? Do you want to enter the creator economy? Are you building a personal brand as a first step toward a business or product? Are you creating a professional public image to help secure funding or other business partnerships?
Answering the “why” will help you identify your target audience. Are they customers? Investors? Employers? Another group? What does this audience need? What unique value do you offer and create for this audience?
3.
Writing an Elevator Pitch
This is where you put it all together to create a simple personal brand statement that summarizes the value you offer, reflects your personality, and speaks in the language of your target audience. Think of it as part tagline and part elevator pitch – for you. One to three sentences can usually summarize the main points (and you’ll score extra points if it fits easily into a social bio).
If you’re stuck, the following template can help you craft a rough draft of your personal brand statement:
I am [introduce yourself: name, specific details, credentials, what you care about]. I provide [product/service] for [target market] that [value proposition].
This is the formal structure of a personal brand statement that captures the important facts, but you should edit it to get the right tone and personality.
Megababe founder, Katie Sturino, leads her personal brand story with the following statement:
“Katie Sturino is an entrepreneur, social media activist, body acceptance advocate, and fierce animal rights activist. Through her personal platform, @katiesturino, she lends her voice and personal style to raise awareness for size inclusivity and empower women of all sizes to find their confidence and celebrate their beauty.”
The statement contains the key components:
- Introduction: Katie Sturino, entrepreneur, social media activist
- What she cares about: Body acceptance and animal rights activism
- Product/service: Her voice, personal style
- Target market: Women
- Value proposition: Raising awareness for size inclusivity and empowering women
Katie chose words like “fierce” and “celebrate” to capture her personality in the tone of her statement.
On the Megababe website, Katie downplays her personal story, even though her personality still shines through on the brand’s “About” page. Elsewhere, the Megababe brand focuses on the customer story, where the products speak to common pain points.
4. Tell a Story
Your personal brand statement is a starting point for narrating the rest of your brand story. You’ll need both short and long versions of your story in your toolkit for various purposes, such as social media bios, press kits, your personal website, or investor pitches.
The best person to tell your story is you – even if you aren’t a strong writer. Tell your story in the first person before working with a writer or editor to help you refine your draft. Remember, this isn’t a formal cover letter – it should reflect your personality’s tone. Review the “Getting to Know You” exercise to remind you. Was “quirky” one of your traits? Make sure your story leaves the reader feeling that way about you.
The principles of brand storytelling can also apply to personal branding. You’re likely to start with a written draft of your story, but you can present it to the world in the format that reflects you best or that suits the platform where you hope to spend most of your time. That could be a short or long video, a podcast/audio, a series of pinned tweets, or all of the above.
Visual Branding
A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Choosing and creating images to represent your personal brand is just as important as the written story.
What colors or moods best represent your personality? What is your visual tone? Will you use photography or illustrations? Are your videos raw and handheld or polished and produced?
Work with photographers and designers whose portfolios align with the vibe you want, and communicate your expectations clearly (another great use of your completed brand story!).
Bloom founder, Avery Francis, turned to Twitter to ask her audience for feedback on her personal image:
The following examples illustrate that personal images don’t need to look like passport photos. Experiment with backgrounds, poses, colors, and moods to reflect your personal brand:
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the images to design your personal website, logo, and other assets. If you’re not a designer or developer by profession, there are many free and inexpensive tools that can help you design your brand and website. The Shopify Themes store has many options that you can customize to align the aesthetic of your site with your personal brand and style.
5. Drawing Lines in the Sand
Your “true self,” public persona, and personal brand may be closely related. However, there are likely to be some differences. There may be aspects of your personal life that you choose to keep private and separate from your public persona. Or, in the case of some online creators who produce personal and candid visual content, these two personas might be one and the same.
There may be other reasons that your personal brand is different from your true self. Privacy and security are concerns for online personas that are drawn to attracting bullies, exposure, and harassment. Decide how much you are willing to reveal about yourself.
If you turn your work into a personal brand, tying your story to it will help you sell it to an audience that has already bought into you as a person.
Your personal brand and company brand are likely to have similarities and overlaps. If you turn your work into a personal brand, tying your story to it will help you sell it to an audience that has already bought into you as a person. Your business story, however, should also try to focus on your customers, their experiences, and the pain points they face. Tell your story, then reflect it back to them.
Patricia Bright is a multi-talented and influential entrepreneur in several fields, including finance and beauty. While her personality and elements of her personal brand appear consistently across her multiple platforms, she understands how to highlight certain elements (or downplay them) for each audience.
Patricia’s personal brand appears on Instagram where she shares candid moments of travel, family, and fashion.
On her personal website, you will find the same Patricia, but in a professional and polished manner. Notice how her voice and tone still match her Instagram captions: playful, bright, and powerful.
And on her YouTube channel, The Break, she speaks to an audience seeking advice on finance and business while staying true to her personal brand.
6. Building and Finding Community
Instead of trying to attract a wide audience, look for people who share your views and interests. This is a specific niche or community that shares your core values and interests.
Building a community from scratch starts with a strong personal brand. We have moved past the years of shortcuts and hacks for social growth, where audiences crave authenticity and genuine connections online.
There’s no greater indicator of this than the success of TikTok during the pandemic when personal and unfiltered content brought audiences to the real people behind it. TikTok made it possible for anyone with a phone and internet connection to create content and join a shared experience – the need for connection in times of isolation. As a result, online personas became more like the people behind them.
But building community is different from merely increasing followers. It’s a two-way street. Your community grows only if the relationship is reciprocal – each of you, the brand, and the audience benefits in some way. Engage with your audience by including their stories in your content, asking for feedback, and participating in discussions in the topics and comments.
7. Leveraging Social Media (and Being Consistent)
Remember that when sharing and engaging across different platforms and audiences, your message cannot simply be “copy and paste.” Understand the nuances in language and formatting expected by audiences on each platform and adjust your content accordingly – while staying true to your personal brand (tone, language, values, etc.).
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Your personal brand is clearly defined across all platforms, Kati Storino:
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Tip: Build an audience on platforms that feature short-term content (like TikTok and Twitter) that you can create at a low cost. This will help you test what resonates. As your content style grows and improves, you can shift your audience toward long-term content by starting a blog, an online course, or a YouTube channel.
8. Creating Content and Value
A strong content marketing strategy can help grow your personal brand and drive traffic to your site. However, a long-term content strategy should include continuously providing value to your audience to maintain loyalty and build long-term relationships.
Before launching SOKO GLAM, Charlotte Cho built her personal brand before launching her Korean skincare brand. During that time, she wrote content that helped her readers engage in their personal skincare journey while also helping them discover products.
By the time she launched SOKO GLAM, Charlotte had established herself as a trusted source for skincare content, easily converting her personal brand followers into customers for her business.
On the SOKO GLAM website, Charlotte’s original story intertwines with the brand, reflecting her personal journey.
Tips for an Effective Personal Branding Strategy
To ensure you build a strong personal brand that resonates with your target audience, make sure your core message is consistent and that your brand voice and aesthetics are seamless across your multi-platform content marketing efforts.
An effective personal branding strategy achieves the following objectives:
- Builds credibility and trust. This can be beneficial in establishing relationships with your audience or securing business opportunities.
- Position you as an expert or personality. A successful personal brand establishes you as a person of significance and interest in your field or community.
- Reflects an authentic and sustainable version of yourself. Unless you are performing a character in your work, your personal brand should be a version of you that you can consistently commit to. It may differ slightly from your true self, but it should remain a representation of you.
- Presents a relatable and personal face and story. This can be crucial for your business or product, helping to build trust with customers who see a real person behind the brand.
- Be transferable and seamless across multiple platforms and media coverage. A personal branding strategy that includes guidelines, keywords, and visual assets can help maintain consistency in your story, even when you don’t have control over it.
- Achieves a clear goal. This could be a goal such as gaining more customers, increasing awareness of your personal business, or promoting yourself for public speaking engagements.
Examples of Personal Brands
In the novel and film Big Fish, the dying protagonist Edward Bloom tells the story of his life to his adult son. The son, who finds the story long-winded, tries to discover his father’s true self before it’s too late. What he finds is that the stories weren’t lies as much as they were colorful details filling in the gaps in memory. But the story also reflects the self that Edward wants his son – and the world – to remember him by.
Using the fictional character to create a persona that is larger than life but still grounded in truth. In some ways, this is the definition of personal branding: authentic and curated elements of someone’s story, traits, and values coming together to showcase their best side and achieve specific personal and professional goals.
A strong personal brand helped Chrissy Teigen turn her influence and popularity into her own business, Cravings by Chrissy Teigen.
In the real world, there are some examples of strong personal brands. Celebrities who often come to mind performing larger-than-life personas include Sia, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Elton John. Their personalities are larger than life.
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Social media influencers are also experts in creating a distinctive personal brand. Figures like Ryan Trahan, Mr. Beast, Will Young, Chrissy Teigen, and Songa Ditrinid are excellent examples of effective personal brands.
Turning Your Personal Brand into Profit
The creator economy is built on personal brands. With the lines between creator and company fading, these new pioneers are finding ways to build independence by monetizing their audience on their own terms.
If your goal is to turn your personal brand into a business, there are many ways to profit from it, even if your influence and audience are still in the growth stage. While the traditional methods people often think of are advertising and partnerships with brands, top personal brands can truly rely on these alone. Get paid by brands you love with Shopify Collabs.
Shopify Collabs makes it easy to find brands that fit your style, build affiliate relationships, get paid for what you sell, and track everything in one place. Learn more about Shopify Collabs.
You can monetize your personal brand on the platform through advertising, brand partnerships, tips, and shoutouts, but moving your audience from social media to your own channels is more sustainable.
Here are some business ideas to help you with that:
- Launch a website where you drive social audience and collect email addresses. Building an email list helps you own your audience and bring them with you across platforms.
- Use a subscription model. Sell subscriptions or access to a fan club to give subscribed users access to additional content. Many apps, like Patreon, can help you with this, or you can set up user accounts on your website.
- Sell merchandise through an online store. If you set up a store on a platform like Shopify, you can expand the personal brand you’ve built into physical goods. A print-on-demand app that connects to your store can help you turn unique designs into products for sale – without needing to purchase or manage inventory.
- Sell content like tutorials or courses. Creator duo Colin and Samir established themselves as experts in creating online video content. After building trust with their audience, they launched a course teaching YouTube storytelling.
Your Personal Brand on the Path to Success
Now you have all the tools to bring your personal brand to life online, it’s time to start! Remember, as you grow and learn from your audience and your own experiences, your personal brand may evolve. The important thing is that it always aims to meet your goals and resonates with your audience, even if those things change.
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