Your personal brand is more than just a resume. It’s more than an elevator pitch or a social media profile. It’s your essence, packaged as a formal expression of your external professional self. It’s a symbol you live by in every way you interact and conduct yourself in the world.
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand is essentially your story. It includes who you are, what you stand for, your strengths, and how you use those strengths to add value to your community. It can be told in multiple formats and extends to all the ways you present yourself online, including the color scheme of your personal website, the music featured in your podcast, and the writing tone of your LinkedIn profile.
Why does an effective personal brand matter?
Creating a strong and engaging personal brand that resonates with your target audience relies on a mix of authenticity and storytelling. A strong personal brand tells people what you do, your core values, and your connection to a specific niche. The voice of your personal brand flows smoothly through a blog post, your LinkedIn profile, your personal website, and your social media content.
How to build a personal brand in 8 steps
There’s a good chance you already have a personal brand. However, you may not have documented it on paper. All the small choices you make when interacting online (and even in real life) accumulate to shape an image or brand that the audience forms an opinion about you.
It’s important to be more intentional with your personal branding strategy in order to present yourself the way you want to be perceived. Whether you’re job searching, an entrepreneur raising funds, a budding creator, or really anyone who’s navigating life and business online, a thoughtful approach to your personal brand will help open the right doors.
Let’s get started. 1. Get to know yourself
There are many questions you may not have directly asked yourself throughout your life experiences. However, some of these answers hold the keys to understanding your personal brand. This is a crucial step in crafting your personal brand statement and telling your story.
Interview yourself in a way that feels comfortable for you to express your thoughts, or ask a friend to pretend to be conducting the interview. Ask yourself:
- What do you mean? Gather your hobbies and interests, the industry or job you desire. What excites you?
- What do you not mean? What qualities do not describe you at all? What do you want to avoid people thinking about you?
- What are your unique 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 form a core part of your personal brand or goals?
- What makes you unique? This will help you identify the value you offer 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 company’s brand overlap?
2. Define your target audience and focus
Once you 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” question will help you identify your target audience. Are they customers? Investors? Employers? Another group? What does this group need? What unique value do you offer that creates value for this audience?
3.Write a Short Introduction
This is where you put everything together to create a personal branding statement that captures your value, reflects your personality, and speaks the language of your target audience. Think of it as part slogan and part promotional pitch – for you. It can encapsulate all the key points in one to three sentences and easily fit into a social media bio.
If you’re stuck, the following template can help you craft a first draft of your personal branding statement:
I am [introduce yourself: name, specific details, credentials, what you care about]. I offer [product/service] for [target market] for [value proposition].
This is the structure of a personal branding statement that captures key facts, but you should edit it to achieve the right tone and personality.
Megababe founder, Katie Sturino, leads her personal branding story with the following statement:
“Katie Sturino is an entrepreneur, social media influencer, body positivity advocate, and fierce animal rights activist. Through her personal platform, @katiesturino, she lends her voice and personal style to raise awareness around size inclusivity, empowering women of all sizes to find their confidence and celebrate their beauty.”
4. Tell a Story
A personal branding statement is the starting point for telling the rest of your story. You’ll want both short and long versions of your story in your toolkit to use for various purposes, such as social bios, press kits, your personal website, or investor pitches.
The best person to tell your story is you – even if you’re not a strong writer. Tell your story in your voice first before working with a writer or editor to help you refine your draft. Remember, this is not a formal cover letter – it should reflect your personality’s tone. Revisit the “get to know yourself” exercise as a reminder. Was “quirky” one of your traits? Make sure your story leaves the reader with that feeling about you.
The principles of brand storytelling can also apply to personal branding. You may 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. This could be a short or long video, podcast/audio, a pinned tweet series, or all of it.
An example of a personal story:
Creative and designer Alice Thorpe captures her personal brand in a quick bio on the homepage of her personal website and a longer story on the “About” page, but her medium of choice, which she uses to connect with her audience, is video. Her bio is written in a way that tells the audience what they can expect from her personality on camera.
When fans find her popular YouTube channel, they encounter a consistent voice. The visual storytelling of personal brands extends:
The imagery also extends to your personal website design, logo, and other assets. If you’re not a designer or developer by trade, there are plenty of free and inexpensive tools that can help you create your branding and your website. The Shopify Themes store has many options you can tweak to align the aesthetics of your site with your personal brand and style.
5. Draw the Lines in the Sand
Your “true self,” public personal brand, and corporate 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 personal brand. Or, for some individuals producing open and unfiltered content, those two sides may be one and the same.
There may be other reasons why your personal brand differs from your true self. Privacy and safety are concerns for online personalities who are drawn into their work for harassment and doxxing. Decide how much you want to give of yourself.
If
You have created a business from your personal brand, and connecting your story to it will help you sell it to an audience interested in you as a person.
There likely will be parallels and overlaps between your personal brand and your company’s brand. If you have created a business from your personal brand, connecting your story to it will help you sell it to an audience interested in you as a person. You should also try to ensure that your brand story focuses on the customers’ stories, their experiences, and their pain points as well. Tell your story, and then reflect it back to them.
Patricia Bright is a multi-talented entrepreneur and prominent influencer in several fields, including finance and beauty. While her personality and elements of her personal brand are consistently showcased across her multiple platforms, she understands how to highlight (or downplay) certain elements for each audience.
6. Building and Finding Community
Instead of trying to attract a wide audience, look for people who share your opinions and interests. This is a specific niche or community that shares your core values and interests.
Building a community from the ground up starts with a strong personal brand. We’ve moved past the years of tricks and quick hacks for social growth, where audiences yearn for authenticity and meaningful connections online. There is no greater indication of this than the success of TikTok during the pandemic, when personal, unfiltered content drew audiences to authentic representations of the people they love. TikTok has made it possible for anyone with a phone and an internet connection to create content and join a shared experience – the need to connect in a time of isolation. As a result, online personalities have come to resemble the people behind them.
But building a community is different from just growing followers. It is a two-way street. Your community can only thrive if the relationship is collaborative – each of you, the brand, and the audience benefit in some way. Engage with your audience by including their stories in your content, asking for feedback, and participating in discussions on topics and comments.
Where do you decide to establish the home base for your brand? It will depend on several factors:
- What medium do you feel comfortable using? Is it short writing? Live streaming? Short recorded video?
- Where have you already excelled? Which platform do you already have a small audience on?
- Where does your desired target audience gather? Research your demographics to understand which channels they use most.
As a personal brand on your own, focusing on one platform may be the most sustainable at first, but eventually, you will need to expand into other spaces to grow your audience. Hugo Amsellem from Jellysmack says that audience overlap across platforms for some prominent personalities ranges from about 10% to 20%.
7. Leveraging Social Media (and Being Consistent)
Remember that when sharing and engaging across platforms and audiences, your message cannot simply be “copy and paste.” Understand the nuances in language and the formatting expected by audiences on each platform and adjust your content accordingly – while staying true to your personal brand (tone, language, values, etc.).
Katie Sturino’s personal brand shines across platforms:
Remember that building an audience on platforms featuring short-term content (like TikTok and Twitter) can be created at a low cost. This will help you test what resonates. As your style of content grows and improves, you can direct 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 increase traffic to your site. However, your long-term content strategy should continue to build value for your audience to maintain loyalty and build lasting relationships.
Before
To launch SOKO GLAM, founder Charlotte Cho built her personal brand before launching her Korean skincare brand. During that time, she wrote content that helped readers engage in their personal skincare journey, which also helped them discover products.
By the time SOKO GLAM launched, Charlotte had established herself as a trusted source of skincare content, converting fans of her personal brand into customers for her business.
On the SOKO GLAM website, Charlotte’s original story intertwines with the brand, reflecting her personal narrative.
Tips for an Effective Personal Branding Strategy
To ensure you build a strong personal brand that resonates with your target audience, make sure that your core message is consistent and that your brand voice and aesthetics are seamless across your content marketing efforts on multiple platforms.
Achieving an effective personal branding strategy entails the following:
- Building credibility and trust. This can be beneficial for cultivating relationships with your audience or securing business opportunities.
- Positioning yourself as an expert or authority. A successful personal brand establishes you as a notable figure of interest in your field or community.
- Reflecting an authentic and sustainable version of yourself. Unless you are playing a character in your work, your personal brand should be a version of you that you can consistently uphold. It may differ slightly from your true self, but it should remain a representation of you.
- Providing a relatable face and personal backstory. This can be crucial to your business or product and helps instill trust among customers who see a real person behind the brand.
- Being transferable and cohesive across multiple platforms and media coverage. A personal branding strategy that includes guidelines, keywords, and visual assets can help maintain continuity in your story, even when you do not have control over it.
- Having a clear objective. This could be a goal like acquiring more customers, increasing awareness for your own business, or promoting yourself for public speaking engagements.
Examples of Personal Branding
In the novel and film Big Fish, the deceased protagonist Edward Bloom narrates his life story to his adult son. The son, who considers the story a tall tale, seeks to understand his true father before it’s too late. What he discovers is that the stories were not lies but rather vibrant details meant to fill the gaps in memory. However, the narrative also reflects the self that Edward wants his son—and the world—to remember.
He employs narrative storytelling to craft a persona that transcends the professional life that initially elevated him to fame. Notable examples of personal branding include personalities such as Sia, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Elton John. Their personas are larger-than-life versions of themselves.
Social media influencers are also adept at creating distinct personal brands. Figures like Ryan Trahan, Mr. Beast, Wil Yeung, Chrissy Teigen, and Sonja Detrinidad are excellent examples of effective personal branding.
Monetizing Your Personal Brand
The creator economy is built upon personal brands. As the lines between creator and company blur, these new creators find ways to build independence by monetizing their audiences 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 phase. While the traditional methods people often think of are advertising revenue and brand sponsorships, top personal brands can truly rely on these alone. Get paid by the brands you love with Shopify Collabs
It makes
Shopify Collabs makes it easy to find brands that suit your style, build affiliate relationships, get paid for what you sell, and track everything in one place. Learn about Shopify Collabs
You can monetize your personal brand on platforms through ads, 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 do that:
- Launch a website where you attract your social media audience and collect email addresses. Building an email list helps you own your audience and take them with you across platforms. Encourage sign-ups by offering free access to exclusive content.
- Use a subscription model. Sell subscriptions or access to a fan club to give subscribing users access to additional content. Many apps, like Patreon, can help you do this, or you can set up user accounts on your own website.
- Sell products through an online store. If you set up a shop 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 translate your unique designs into products for sale – without the need to purchase or manage inventory.
- Sell content like tutorials or courses. The creative duo Colin and Samir established themselves as experts in creating online video content. After building trust with their audience, they launched a course teaching the story of YouTube.
Use Your Personal Brand for Success
Now you have all the tools to bring your personal brand to life online, it’s time to ship! Remember, as you grow and learn from your audience and your own experiences, your personal brand may evolve. What’s important is that it always aims to achieve your goals and resonates with your audience, even if those things change.
How to Build a Personal Brand: FAQs
What is a personal brand and why is it important?
A personal brand is a public statement about who you are, what you stand for, who your audience is, and what value you provide to that audience. It is developed based on your goals and values, which should remain central to your brand when used across channels. A personal brand is important for anyone building an online audience for a specific purpose (finding work, seeking funding, or becoming an influencer). Similar to a set of guidelines for a company brand, a personal brand helps you stay consistent across platforms and stay true to your vision.
What makes a strong personal brand?
A good personal brand contains key elements such as a clear purpose and a defined audience. It is also a sustainable and authentic representation of you, even if it is a polished version. An effective personal brand is consistent across social media accounts like a Twitter bio or a LinkedIn profile. An effective personal brand offers a value proposition and reaches a specific audience.
What are some examples of personal branding?
Some famous examples of personal brands are those that have become personalities
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/116266245-personal-branding-how-to-market-yourself-without-selling-out
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