The most successful thought leaders and entrepreneurs with a high rate of followers, engagement, and bookings have one main point in common: a clear and compelling personal brand.
What Is a Personal Brand?
In its simplest form, a personal brand is just that: personal. Your brand should tap into who you are, from your voice and conversation style to your sense of humor and most pressing concerns. Your brand also encapsulates your life purpose. It is the “Why,” the “What,” and the “How” of your personal mission statement. It is, essentially, the soul of your work.
You may ask yourself how this differs from your corporate brand or, if you’re a published author, your book brand. A good way to envision this is to imagine your personal brand as a foundation. This is the solid and supportive structure that everything else you create is built upon.
Your corporate brand and your book brand are a part of you. They are extensions of your mission and your expertise. What makes a strong personal brand so important is it elevates the visibility of an individual and adds further credibility to their name. It instills trust and deeper connection with their audience.
The corporate brand, at the end of the day, exists to solve audience needs. Unless that brand is a non-profit or government entity, it must be fueled by a monetary investment in exchange for providing value to constituents. The audience sees that brand as a “seller” in a marketplace. You and your personal brand can instead be positioned as a “teacher” or thought leader, providing value in exchange for the time and attention of your audience.
This means you can reach audiences not yet ready to invest more than the time to learn something that they view as valuable to their lives. This is a place of great opportunity and influence that ultimately sets up that audience to listen to your advice and prefer your corporate brand when they are ready to invest in solutions that you offer.
A good example of this is with our CEO, Adam Witty. Adam’s main website promotes him as a Founder, CEO, speaker, and author. Within his site, he promotes his business, Forbes Books | Advantage Media, and his published book, The Authority Advantage. Both of these are crucial parts of his career and his thought leadership, however his personal brand is what is elevated the most.
Why Do I Need a Personal Brand?
Developing a personal brand may seem like a daunting task to some, particularly if you’re in the throes of developing and promoting their business. However, establishing yourself outside of your corporate brand has many benefits. For one, it creates more visibility for both you and your business.
Additionally, and just as important, it builds more direct relationships with your audience, boosting engagement and strengthening their confidence in you. It will also allow you more flexibility on what kind of content you can create and which platforms to use.
Building Your Personal Brand: Where to Start
Your Why
The first step to building your personal brand should always be to establish your core mission—the “Why.” Without solidifying this key principle, it can be easy for content overall to be thrown astray. It might also eventually make you feel lost and overwhelmed without clear direction overtime.
The “Why” is what comes before the “What” and the “How” because, usually, it will help you decipher the latter two. Writing a polished and precise core mission will help the rest flow naturally and give structure to your brand.
Fundamental Values
After you’ve confirmed your core mission statement, you can then delve into your fundamental values, or your pillars. These are your non-negotiable standards that will carry across your brand. Some examples of these are accountability, honesty, education, empathy, creativity, etc. These values will be the most important aspects of your reputation that you want emulated, both online and in person.
Tonal Elements
Following your core values should be your overall tone. What do you want people to say about your brand? How do you want them to feel when they read, hear, or watch your content? In what ways does your personality translate to your brand? The more granular you can get, the better.
Once you have your core mission, values, and tonal elements concrete, this aids you in creating a loyal and well-fitted following who will look to you for guidance. It can be difficult for consumers to feel truly connected to a business or corporate brand.
There is a natural spatial divide that occurs when an individual is attempting to look to a bigger brand for help or inspiration. However, that space is lessened significantly when they follow a singular leader who promises to guide them through their pain points. Instilling trust and increasing credibility to your name makes for an exponentially more successful brand.
Understanding Your Audience
Picking a target audience can always be a long and indecisive conversation because it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be relevant to everyone and all times. However, the more distinct you can be about who your audience is, the more focus and overall success your brand will have because of specificity. And more often than not, this will lead to more engagement from loyal followers rather than silent observation from casual perusers.
A useful way to do this is to imagine your audience as individual people rather than general groups.
Ask questions, such as:
- What is this person’s name?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do for a living?
- Do they have a family?
- What do they do for fun?
- What do they read?
- What do they listen to?
- What do they watch?
- Did they go to college?
- What kind of degree did they earn?
Having a good grasp of this persona will lead to a more detailed plan for implementing your brand message and getting the notice that you want. You can also use tools like GA4, SEMrush, or AHREFS to help locate your audience.
The most important question you must ask yourself regarding your target audience is: What is a pain point they are trying to alleviate?
After you identify the problem your audience faces, you then need to determine how you will solve these problems. As part of your overall presence, you can then provide your audience with the proper resources and assets needed to aid them. This can include consistent social media content, blogs, a book, a podcast, webinars, workshops, and more.
The Competitive Marketplace
A great way to understand the current stateof an industry and establish where you feel you reside is identifying businesses that offer similar products or services. Once you have this list, you can then conduct a competitive analysis for each organization.
Once you look at the structure of the business, their prices, and how they approach their audiences, this can then also start to give you an idea of peer profiles in your field.
Peer Profiles and Differentiators
It’s important to not only observe what your competition is, but who.
Identifying thought leaders who have similar messaging and goals as you is extremely useful, not only for your own inspiration but also to note on areas you find need improvement. Between the studies of your peers and the competitive marketplace, this can provide you with valuable highlights of what makes you different from the rest and sets you apart as a thought leader.
How Do I Build a Personal Brand on Social Media?
In social media, the first thing to determine is which platforms fit you and your personal brand. Creating those accounts and ensuring your profile is set up will be step one. After that, it’s vital to connect your business brand with your personally branded social media accounts on both ends.
Ensure both accounts link to or mention the other in some form. This will increase the probability of an individual finding you and your business, no matter which one they came across first. It will also make your overall brand seem cohesive.
The most important aspect of social media to keep in mind is consistency. No matter if you post once a week on one platform or five times a week on several, it’s crucial that you maintain that consistency in the long run. Persistence is the key to a successful social media presence. Be patient and steady.
Key Brand Building Action Items
As previously mentioned, a good first step is to ensure you have your own social media accounts that feature you as a leader in your industry. But another critical action item to make priority is to build your own personally branded website.
This acts as your home base and will be a one-stop-shop for your followers where they can easily find anything they need regarding you and your brand. A well-designed and easy-to-navigate website will boost your credibility and will provide you with a space to have all of your assets in one place. Additionally, this will be a green flag for anyone wanting to reach out to you for speaking opportunities.
Another action item to consider is collaboration opportunities with other peers in your industry. A great way to promote your brand and to pitch yourself is by using the follower base of other thought leaders who have a larger fanbase.
Give them ideas about potential collaborations and how it could benefit both of you for your brands. Whether it’s them tagging you in a post or co-hosting a webinar with you, it will ultimately lead to more followers.
Conclusion
A personal brand is essential to credibility boosting and visibility in today’s world. Your current audience may understand who you are and what you do. However, it’s crucial to also enlighten them on your why. This will open the doors wide to bigger promotion opportunities, a more successful visibility rate, and accomplishing your goals.