Publish content
Now that you know what personal branding is and what the benefits are for you, we’ll guide you through how exactly you should start branding yourself.
Take these 3 steps into account:
- Firstly, you should determine what features or aspects of yourself you would like to put forward by doing some self-reflection. Where lies your passion and knowledge? What would you like to share with others? What do you want to be known for? The answer to these questions is what you need to emphasize with your personal branding. It’s important to stay in your lane and talk about your area of expertise, not something you don’t know much about.
- Secondly, you will have to determine who your target audience is. Who needs to hear your message? Where are these people most active? LinkedIn for example is a great tool for building your personal brand, but if your target audience is much older or younger, you might want to look elsewhere. Don’t be afraid to narrow down and focus on a small, targeted audience.
In fact, defining your target audience allows you to determine the channels you will be using to reach them. As a professional service provider or entrepreneur, your obvious channel of choice will indeed be LinkedIn. That's where the matchmaking happens between a company needing a certain service and the service provider capable of delivering such services.
However, if your goal is to use personal branding to sell products or services that require visual representation in order to appeal to customers or convince people, you might want to go for a platform that allows for this more visual approach. Think Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok.
- The third step is to define what your main message will be and what it will look like. What will you be creating content about? Keep in mind who your target audience is and keep your message focused on them.
Keep your content genuine and authentic. Don’t copy from someone else. Don’t be afraid to get personal and connect with your followers.
Make sure the content is relevant for your followers and it inspires or entertains them. Good content gets the most engagement and therefore creates higher visibility online.
Post consistently. Try to be active daily, not only by posting but also by engaging with others on social media.
Visual brand identity should definitely be a part of your personal branding. This means that you have a certain consistency in terms of visual look. Think of brand colours, style, tone-of-voice etc. Will you talk formally or more casually? What style and colours are you going for? Think about the visual identity of Netflix for example, it's very simple and clean, yet very recognizable.
Engage with others
Apart from publishing relevant content on the right channels, an important part of growing your audience is to be active and engage with others. What exactly do we mean by engaging with others? Like or comment on articles that you think are interesting, share articles that you think are also a great read for your followers. Did someone leave a comment under your post? Interact with them.
The idea behind this is to be active and engage with others, the same way you would like people to engage with your content.
At this point, you should have a pretty good view of what personal branding is, the importance of doing it and how you should do it. Now it's time to get started and put theory into practice.
In the next part of our E-book, we will lay out the 6 steps of how you should start building your personal brand. Each part has examples so that everything is crystal clear for you.
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