10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Personal Brand Today
Almost everything in the world has become a brand over the last few decades, including people. Every person with a phone or computer and a social media account is a brand, whether they like it or not. Many people are becoming entrepreneurs with themselves as their brands and the competition in this space has become tough. While many people fail at this, some are monetizing their personal brands effectively and essentially turning it into businesses.
Here are 10 easy ways that you can improve your personal brand today:
- Create a Good Brand Identity
- Be Authentic
- Optimize Your Social Media Channels
- Network
- Leverage Partnerships
- Cross-Channel Marketing
- Add Value to Your Audience
- Create Loads of Good Content
- Be Consistent
- Sell your Story
These appear in no particular order of importance, but let’s get into them and explore.
Create a Good Brand Identity
A brand identity is a great way to differentiate you from your competitors, and unique identities generally stand out more than mundane ones.
Your brand identity is a visual representation of who you are as a brand and how you want to be perceived in the market. You can consider it as a visual showcase of your personality. Make sure your branding accurately reflects you and your vision.
Be creative. Finding unique and interesting ways to present yourself can make you get noticed much more often and can help you to grow.
Be Authentic
One of the key factors that influence much of the long-term success of many people in the personal brand business today, is authenticity. People in general, but especially on social media, have become far more restless with fake personas, sales pitches, etc.
Be authentic. Show your audience your personality and let them into your life, to a certain extent of course. Let them know about your failures as well as your successes and show them that you’re a real person.
I would consider this as one of the most important factors if you are in this game to enjoy real long-term success. If you are fake, people will notice it eventually and you will destroy your brand.
Optimize Your Social Media Channels
Learn how to use each social media channel that you are on in the most efficient way. Every platform is different and requires different communication skills.
Don’t just spam followers with content with the same strategy across all platforms. Spend time in learning and developing the skills that are required for each platform for you to optimize your social engagements and yield the most rewards from them. And keep your audience entertained with your content.
Network
Networking is still huge in any industry. Be seen with your peers, hang out with them and other people from your industry. Learn from them, collaborate with them and always ask for advice, you’ll be surprised at how much people are willing to share with you that can help you on your path.
Always keep track of people you meet and network with. Follow them on their social channels and try to stay in touch with them as much as you can, because you never know what opportunities may eventually unfold from those relationships.
Leverage Partnerships
Not only is it important to partner with the right people that would support your brand identity and add value to your audience, you need to learn how to leverage those partnerships wisely.
A great example of this is when you can partner up with someone who has a product that can be useful to your audience. Get an exclusive discount from them that you can then offer to your audience that they won’t be able to get somewhere else.
Cross-Channel Marketing
Don’t take on too much at once when going starting your social channels, always try to build up an audience on one channel and learn how to be as efficient as possible on that channel. Once you have done that, expand to other channels and engage with your audience on those channels.
Cross-channel marketing is extremely useful if you have products or services to sell. Most people are active on more than one social media network, so it might be easier to build up an audience on other channels once you have already established yourself on one channel.
Add Value to Your Audience
The best way to win over an audience is to constantly provide them with value. Don’t pitch stuff to them all the time and spam them with your products etc.
Spend the time to figure out what problems they have that need to solved or what the reasons are for them engaging with you in the first place. Try to create content that helps them solve these problems and fulfills their needs. Once they feel that you provide real value to them, they will be much more likely to listen to your sales pitches if you want to sell them something.
Create Loads of Good Content
Content is king! This is still pretty much the law of the land.
Put out the best content you possibly on the most regular basis that you possibly can. If your content is good and you produce a lot of it, people will follow you and share your stuff much more often. You want your content to become a regular thing in their lives.
You want them to get a daily dose of you, but make sure your content is relevant to your audience.
Be Consistent
Consistency is routed in having a solid brand identity. Your brand strategy is the roadmap that you can constantly reflect back on, to see if your brand is still on course.
Be consistent in your style, content, voice, personality, visual identity (type of designs, colors, fonts, etc). Consistency is a very powerful tool if you want to grow your brand. When people that know you from YouTube stumbles upon something of yours on Facebook, you want them to instantly recognize that it is your brand.
Sell Your Story
Don’t just sell your brand, sell your story.
People are interested in stories and that comes back to authenticity. Stories can be a very powerful way of getting people interested in you.
If you have an interesting story to tell, structure it in a way that fits your brand the best and share it whenever you can. If you don’t have an interesting story, tell your story in the most interesting way possible.
Just remember to stay true to yourself and your audience. Don’t lie, don’t embellish to the point where it becomes a grey area, because the truth always comes out.
Conclusion
So whether you are just starting out and still building up your brand, or a seasoned professional that have just hit a plateau, I hope that you will be able to use some of these points to help improve your brand and hopefully break through to the next level.
