5 Steps To Develop A Personal Brand
Creating a personal brand can be a daunting, mythical task; but it’s worth the investment in thought and time. The development of a personal brand can transform your career or business progression. It changes the association from someone with a ‘experience’ to someone with ‘authority or conviction’.
Remember you ARE your personal brand. You already have a personal brand - whether you can articulate it or not. Developing a personal brand just means setting intention behind the actions you are already doing. No matter what your current job is, what project you happen to be working on or whatever the priority happens to be today... the impact you leave on others and your approach to circumstances and challenges forms your brand.
Note: Ideally you should work through these questions with an executive coach or trusted colleague who can give you a perspective that you might not be able to uncover on your own.
Step 1: Determine who you really are
The first step in creating a powerful personal brand is to determine who you are. Remember, building your personal brand is about sharing your authentic self with the world.
Your personal brand is built upon your skills, passions, values, and beliefs. You need to know yourself if you want to build a strong personal brand.
Ask yourself:
What unique skills do I have? What makes you good at what you do? What innate abilities, unique talents, or special gifts do you have that others don’t have?
What are my core values?
What am I most passionate about? What types of work excites you to get up in the morning and keeps you motivated?
What unique experiences have shaped who I am?
How can I most effectively serve others?
What do I have to offer that no one else does?
What specifically do you think has contributed to your success?
Why do you think people like to work with you?
How do you think other people describe you? What would a reference say? What positive things get documented in performance appraisals and letters of recommendation?
The answers to these questions will shape your personal brand. They’ll help you get to the core of what matters most to you and how you can add value to your audience.
Step 2: Determine what you want to accomplish
It’s now time to think about what you want to accomplish with your personal brand.
Answer these questions:
What would I like to accomplish, both personally and professionally?
What do I want to be known for?
If I could be the world’s foremost expert on a topic, what would it be?
What key message do I want to communicate?
If I could only give one piece of advice, what would it be?
The answers to these questions should further solidify in your mind what your personal brand will look like.
Step 3: Identify your target audience
You can’t effectively serve everyone. Rather, there’s a core demographic of people who will resonate deeply with you, your brand, and what you offer. This core demographic is your target audience. It’s these people who you’ll serve most effectively and who will be your ideal client.
To identify your core audience, ask yourself these questions:
Who can I most effectively help?
Who will benefit most from my skillset and knowledge?
Who am I most passionate about serving?
Who will resonate most with me and my brand?
Step 4: Determine your unique value proposition
Your Unique Service Proposition (USP) is simply your brand summed up into a single, powerful compelling statement that describes exactly what you do for your audience.
A USP typically looks something like this:
I help (target person) to (achieve X) so that they can (outcome).
For example, your USP may be something like, “I help entrepreneurs scale their businesses over six-figures per year so they can live a life of freedom.”
Your USP doesn’t have to say everything about your brand, but it should get right to the heart of who you are and how you help your audience.
It might help to give your USP a unique name that will stick in people’s minds. For example, if you help entrepreneurs scale their businesses, you could call your USP something like, “Scale Without Fail.”
It just needs to be short, memorable, and aptly describe what you do.
Avoid skimping on this step. Creating your USP gives you a high degree of clarity about what your brand is all about.
Take the necessary time to craft a USP that adequately captures what your brand is about.
Step 5: Start treating yourself as a brand
Once you’ve identified the core of your brand, as well as your target audience, it’s time to start treating yourself as a brand. What does this look like practically?
In every communication with your audience, you stay true to your personal brand. Speak about the problems you solve and reinforce your Unique Service Proposition in everything you do.
Your goal is to portray yourself as a strong, compelling brand with a powerful message.
Work through these questions at least once every year so you can continue to assess, modify, enhance, and clarity your message for each pursuit you have. Perfecting your knowledge of your own personal brand is the art of self-promotion.
Here are some considerations to keep in mind as you organize your thoughts above.
Focus on your target audience. This will make it much easier to carve a niche, and then carve a niche within your niche. The best personal brands are very specific. Think about people whom you are interested in. How would you describe their ‘personal brand’? This is a great way to start understanding your own focus.
Be genuine. It will make it much easier to manage your personal brand on a daily basis. Your personal brand should follow you everywhere you go. If you truthfully answer the questions above, then you should use this to set yourself apart as a master of your craft, skillset or industry. It needs to be an authentic manifestation of who you are and amplify what you believe. With this in mind, your personal brand is not only a reflection of a series of job functions like marketing, finance or creative but also ideals like giving back, thoughtful leadership or mentorship and a positive attitude.
Tell a story. Your personal brand should tell a hero’s story - and we should all be the hero to our own story! An effective personal branding strategy shares a true narrative complete with the high, and low, points.
Fail. Failure gets a bad rap in our society but it’s truly the only way that we can hone in on our skills, relate to others, and perfect our story. For a personal brand to rise above the rest, you will need to have and leverage failure.
Maintain your reputation. After you’ve developed your personal brand, you need to continue to build and refine your brand. What are the keywords and actions that you want to be known for? A personal brand is a lifelong project that constantly evolves and changes. Even the experts who build or enhance the biggest brands in the business know that there are no hard-set rules for creating a personal brand. But these general considerations and actionable questions will help provide the first steps.
Please see our Professional Development Services for more information on our Executive Coaching which guides and coaches you through the process above and allows you to build both a personal brand and executive presence.