If you are, a marketer or entrepreneur good chances are that you already know the significance of personal branding. However, some people these days do not have adequate knowledge of the power of personal branding. In this blog, we are going to discuss why personal branding is important to prosper in the highly marketing and competitive era.
What is Personal Branding?
To state simply, personal branding is you branding yourself. You are your brand. In addition, like marketers work hard to achieve adequate, marketing stats for a brand, personal branding involves similar dedication. However, this time you are your own marketer.
Personal branding is an effort to differentiate yourself from others. For instance, your story, your skills, behavior, the words you use, your attitude and whatever portrays you in real life are elements of personal branding.
Professionally speaking, personal branding is how people see you in real life or how the media portrays you or the information of you available online.
If you are thinking about why you need to have a personal, branding then here is the reason why:
Personal branding explains the “why” in the person. As for why I should listen to this or why should I trust this person. By having an affirmative personal branding, you allow people to have faith in you. Without creating trust among your audience, you cannot expect people to establish a partnership with you or invest in your products or services.
Apart from this branding helps to achieve the credible and authentic status you always wanted. The fake persona created by some of the marketing tactics is often canceled out through genuine personal branding.
So now that you are aware of the benefits of personal branding then let us get to the real talks:
Here come the golden rules of personal branding straight from experts oven:
Always Stay Focused
The first and foremost rule of personal branding is to stay focus on your goals.
The CEO if Klickly, a payments platform Cooper Harris explains this better. She says that many people out there are not focused on their key messages. They want to become everything for everyone instead of sticking to their core purpose. This practice often shifts them from achieving their main objects.
Your audience wants to hear about you and not about everything surrounding you. Instead of being a teacher, preacher, mentor, motivational speaker, and the world to your audience try delivering them your focused message.
The key is to be specific when branding yourself. For that, all you need to do is select a niche and then generate content around that niche. The narrower your approach is the more focused you will be in terms of personal branding.
Stay Real, Stay Genuine
In brand marketing staying genuine and real means, that you deliver what you advertise. For instance, people looking for a reliable internet service that provides them internet bundles and the authority to customize them as per their needs will choose Windstream Internet. The company not only delivers what it advertises but also has a genuine approach towards customers’ demands and questions. In digital marketing, we call such brand genuine and real.
However, when it comes to personal branding staying genuine and real means staying connected and filter-free with your audience. The more you will try to copy anyone else while branding yourself the more people will call you out. In addition, you know that whatever comes on the internet stays on the internet for a long time. Therefore, having a genuine and real approach with your audience builds a connection that even your worst enemies cannot damage.
For this, all you need to do is become a master of the skills you want to include in your brand. If you are skillful even in one art form, your personality alone can build your brand.
Founder of CoinState, a marketing agency based in Los Angeles, Justin WU puts the golden rule of personal branding in this way:
He says that by being master of your skillset before starting with personal branding you will generate the content of who you are. In addition, this will make you genuine for those who follow you.
Always Tell a Story
One of the basics of personal branding is to tell a story. If you see a brand that has nothing to tell, it is simply not explaining why in it. In addition, if your brand lacks in answering the why through a story then there’s no point left in it that is worth listening.
The Chief Strategy Officer at Skyword, Allen Gannett, puts the importance of telling a story for personal branding as a more effective brand strategy. She further says that building a narrative is much important in contemporary personal branding.
One of the finest ways to tell your story is to go visual. Use video to portray the story your brand carries and what makes it worth listening to.
Key Takeaways
Personal branding is highly effective in the contemporary digital age. However, it requires some of the rules that we have mentioned in our write up. Personal branding demands you to tell a story worth listening, staying genuine, focused but most importantly, it demands consistency.
