What are the elements of a personal brand?
To help you create a great personal brand, we asked personal branding coaches and marketing professionals this question for their best insights. From sharing expertise and knowledge to tenacity to being relatable, there are several elements that you need to harness effectively to create a great personal brand.
Here are 12 elements that make up a great personal brand:
- Sharing Expertise and Knowledge
- Well-Defined Target Audience
- Visibility
- An Established Mission and Principles
- Your Uniqueness
- A True and Unique Story
- Tenacity
- Authenticity
- Effective Online Presence
- Consistency
- Personality
- Being Relatable
Sharing Expertise and Knowledge
Sharing your knowledge by writing a blog post, creating a video tutorial, or offering advice to others is unquestionably a terrific method to engage with your audience. Doing this influences people and, in turn, impacts your business. Additionally, people will follow you and remain interested due to your expertise. The goal is to establish and maintain a connection with your audience. Making connections is an essential part of developing your brand. Your connections will not only help you meet new people and expand your network, but they will also provide a growing list of testimonials that speak directly to your character.
Muskan Rai, WebHostingAdvices
Well-Defined Target Audience
When you’re clear about who you want to reach, it’s easier to create content that resonates. By targeting your content, you can connect with those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to say. For example, as a professional mover, our target audience ranges from relocating families to businesses needing assistance with an employee’s relocation. As such, we produce multiple yet tailored content pieces to reach each of these groups. In turn, this strategy helps us build a stronger personal brand.
Joey Sasson, Moving APT
Visibility
A great personal brand should be able to reach their audience. To do this, you need to promote your business actively and market it in a way that appeals to the masses, this can greatly contribute to your brand’s visibility.
You need to take advantage of the broad reach of online advertising – pay-per-clicks and paid ads on social media platforms are some of the methods you can employ to get a more extensive scope.
Once a customer is directed to the company website, adopting an opt-in form on the homepage is best to generate leads. A potential client will put in their details, and from henceforth, they can be notified of the latest developments you are offering, boosting the conversion rate.
Debbie Meeuws, Nature’s Arc Organic
An Established Mission and Principles
Having a successful personal brand means establishing your own principles and mission, just like a company does. To get started, think about what your most important core values are, what you believe in, and what you stand for or against. Then consider your goals as a professional to create a personal mission that is held up by your core values and beliefs. Think of your personal brand as how you are building your reputation, as you create an image of who you are to the world around you and market your abilities as a professional.
Marilyn Zubak, Snif
Your Uniqueness
If you ever feel compelled to blend in and follow in the footsteps of other brands, remind yourself that playing it safe will seldom get you very far. A memorable brand is one that embraces its unique quirks and even emphasizes them to stand out in a sea of competitors. It could be anything from incorporating a color palette that’s unlike anything else or not shying away from speaking up on controversial issues. As long as it resonates with your core values and you aren’t being inauthentic, highlight every part of your brand that sets you apart from the rest.
Brian Casel, ZipMessage
A True and Unique Story
A great personal brand tells a true and unique story. Don’t depend on other people to promote yourself. Making your own name does not depend on other people’s ventures, milestones, or influence. Instead, you showcase your own educational attainment, career background, and personal experiences. While your storytelling may contain touches of struggles and failures, you must be able to show how you overcome them with pride and confidence.
Lorraine Daisy Resuello, Connection Copilot
Tenacity
When establishing a personal brand, you don’t always have the support that comes with an established company. However, tenacity is what pushes a personal marketing or PR strategy to the finish line. Whether it’s networking, establishing relevance or creating higher visibility, being tenacious will help you achieve your goals and be attractive to your target audience.
Mark Sider, Greater Than
Authenticity
Authenticity is one of the best elements of creating a brand because it is incredibly hard to do. People like to put things into buckets of stuff they’ve already seen before and when they can’t do that easily, they start paying closer attention. For example, our brand is called “fat kid deals”, it is completely unique in our deal-saving space.
Lots of brands say they’re finding great deals on the internet, and they are, but they don’t have a memorable name.
There are many deal brands with names like fast deals, quick deals, awesome deals and then there’s others with their non-unqiue names, such as Rick’s deals, Steph’s deals, etc. However, when you’re searching for deals and “fat kid deals” pops up, it makes you look twice, and that’s how authenticity helps.
Kelly Skelton, Fat Kid Deals
Effective Online Presence
Establishing an online presence can transform your whole business. Customers look for brands that offer customer satisfaction and have a good following and online presence. Your personal brand can be significantly enhanced by consistently leveraging the social media platforms to post compelling material that is appealing to your audience. It takes time to establish an online presence, but once you do, your prospects of increasing website traffic and attracting new visitors will be greatly enhanced. Based on the demographics of your target audience and the platforms they use most frequently, you might start by concentrating on two social media networks.
Michael Garrico, Total Shape
Being Relatable
Whether you are a fashion influencer with 5,000 followers or the CEO of 3 companies, the thing which makes us attracted to a personal brand is relatability. Though the likes of Elon Musk are worlds apart, when you watch one of his keynote talks, or you listen to a podcast by Neil Patel, they come across as real people. A person with a successful personal brand has been able to identify different elements of their own personality, inflate them into larger-than-life characteristics, then use the right platforms to engage with people with similar personalities.
So what makes you relatable to your target audience? Do you fill people with optimism that they can achieve what you have? Are people entertained by your unfiltered take on your industry or environment? Are they educated by your knowledge and have a thirst for learning? Do your audience research and be as relatable to them as possible.
Dan Simpson, The Remote Marketer
Consistency
When it comes to personal branding, consistency is key. Many professionals build their personal brands on LinkedIn and that requires posting helpful content on a regular schedule. The more helpful your content is, the more likely it is to get engagement through likes, comments, and shares.
If you’re operating on multiple social media platforms, using the same profile picture and username helps with consistency and can help you gain more followers across different channels. Followers want to know when they’ll receive new content from you.
Using social media management tools such as Hootsuite to batch and schedule posts is easier than trying to do everything manually. You can create your content in one or two days and then schedule each piece to post on different days. Posting daily is important. On some channels, you need to post multiple times a day in order to get noticed and maintain a following. However, building a solid personal brand is certainly worth the effort.
Jibran Qazi, MCPD
Personality
I know it sounds like a bit of a cliché and it is, but it truly is the greatest element and this is where your personal brand should stand out! There’re some places where you shouldn’t try to stand out as much, such as SEO (it’s best to imitate the best performing pages and then knock them down with your superior content). But when it comes to a great personal brand, be yourself.
Søren Jensen, CyberPilot
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