Building Your Personal Brand For Business Success
While creating a personal brand may seem to be an ambitious endeavor at first glance, the harsh truth is that if you don't create your own brand, other people will do it for you based on the information they obtain about you from social media, internet searches, colleagues, and friends.
When you control your personal brand, you'll have the power to present yourself in the best light as a business professional.
This post will walk you through what personal branding is and why it's vital for business.
What Is Personal Branding?
Personal branding involves creating a brand identity for an individual or business. Essentially, it's how you portray your brand and its ethos and goals to the world and ensure that the public has the right perception about your persona, what your values are, and why it's worth choosing you over your competitors.
We all know of high-profile individuals with personal brands. Think Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs. They have all established an identity in the public eye–their personal brands–that allows others to understand the type of person they are.
Personal branding isn't just about marketing; it's about being your own marketer. It is about standing up for yourself and your business to earn confidence and command respect from your customers and peers.
6 Reasons Personal Branding Is Important for Businesses
Personal branding shows potential customers and business associates another side of you other than product branding or company branding. It clarifies your business's mission and objectives and helps you better connect with your target audience.
Here are the key ways your business can benefit from personal branding:
1. It Helps You Stand Out From the Crowd
Today, most digital markets are saturated. As such, businesses need to leverage differentiation as a key tactic for business growth. When it comes down to crowded markets, consumers rely on personal brands that tell them more about you.
Building a personal brand that aligns with your business goals can help you stand out in a saturated market to attract new customers. The best personal brands use various technologies and social networks to present their brand in the saturated online space to create positive experiences consistently for their target audience.
2. It Gives You More Credibility
When you're an entrepreneur, the success of your business depends on the efforts you put in to build your personal brand besides marketing your product or business.
This means spending a great deal of time attending conferences and conventions, networking with customers and other business owners, and amplifying your brand or product's voice.
It also means laying a path for selling your personal brand, not just your company branding or product. Provide your target audience with a window into your world with consistent actions that promote your personal brand. This will help foster relationships and entice potential customers to be interested in whatever you're offering.
Remember, 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands.
3. It Provides an Alternative Way of Interacting With Customers
Let's face it. Product pricing and product quality have a huge bearing on customers’ purchasing decisions. Even so, today's consumers prefer buying from brands they feel confident about. They are comfortable buying from brands whose values align with theirs.
Your personal brand can provide customers with insights into what drives you as a person. By availing of different communication channels, you can provide a transparent view of the people behind your business and make a meaningful connection with the consumers.
4. It Helps You Build Better Networks
According to a recent study, approximately 77% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business when the CEO of that business has a strong social media presence.
Building a personal brand is somewhat directly proportional to creating a better network. Using social media platforms for brand building to promote your personal brand is the best bet for expanding your network.
Social media platforms help increase your visibility to form relationships with influential people in your industry and reach a new set of customers.
5. It Can Create Greater Opportunities
Personal branding greatly helps you grow your image as well as your company's brand. The more people start to hear about you besides your products and services, the more likely you'll be able to showcase your unique ideas, thought leadership, and expertise.
As a result, it helps build your persona as an in-demand industry thought leader and, in the long run, allows you to work with more prominent customers and fetch better deals.
6. It Helps Build Relationships
When you have strong personal branding and consistently create content that resonates with your audience, you can nurture and create valuable online relationships. The relationships you nurture with potential customers and colleagues can be excellent sources for gaining business insights.
Building an online relationship is crucial if you want people to listen to you, remember who you are, and continue visiting your social channels and website. Apart from building relationships, you can also create new partnerships by reaching out to other people, generating new leads, and giving your business a new growth line.
Golden Rules for Creating a Personal Brand
Building your personal brand is easier said than done. You can easily get lost in the brand-building process if you don't know where to begin. Here are tips for building an effective and unique personal brand:
Have a Focus: Decide on what your key message will be and stick to it. Keeping your message focused on your target audience makes creating content around your personal brand easier. The narrower and more focused your personal brand is, the easier it is for your target audience to remember you.
Be Authentic: When you're genuine, you'll have an easier time managing your brand. The content you create should amplify your persona. If you're deeply skilled in a given area, your reputation alone can help you build the brand you want.
Be Consistent: You should demonstrate consistency in appearance, communication, and gravitas. Even the most diminutive of things can derail the effectiveness of your personal brand.
Create a Positive Impact: Keeping a positive attitude and helping others can help grow your personal brand and improve the brand awareness of your business. This can lead to the healthy growth of your business.
Be Ready to Accept Failure: No one likes failure, and everyone strives to avoid it. That's human nature. Even so, to have a successful personal brand, you need to have the willingness to accept failure. The most successful brands usually come from numerous mistakes and failures and not from instant perfection.
Emulate a Successful Personal Brand: You need to borrow a leaf from a successful personal brand when beginning the journey to creating your personal brand.
Let Other People Tell Your Story: The best PR strategy is by word of mouth. Building a personal brand is no exception to this rule. Personal branding is the story people tell when you are not in the room. As such, you should ensure that people can recall the positives about you.
Wrapping Up
Personal branding is part of a strong business strategy. It can show your target audience who you are beyond your business. It also allows you to connect with your customers genuinely and identify yourself as a professional in the industry.
We hope that the information in this article has convinced you just how vital creating a personal brand is important for your business's brand marketing. Feel free to contact us or subscribe to VTQ Magazine to receive information regarding new articles, magazine issues, events, and invitations.