You’ve been working on your business for a while now, and your brand still doesn’t get enough recognition from the public? Read on as in this article we discuss Personal Branding: Things That Help Create a Strong Brand.
Here’s why: you skipped personal branding.
Yes, you, as an entrepreneur, can market yourself as a brand by self-management and self-representation. It is an ongoing process of creating and establishing a certain image in the eyes of the public that recognizes your brand according to its most prominent features.
So, if you’re a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur, personal branding might be something you should be interested in.
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But Is It Necessary?
Let’s look at the stats.
- If you have a strong personal brand, 92% of people will be likely to recommend your services over a company;
- 53% of people don’t trust sponsored content they see on the news, giving preference to branded content;
- A message posted by a personal brand has 561% more reach than a message posted by a company.
So, the more you work on personal branding, the higher are your chances to reach more people. This is also supported by the fact that customers aren’t really interested in a company’s general image, but would rather prefer to see the people who stand behind it. And, for a personal brand, it means that you will get twice more attention because your story will become your brand’s identity.
Some Convincing Examples
Cannot think of a single person who achieved huge success through personal branding?
Remember Kissmetrics?
A company founded by Neil Patel, Kissmetrics helped people understand how their website works, what drives engagement, how to build traffic and grow retention. The company is a huge success, having become one of the key players in the industry.
Neil Patel moved on to create his own personal brand, Neil Patel Digital, helping the world’s biggest and most recognized companies grow engagement and boost traffic. His company is a perfect representation of personal branding:
- Besides naming his company after himself, Neil launched several social accounts, including a YouTube channel, where he uploads how-to videos featuring, again, himself;
- On his website, he has a cartoon picture of himself as a favicon, attracting visitors to learn more about his brand;
- His website also has a signature colour – orange – that is also present on all his social media accounts;
- His call-to-action button, again, is a perfect example of personal branding, as it says “I want Neil to teach me how to grow my business.
Most importantly, after founding Neil Patel Digital, he was able to reach almost 2 million people through his blog. The only thing he says he regrets about creating a personal brand is that, while companies like Google and Apple have no problem replacing their CEOs, there’s hardly anyone who can replace him as the founder of Neil Patel Digital (if it’s not a person with the same name, of course).
What Are the Things that Help Create a Strong Brand?
Have we convinced you to consider personal branding? Good. Now, let’s take a look at the things that you’ll be working on to create a strong personal brand.
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Launching a Strong Platform
Becoming a personal brand involves having a strong platform that you’ll use for all marketing and promotional purposes. For a personal brand, a strong platform is a website, a visual platform where all the characteristic features of your brand will be visible.
Here’s what you should take into account:
- The name of your website should be your name. Like in the example with Neil Patel and others, like Gordon Tredgold (leadership training) and Mark Manson (blogging and entrepreneurship), you should also give your brand your name to get recognized. When a person visits your website or sees it in the search results, they will know immediately that they will find unique information based on personal experience and expertise. This is what you’re looking for.
- Work on your personal logo and dominant colour of your website that will be then transferred to every branded content you create. Reportedly, 72% of marketers say branded content performs better than regular advertising because it boosts brand recognition.
- A strong online platform means also launching your blog (if your website is not a blog, of course). According to researchers at the international real estate company Flatfy, 80% of their visitors go immediately to their blog to find out more about the company. So, showcasing your expertise is a good way to boost your personal brand.
Tip: don’t be hesitant to humanise your brand. Neil Patel did it, and so can you. Besides, having visitors see your face everywhere on your website will create a personal connection between them and your brand.
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Discovering Your Personal Brand Persona
Now, let’s go deeper. You already know about the target audience and your key buyer personas, but what about you? Do you know who you are and what makes people pay attention to your brand?
Discovering your personal brand persona is an essential step in creating a personal brand. But if with buyer personas you should concentrate on demographics, motivations, and challenges, what aspects constitute a personal brand persona?
- Emotional appeal. Remember that Virgin Atlantic primarily use a haphazard approach to doing business? Richard Branson and his well-known opportunistic personality influenced on how his whole company operates. So, take a close look at your own personal features. Some of them might be the answer, why people get emotionally attracted to your brand.
- Describing yourself. What drives you to reach your goals? What is your story? Why should people listen to you? Answering these questions will help you understand better how to represent your personal brand.
- Defining your offer. What would you like to offer people? How will it change their daily lives? The things that you offer your target audience, become your brand’s goal and mission.
Tip: the answers to the questions will help you discover the defining features of your personal brand. These features will also be your main tools to boost brand recognition, so make sure they become the keynote on all the platforms you use to promote yourself.
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Growing Your Presence
The obvious answer to growing your presence would be joining as many social media platforms as possible to reach as many people as possible. Indeed, 90% of marketers claim social media marketing is an effective boost to a personal brand.
Yet, there’s something more to growing your presence than just increasing your social media following.
Coming back to Neil Patel example, he says that a large portion of his job is to create free marketing tools. The urge to give back pushed him to create platforms like Ubersuggest (a tool to help businesses grow traffic) and Subscribers (customer retention and increasing revenues).
Of course, promoting yourself with branded content on social media is effective enough, but having something people will remember you by is an even for personal branding.
Conclusion
With all the examples and statistics that were shared in this article, personal branding does seem like something you should try if you want people to recognize you. Hopefully, these tips and the examples of people who’ve built personal brands will inspire you to build and grow your own successful personal brand.
Author Bio
Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works as a real estate agent at Flatfy. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.