Whether you’re looking for a better job, looking for a promotion, considering a career change, or growing your network, building a personal brand can help you reach your goals. As marketers, we often market services and products but forget that we need to market ourselves!
Creating a brand identity for your business is a fun and creative process, but the pressure to create a design representing your business values and has business appeal can feel like a long order. Following a structured plan of action will help you avoid brain drain and keep your ideas moving forward.
Not everyone knows who you are, and that means they probably don’t know what you do and how well you do it; you need to give your skills a little recognition.
Branding yourself is not solely about who you are as a person, but mostly what kind of services and goods you can offer.
A client will usually choose someone they have previously heard of to working on their latest project, and if you have not left an impression that shows you as an expert in your field, you are straight out of luck.
It would be a lot of inconveniences if a client knew who you were but had no idea about the quality of the services you offered. They’d have nothing to recognize you apart from the rest, and hence normalcy will follow you.
Don’t worry; here are ten tips you can follow to Set Yourself Up for Personal Branding.
1. Know Who You Are
It is important to define yourself and your business for yourself. Do not succumb to ideas or practices in the market. When it is clear, you can identify customers who can resonate with your offering and celebrate your brand. We often hear about authenticity, which is when you know the value you can bring to the table.
2. Create a brand development strategy
Brand development is the process of building and strengthening your professional services brand. As we help firms develop their brands, we divide the process into three stages.
- The first step is getting your brand strategy right and aligning with your business objectives.
- The second is to develop all the tools you will need to communicate with your brands, such as your logo, tagline, and website.
- Finally, there is the phase of strengthening your newly developed or updated brand.
- Your brand development strategy is all about how you accomplish these tasks.
3. Evaluating your existing core brand identity
Your core brand identity is often defined by your company’s vision (why your company exists), mission (what your company does), and values (beliefs that direct the actions of your company).
You may already have your vision, mission and values documented, but don’t worry if you are not.
Some companies chose these documents and put them on an office wall or their website. Others are less formal but take time to understand their vision, mission, and values.
The critical practice for existing companies is to evaluate whether their core vision, mission, and values are still relevant. Ask these questions to yourself:
- Are there elements that have been reflected in the company’s culture in that vision, mission, and values?
- Are some existing elements poorly defined or no longer valid?
- What is most important for your company?
- Do your current brand identity and marketing properly communicate your core identity?
4. Find Your SNN (Specific Narrow Niche)
Since there is stiff competition in almost every domain, specializing only in common areas such as “marketing” and “business” will not be sufficient.
Instead, you should focus on developing expertise in a very specific and narrow space, and one that is not so common.
When you focus on a niche and provide valid information about it to your readers, you will have more opportunities flowing in. You will also be considered an authority figure in that area. Therefore, the more specialized you are in a particular area, the more trade you will attract.
5. Understand why you’re building a personal brand
Okay, so it is clear that if you want to succeed, you need a personal brand. But how will it actually help you? What are your specific reasons for building a solid brand? Being clear about what you are trying to achieve with your brand will help you take steps to get there.
6. Pick your brand’s colors and fonts
Once you get the name, you will need to think about how you will visually represent your color and typography, i.e., your brand. This will come in handy when you start building your website.
Choose your color
Colors do not just define the look of your brand; They also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you tailor it to your entire brand. You want to choose colors that differentiate you from direct competitors to avoid confusing consumers.
Color psychology is not an exact science, but it helps inform your choices, especially when it comes to the color you choose for your logo.
Choose your fonts
At this point, it is also good to see the fonts you want to use on your website.
Choose two fonts to avoid unnecessarily confusing visitors: one for headings and one for body text (this does not include the font you can use in your logo).
7. Write a slogan
A catchy slogan is a good-to-great asset – something concise and descriptive that you can put on your Twitter bio, website headlines, business cards, and anywhere else where you’ve got too few words to make a significant impact.
Keep in mind that you can always change your slogan as you find new angles for marketing – Pepsi has gone through more than 30 slogans over the past few decades.
A good slogan is short, catchy, and a strong belief. Here are some ways to write your own slogan:
- Stake your claim.
- Make it a metaphor.
- Adopt your customer’s attitude.
- Leverage Label.
- Use Rhyme tone.
- Describe it literally.
8. Outline the key qualities & benefits your brand offers.
There will always be brands with larger budgets and more resources to command their industry.
Your products, services, and benefits are only for you. Starting a brand that is memorable means that you dig deep to explore what you have to offer, and no one else is offering.
Pay attention to the qualities and benefits that make your company’s branding unique. Assuming who your target audience really is (see step 3), give them a reason to choose your brand over another.
It is important to note that this is not just a laundry list of features that the customer or customer has to offer your product or services. Think about how you provide value that improves your consumers’ lives.
9. Find the Valuable partner
Bringing in strategic and design expertise to help with a branding project can be challenging. How do you know that you are choosing the right partner to create a very public image of your company? When vetting agencies, make sure you actually grill them on the following:
- What’s your process for coming up with the brand? If you do not have a well-defined set of steps to understand your company and its audience, then it is a red flag. Also, look for agencies that are ready to show many ideas and concepts. The one who promises to nail it on the first try is full of it.
- How do you handle feedback? Contrary to popular belief, you do not want an agency that takes and implements every single piece of feedback. You are hiring an agency for their expertise. Find hints that the company will challenge your teams’ ideas and tell you when and why something might not be a good move.
10. Review Your Brand
You have completed your brand setup, congratulations! Now what?
Okay, it may seem like the last thing you want to do, but you need to keep your mind open to review your brand that it is in use.
The first part of it is research-based. Pay attention to how customers respond to the brand. If you have a physical store, this can be easy to do, and you have a great opportunity to survey your brand personally.
If your business is online-based, you can use email lists to conduct surveys or weeks after launching your new brand look. Analyze sales performance over months. If your sales are improving, this is a strong indication that your brand is performing well. If your sales are remaining the same as before, or worse, decreasing, this may be a sign that your brand is not being well-received.
If your brand is not working well enough, don’t be disappointed. It is really common as businesses try to find their visual identity and unique place in the market. How you react is more important.
Now is the time to consider reviewing your brand and re-adding elements of an existing identity or making a new identity from scratch. Return to the market research phase and see if you can miss anything.
Designing brand identity is not an exact science. Still, with a methodological, measured approach, you can take a perfect shot at creating something that connects with people on an emotional and professional level.
If you need a professional agency to assist you at each step of the process, we are here to help you. Call us at +1 386 400-6112.