Personal Branding Made Easy - Part 2 (How)

Ok guys, so here is the second and final part that covers on how to build or rebuild your personal brand. Yes, there is now hope to change your current personal brand if you follow exactly what I am about to share. There are three parts to the process and let’s get to the first step, right away!

1) BE SELF AWARE

Firstly, you must be self-aware of what you can bring to the table that the world needs.

There are a few questions you may ask yourself to get some hints:

a) What people think of you?

b) What am I passionate about?

c) What are my attributes, skills and/or experiences that serve as my strengths that I can help the world with?

d) What makes me credible?

e) What are my personal brand goals or what do I want to achieve through my deliberate personal branding exercise?

It is important that you ride on the current perception and marry them to your passion, strengths, and reputation to reach your personal brand goal. For example, one of my clients was a Science Teacher who loved interacting with whoever she came across and is well known for her ability to communicate, motivate and impact the people around her. Her personal brand goal is to create awareness about her existence, generate more leads for her to do workshops and get more speaking opportunities eventually. She was aiming to become the next Oprah Winfrey of Asia, digitally for a start, the least.

Now that you are now self aware of what value you can offer to get what you want, next is to align all thoughts, communication and actions towards your met and unmet target audience who will help you reach your brand goal. You need to communicate what value you can give them if they give you their time.

2 ) COMMUNICATE

So how do we do that? You first need to identify who your target audience are - what is their demographics, (purchasing) behaviour and which social media platforms they serve. So using the earlier example, if you were the Science teacher, your target audience could potentially be individuals around 35-45 years old and/or having a mid-life crisis, have the financial means to pay for value-adding services and are usually on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

You then need to choose your style of communication. You have to identify your preferred form of communication because you need to be extremely comfortable in your delivery to ensure that the message and intent you want to communicate penetrates through the minds of your target audience smoothly. However not everyone is comfortable being and speaking in front of the camera – they rather be unseen. You can choose:

1) Written communication style (blogging, writing, etc) if you have a flare for writing;

2) Visual style (videos, livestreams, etc) if you are good at communicating in front of the camera; and/or

3) Verbal style (audio, podcasts, etc) if you prefer speaking offscreen.

Thereafter, you should choose your preferred choice of platform where you want reach out to your target audience. If you had chosen:

1) Written communication style, you would be communicating on blog sites such as Medium, engagement platforms such as Twitter and content platforms such as LinkedIn and even Facebook. Yes, even Facebook is seeing an unprecedented surge of experience reviews and ‘blogs’;

2) Visual style, your preferred platform may be Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. Remember to leverage on the under-utilised Facebook and Instagram Stories feature for maximum reach and exposure; and/or

3) Verbal style, Anchor and Spotify are a few possible platforms if you prefer doing podcasts. Audio is the next big thing, guys, really!

After that, it is pretty simple. You just got to start communicating! Of course, it will be ideal if you had a content and social media management strategy like how I map it out for my clients. I remember one client who had to rework on all her blogs and she was always swearing that she wished she met me two years back when she just started out blogging. She just had so much energy.

So what to start communicating on? I shall tell you a tip guys, start off with your personal brand story which will serve as your own trailer. It should invoke a wave of emotions at different phases and like any other movie trailer, it should have characters, conflicts, a turning point or a climax as many would call it and a conclusion. It should reveal who you are, what you have overcome, what your current mission is and what makes you credible to share about what you want them to hear. It is so simple to direct your own trailer now that I have architected the structure for you. Thereafter you have to start framing their thoughts of you or the value you bring through every message, post or video you put out at the various platforms using an effective content and social media management strategy.

What has all these got to do with personal branding you may ask? Well, personal branding is something you need to invest your time daily for a firm and credible reputation that will stand the test of time. Like what i often say,

"Money, career, assets or even spouse may leave you at your lowest point but your Personal Brand won't".

3) DEEPEN RELATIONSHIPS

Once you start launching your content pieces, you must deepen your relationship with your viewers by acknowledging and responding to each and every reaction your content drew. You need to increase engagement and keep sharing so much value that they look forward to your posts and don’t want to leave you. When you build people up, they will in return, help you achieve your brand goals through their word-of-mouth reviews and referrals which brings about the highest conversion rates (i.e. pushes people to make their purchase/engage the same service).

So by sharing so much value and love with your target audience at their favourite hangout platforms, they are more inclined to trust you and become your clients, do what you want them do and/or bring you towards your personal brand goal. This is the simple formulae that will allow you to tattoo your personal brand in their minds in a way you want.

Do share with me your thoughts and experiences by commenting below or connecting with me - I will love to hear from you!

Now that the ball is in your court, it is time you started building your personal brand and started aiming for the moon because even if you fail, you will fall upon the stars. Now there’s no excuse not to. All the best!

#personalbrand #personalbranding #branding #branding101 #brandingtips