In an “already established” competitive market, it’s very difficult to ESTABLISH yourself as the expert in your niche unless you’ve set up your personal brand well. Therefore, businesses, influencers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs need to build an authentic personal brand. And so, a question springs to mind – how to create a personal brand?
Today, we’ll go through detailed steps to create a personal brand. In addition, we’ll discuss the merits of a personal branding strategy, how to create a personal brand identity, and personal branding importance. Once you have a clear grasp of all these concepts, you can start working on your personal brand and develop it into an accurate and credible representation of you, and your business.
The key to staying at the top of your niche and holding that position is to create a personal brand – with a unique brand, you can distinguish yourself from others offering similar services. Moreover, you can garner trust and credibility with a personal brand. Finally, once you know how to create a personal brand online, you can reach a large audience and greatly increase the accessibility of your products and services.
Once we’ve established the importance and of a personal brand and why you need it, we’ll go through a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create a unique personal brand. Let’s begin.
Who Needs A Personal Brand?
If you are a creator or a provider of contents and services rather than a consumer, you need a personal brand along with a personal branding strategy. Regardless of your business model, whether you have a solo gig, a small company, or a massive organization, in all cases, you need a personal brand that draws in an audience and helps them create a representative image of you. Therefore, as a business owner, you need to know how to create a personal brand identity.
While providing a reliable source of information about you and your business, your personal brand defines the initial impression people will have of you. This includes your general audience and potential business partners. Therefore, if you want to leave a good first impression when someone looks up your business, you need to ensure you have a personal brand set up.
If you want to take the charge of your service or product and establish yourself as the main authority in your niche, you need to create a unique personal brand. And so, you must start studying up on personal branding importance and the steps required to create a personal brand identity.
Benefits of Personal Branding
Once you learn how to create a new personal brand, you’ll start to see that there are numerous benefits of personal branding and personal branding importance. To start, having a personal brand means you can quickly build trust with your audience and clients and cement yourself as an authoritative figure or expert in your niche. In addition to trust, with a solid personal brand, you can reach a larger audience and thereby increase the number of clients who are likely to do business with you. Other known benefits of personal branding include:
- Greatly boosts your credibility and trust
- Differentiates you from your competitors thereby giving you an edge
- Advances your career and your business
- Increases your circle of influence and audience reach
- Allows you to have a larger impact on the community as a whole
- You can become an authoritative figure in your niche
As you can see, there are numerous quick benefits to personal branding along with long-term benefits. To get a better idea of personal branding’s importance and learn how to create a unique personal brand, check out our detailed overview of why personal branding is important.
Steps to Create Your Own Easy to Trust Personal Brand
Starting your own personal brand is a daunting task. Therefore, we’re going to break down how to create a personal brand into easy to follow steps. Remember, although these are the starting steps, you need to keep them in mind throughout the lifetime of your personal brand as they’re very important values to uphold as a company and as a brand. Therefore, without further ado, here’s how to create a new personal brand.
- Step 1 – Select a Niche You’re Passionate About
- Step 2 – Determine Your Goals
- Step 3 – Analyze Your Competitors and Offer Something Unique
- Step 4 – Design Your Appealing Website
- Step 5 – Focus on Your Content and Marketing Strategy
- Step 6 – Promote Your Brand
- Step 7 – Make Irresistible Offers
- Step 8 – Build Your Community
- Step 9 – Always Keep Adding Value for Your Customers
Step 1 – Select a Niche You’re Passionate About
Before basing your personal brand around trade or niche, contemplate whether you believe in it and if you’re willing to persevere. Without passion, it’s very easy to lose heart years down the line as it gets tougher to grow your business. At that point, the only thing that can keep you running is your passion for your niche and your desire to be the best in that business.
As a concrete example, if you can’t choose between freelance web design and strategic marketing, choose the one you’re more passionate about. That is, choose the niche you’re willing to strive to become the best at. Building a personal brand around something you sincerely enjoy doing is much easier and comes off as genuine as opposed to something you’re forcing yourself into. Therefore, put a lot of thought into selecting your niche and choose the one that fits your goals, and something you are passionate about as it is crucial when you want to know how to create a personal brand identity. In addition to staying motivated years down the road, selecting the right niche helps in the next step to create a personal brand – determining the values and goals of your brand.
Step 2 – Determine Your Goals
Determining your goals as a person and a business is crucial before you start setting up your own personal brand. Without a clear objective, you won’t be able to set the beliefs and highlight the passion which will drive your business forward and determine what route your brand will take. The goal of your business is at the heart of how it will work and how you can prioritize what you want to offer your clients and what you want to accomplish. When faced with hard business or moral decisions, falling back on your goals and values as a company will help guide you towards making the right choice.
There are two essentials in personal branding goals:
- Values
- Passion
When going through the steps to create a personal brand, determining the values you stand for will help your audience relate to you. If your goals are well-defined and your values are clear, your audience will listen to what you have to say. Unless you stand by your values, you will quickly lose the trust of your audience and business partners. Therefore, determining early on what you want to strive for as a business and as a brand is essential.
Without passion, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to reach your goals Therefore, when setting goals, find out what drives those goals. If you lack the resolve and motivation to reach your goals, you’ll eventually fall flat, thereby losing the trust of your audience and clients. It’s important to show them that you are passionate about your goals and are willing to chase them even when things become hard. Therefore, determining this aspect of your brand is crucial when trying to answer how to create a new personal brand.
Step 3 – Analyze Your Competitors and Offer Something Unique
How to create a unique personal brand? – this question often comes to mind when you’re dealing in a niche with a lot of established competitors. And so, personal branding offers you a chance to stand out. That is, you can conduct a study and find out what new services you can bring into the market. From there, you can develop your skills, and work towards providing something the market is lacking and none of your competitors provide. This is where skills in market research and self-growth come into play. You need to be able to spend the time needed to deeply analyze what unique selling point you can come up with, and work towards providing that for your customers.
If you offer something valuable to the market, you will be able to quickly establish your personal brand as a top dog in the niche. You will reach a wider audience than your competitors and quickly overtake them in terms of market share. Therefore, do your due diligence and give it your all to find the unique service or product and provide it to the customers in your respective niche.
Conducting proper market research and analyzing your competitors is one of the most important steps on how to create a new personal brand.
Step 4 – Design Your Appealing Website
How to create a personal brand online? – this question is well-answered through an illustrative example of a well-designed and appealing website.
A website will make or break your personal brand. Without an appealing website to go along with your content and services, instead of bringing in customers, you’ll be driving them away. Therefore, as the website is the first thing people will find when they look up your brand, it’s important to make the best first impression. And so, create an appealing website which highlights your brand, matches its values, and presents everything in a neat way to your audience and clients.
4.1 How to create a personal brand online – developing an appealing website
If you have excellent skills in web development, you should have an appealing website up and running in no time. However, if you decide to delegate the work to someone else, make it clear to them what you want to highlight through the website. To further boost the value of your website, you might want to add in a blog which works as a great way to engage your audience, while allowing people to read up on your content.
4.2 How to create a personal brand identity – choosing the right logo
When designing your website, the first thing that should come to mind is the logo you choose to represent your brand. This is one of the most crucial decisions you can make when creating your personal brand as the logo represents everything your brand stands for and should convey your beliefs to the audience.
The best logos feature the following characteristics:
- The logo should reflect the values of the brand
- It should be easy to read and understand at a glance
- It should also include all major identifiable brand colors
4.3 How to create a unique personal brand – developing a personal brand statement
To take it a step further, you might want to add in a tagline or personal brand statement along with your logo. Find out more about creating a personal brand statement here: Building a Personal Brand Statement.
To sum everything up, an appealing website comes with the following:
Step 5 – Focus on Your Content and Marketing Strategy
A key factor in your personal branding strategy is your content and marketing strategy. You need to nail these two aspects to drive home your personal brand and allow it to thrive.
Firstly, the content. The content you share with your audience should be of the highest quality and must be representative of what you provide your customers with. If there is a discrepancy between the quality of your work for your audience and your customers, you’ll quickly be labeled as someone who’s simply in it to make money. Therefore, let your passion show with the high-quality content you share with the rest of the world – be it free or paid for.
Next up is your marketing strategy. No matter how good your content is and how valuable it might be to someone, if you don’t market it properly and put time and effort into bringing it to the world, it will go unnoticed. Therefore, spend some time trying to develop a good marketing strategy, and invest both time and money into it. Once you’ve managed to garner an audience through your marketing strategy you will start to see the return on investment.
Hence, when asking how to create a personal brand online – content and marketing strategies are crucial.
Step 6 – Promote Your Brand
Once you’ve created content for your audience – it’s time to promote it. Unless you promote it and get it out to your audience, it’s unlikely to reach the people who truly need it. Similarly, once you’ve set up your personal brand, you need to promote it so people start taking notice of it. Promoting your brand is one of the most important to create a personal brand.
Social media promotion is a powerful tool. And so, to promote your brand, you might want to pay for ads on different social media accounts to generate some traction. Therefore, complete your social media profiles so you can promote your brand through those outlets. More importantly, keep them up to date with all your latest information.
Another good way to promote your brand is to develop a consistent and well-thought-out elevator pitch. Whenever you get a chance to promote your brand in person, you should be able to give them a brief of your business model and why you’re the best in your niche.
Some other tips to promote your personal brand include:
- Focus on the strengths and values of your business when promoting your brand
- Be authentic
- Increase your digital footprint – make sure your brand is visible across multiple social media outlets. Moreover, you should have a well-designed website to go along with it.
- Focus on quality instead of quantity
- Once you’ve defined an audience – target your brand towards them. Singling in on a single audience prevents you from losing focus.
Promoting your brand properly plays well into how to create a unique personal brand – if your brand is unique and you have a marketable unique product, you will have an easier time promoting it.
Step 7 – Make Irresistible Offers
An irresistible offer is one in which you offer a high value to cost ratio, thereby motivating your buyers into a purchase.
It’s not always a given that your excellent content and services will be accessible to all user groups. Therefore, in addition to making great content, you should keep in mind that you need to be affordable as well. If you sell your services at a markup all the time, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to stabilize your business. Therefore, strive to create irresistible offers that your audience cannot refuse. Through exciting offers and high-quality content, you can motivate your customers to purchase and invest more in your business.
Often, you will find that if you offer a lot of your content free and monetize some, you’ll end up raking in a larger audience than if all your content is behind a paywall.
The simplest ways to create irresistible offers are:
- Bundling offers – put two or three things together and sell at a lower price.
- Value-adds – throw in some extra services or products and sell them together at a better price.
- Attention-Grabbing Risk Reversal – offer guarantees and warranties. Take risks off the customer and onto yourself.
- Proper discounts – Do not undervalue your content, but rather, offer discounts that improve the perceived value of your products and services. In addition to discounts, you can provide segmented offers, early-bird discounts, and limited-time offers.
Step 8 – Build Your Community
A personal brand thrives on audience engagement and interaction. Therefore, one of your core parts of your personal branding strategy is to actively engage with your audience and work hard to build a community around your brand. In addition to building lasting business relationships, you should focus a lot of your effort on building an engagement-driven fan base.
To build an outstanding community and following for your personal brand, there are several things you can do:
- Let the community grow organically with your business. Your goal should be to build an authentic and reliable community around your brand and this can take years. Therefore, just give it time to grow and you’ll eventually get there.
- Put the right team together. Select the right people for the job and work together towards building a community around your brand. Without a trusted network of people around you, you won’t be able to grow your community sustainably.
- Involve your customers in your branding. The best way to do this is to add their reviews, comments, and other feedback into the heart of your brand. Therefore, if a new person comes across your brand, let your existing audience play the role of selling you and welcome them aboard the community.
- Strive for value-driven social media interactions. Here, your objective should be to post content which in some way or manner is helpful to your audience and adds value to their lives. If you have something worth saying, you’re certainly going to attract a larger audience who wants to listen.
Step 9 – Always Keep Adding Value for Your Customers
This drives up interaction with your brand, along with value and trust. With more content delivered more often, your clients and audience will feel catered for and will keep coming back for more. Therefore, one of the steps to create a unique personal brand is to keep adding value to your customers.
If you’ve been in the niche for a while and have been running your business for several years, it’s easy to take a laid-back approach. However, this can hurt your personal brand and your audience will quickly lose interest in your offerings. Therefore, strive to learn new skills so you can offer better or newer services for your clients. Additionally, keep your content fresh and up-to-date, leaving no room for your audience to get bored of you. Constantly adding value for your customers is the best way to work your way up to the top of a niche and cement your position there.
Without adding value for your customers, you will end up devaluing your personal brand and represent a failed personal branding strategy.
Final Words – Get Started NOW
Establishing yourself as the primary expert in your niche isn’t an overnight process. It will take continued time and effort over years to reach the point where you can claim that you’re the best in your field and have a personal brand to back up your claim. Therefore, while it takes a lot of time and effort to get to the top, it’s a massive return on investment and one you will not be regretting. Thus, our 9 steps to create a personal brand is sure to get you started on the right path.
Once you understand how to create a personal brand and personal branding importance, the only thing stopping you from getting to the top of your niche is yourself. Therefore, strive to serve your customers and focus on self-improvement.
With all that in mind, you should have everything you need to know on how to create a new personal brand.