If you don’t have a captivating personal brand statement to go with your personal brand, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the crowd. So, how to create a personal brand statement?
A personal brand is essentially a catchphrase you tag with your brand that states your expertise or passion in a single succinct statement. This allows your clients and audience to get a quick look at what your brand is about and help recognize you as well. In many cases, a personal brand statement works just like a logo – it offers recognizable glance value for your brand. Therefore, you will find that a personal brand paired with a well-designed logo sends a clear message to all clients and readers. More importantly, a great personal brand statement makes your brand memorable. And so, with a catchy personal brand statement, you can ingrain yourself in the minds of your customers and clients.
A lot goes into developing your personal brand and a fundamental element is the personal brand statement. The best brands in their niche have a captivating personal brand statement that says something about their values and beliefs. Therefore, when writing your own catchy personal brand statement, you need to ensure it shows off who you are and what you can do for your clients.
Today, we’ll be looking at why you need a personal brand statement, how to create a personal brand statement and some catchy personal brand statement examples from world-renowned personal brands.
Why Do You Need a Personal Brand Statement?
To provide a way for people to understand what you do from the get-go, you need a personal brand statement. A poor personal brand statement creates confusion rather than communicating to your audience about what your brand excels at, and what you have to offer. With the right personal brand statement, you can leave a lasting impression on someone. From that impression, they might someday come back as a customer. You will often find the best examples of personal brand statements offer up a clear image of the brand itself, and communicate purpose.
To stand out in your niche, a personal brand with a catchy personal brand statement is essential. If you’re just another brand with nothing to set you apart from the others, you’ll be competing with the entire market – a position you don’t want to be in. Therefore, to boost your position in the market and help yourself stand out, you need a personal brand statement. To do this, you need to learn how to write a personal brand statement. And the best way to learn is to look at personal brand statement examples, which we’ll dive into a bit later.
A personal brand statement also helps you focus. If you want a sizable market share, you should focus on a specific element of your niche, master it, and advertise it. For instance, in the world of web design, if you’re a master of UX design, make sure your personal brand reflects that skill and your personal focuses on that skill. Without focus and purpose, it’s hard to stand out from other brands catering to the same niche. As you’ll often see in the best examples of personal brand statements, they communicate a clear goal to the audience – if you need something, we can provide it. So how do you create a personal brand statement?
Here are 10 Reasons Why You Should Go For Personal Branding in today’s era.
4 Steps to Create a Crisp Personal Brand Statement
Next, let’s get into the gritty details of creating your personal brand statement and how to write a personal brand statement.
The best thing to do when creating your own crisp personal brand statement is to highlight your unique selling proposition. Therefore, if you use the right words in conjunction with a bold statement, you’ll end up creating a great brand statement. The key here is to keep your target audience in mind, highlight your specialties or most valuable skills, honesty, and clarity. Let’s dive into how to write a personal brand statement.
- Step 1 – Determine Your Target Audience
- Step 2 – Write Down Your Specialties
- Step 3 – Be Honest Towards Your Audience
- Step 4 – Make it Short and Crunchy
Step 1 – Determine Your Target Audience
When creating your personal brand, you must’ve had a target audience in mind to cater to. That audience comes back into play here when crafting your personal brand statement. Therefore, when crafting your personal brand statement, keep your target audience in mind and ensure you address them either directly, or indirectly, in your statement. Later, when we look at the best examples of personal brand statements, one thing they all have in common is that they have a target audience in mind and addresses that audience. As a result of this, the audience is drawn into the brand and is encouraged to learn more about the brand.
Once you’ve determined your audience, you can craft a personal brand statement. Usually, target a specific group of people, be it in terms of age or industry. Once that’s out of the way you can craft a good message for that audience. How does this help? This allows you to identify what would be most beneficial for your audience and focus on that main aspect. Therefore, try to stay focused and adamant about the sector of the market you are aiming for. If you spread yourself out too much, you will end up with a vague personal brand statement without clear goals.
Step 2 – Write Down Your Specialties
Start by jotting down everything about yourself which you think is special, or is valuable to your clients. From there, narrow it down to specific qualities or skills which cater to the needs of the people in your niche. Here, you’re looking for your strengths, areas where you have a lot of experience, or just some personal character traits, you’re proud of and strongly believe will add value to your brand. For example, if you are a web designer, technical skills such as CSS, SASS, and JavaScript will draw in customers. In addition to this, personal skills such as good design sense and creative experience will add a lot of value to your brand. From there, you can choose to highlight a single skill within your personal brand statement and market it as the defining quality of your business. If you have a large skillet, make sure to highlight it can add value to your client’s business. To summarize into key points:
- Jot down your best skills
- Select specific skills or a unique selling point
- Select a general category you can cater to with those skills
- Communicate both aspects of your personal brand statement
Identifying your specialties plays a key role in answering ‘how to write a personal brand statement’.
Step 3 – Be Honest Towards Your Audience
When writing down your skills, it’s important to ensure you’re honest with yourself and your audience. You don’t want to oversell yourself and let down your clients when you can’t live up to expectations. With that in mind, ensure you understand the scope of the problem you want to solve and the skills you bring to the table to solve that problem. The other thing to keep in mind is that you are honest with your audience in terms of what your brand offers. However, be sure to highlight your unique selling proposition excellently. With these two things in mind, you are on your way to an excellent personal brand statement. Never claim to be more than what you are and always focus on what you can provide.
One other point is, don’t write your aspirations in your personal brand statement. Rather than focusing on what you will become one day, try to jot down what you can provide your clients with now. Your personal brand statement should inspire your reader and not scare them away based on fancy titles or extraordinary claims.
Step 4 – Make it Short and Crunchy
While it’s not an absolute rule, shorter personal brand statements tend to leave a lasting impact. Avoid using too many technical words in your personal brand statement – the best ones make their message clear with everyday words most of the audience can understand. Ideally, you want a child to be able to comprehend everything your brand is about. Moreover, it should be short and crunchy enough that, when asked about at a dinner party, you can get away with expressing everything your business stands for by just telling your personal brand statement. If you can sell yourself to your friends using your personal brand statements, interested clients are just a read away.
In addition to being heavy with intent and meaning, the statement needs to be sufficiently short. That is, no more than a sentence should ever be used to describe your qualities and professional focus. Some rare cases might force you to use two sentences, but for the most part, one is more than enough.
Your brand statement should be memorable. If you can nail down a short and impactful personal brand statement you’ve found yourself the answer to “how to create a personal brand statement”.
We’ve Created step-by-step guide on How to Create a Personal Brand for beginners.
8 Examples of Successful Personal Brands With Excellent Statements
When trying to figure out how to create a personal brand statement, the optimal place to start is by looking at the best examples of personal brand statements. Therefore, to further our understanding of how to write a personal brand statement, here are some famous examples.
1. Neil Patel (“Do you want more traffic?”)
With a simple question, Neil Patel makes a “statement”. With this, Neil knows that every website and business out there wants to organically generate more traffic – and he knows how to make that happen.
Neil Patel is one of the world’s leading marketing strategies and experts and is world-renowned for his traffic generation and SEO capabilities. While his personal brand statement is a simple question, it sparks intrigue and interest from the reader. From there he proceeds to cement himself as the leading expert you need to make your business grow. Therefore, although a simple question, it’s very good at captivating the reader.
The key takeaways when learning how to create a personal brand statement from Neil’s statement is that he highlights what he can do to add value to your business and thereby starts with a leading question. A question, HE is the answer to. In addition to making it clear about what he does, his statement also reflects some of the important aspects often found in the best personal brand statement examples – clarity, purpose, intrigue, and command.
2. Aron Orendorff (“Saving the world from bad content”)
Aron’s statement is a bold claim for sure, but it also engages the reader. Therefore, when trying to learn how to create a personal brand, you should aim for something just as daring.
Aron is an expert when it comes to content and has worked with some of the most reputed businesses. With his personal brand statement, Aron demonstrates a key understanding of his target audience and ensures to market his skills like that. Aron is an expert in the field of business to business strategies and content creation. What does he offer? He can improve traffic, get qualified leads, and improve scalability for your business. Therefore, with a strong skill set to back up his claims, he can construct a commanding personal brand statement, claiming that he can rid the world of bad content. This serves as one of the better personal brand statement examples of making a bold and extraordinary claim fits with the brand.
3. Sujan Patel (“I build and grow Saas Companies”)
Sujan Patel is an entrepreneur hungry for growth – and his personal brand statement makes this very clear. Very few can back up their marketing claims with promising results. Sujan speaks for himself when it comes to marketing and appealing to other entrepreneurs – if you want to grow, I’m the person you need to talk to. Therefore, Sujan’s statements serve as another great example for those learning how to create a personal brand statement – define what you can do within your personal brand statement.
He is direct and keeps it simple with his brand statement while hinting at what he’s the best at, in this case, SAAS companies. Therefore, almost immediately, if you’re the owner of a software company that offers SAAS, you can quickly latch onto Sujan as the man you need to grow your company.
Although he is boldly declaring that he grows businesses, you can rest assured knowing Sujan can back the talk. Therefore, Sujan takes an authoritative stance with his personal brand statement. His claims go beyond just stating he can help you grow your company – he IS the reason your company will grow. This serves as an eye-catching and intriguing experience for any new reader.
Altogether, his personal brand statement says a lot about him – expertise, credibility, confidence, reliability, and succinctness. Not only should you be confident in your claims, but you also need to be able to back them up as well.
Related Article: What is Personal Branding? 5 Examples of Personal Branding Success
4. Kaleem Sajid (“Quality and Responsibility”)
Kaleem makes it clear with his personal brand statement that he’s someone who excels in delivering high-quality work, responsibly.
Kaleem is an expert in building professional websites, developing modern solutions for large MNCs and smaller companies.
Therefore, as an example of a personal branding statement, Kaleem teaches us to deliver a promise to the audience through a personal branding statement. When creating your personal brand statement, it’s important that you keep in mind the promises you make to your audience, clients, and readers. Unless you deliver on your word, you’ll quickly lose clients and your business will come crashing down.
When learning how to create your personal brand statement, learn from examples that exemplify the responsibility and commitment associated with a personal brand statement. It’s a promise to your clients that they can trust you with their work and needs, and that you’re the best at what you do. High quality work and responsibility should be the driving factors behind your personal brand statement.
5. Thomas Frank (“Become a better student”)
Thomas Frank – the founder of College Info Geek has designed his business model around helping students. However, what he ensures to highlight is that we’re all students. Therefore, he goes on to add to his front-liner, that his advice will help you even if you’re not a college student.
The learning techniques and other tidbits he shares throughout his website and videos are helpful for anyone who wants to be productive – not just college students. And so, in Thomas’s case, the target audience is clear, and the message is clear. Follow Thomas’s advice, and you’ll become a better student.
For those learning how to create a personal brand statement, Thomas Frank’s personal brand statement serves as one of the better personal brand examples wherein you get a clear sense of audience. This is fundamental in creating an effective personal brand statement and so it’s essential to identify your audience early on.
6. Mari Smith (“Achieve social media mastery”)
Mari Smith shows good use of powerful words in her personal branding statement. She could have easily said, “I help you get better in social media”. But she knows the power of words – and so chooses to offer her audience social media “mastery”. Finding the rights words to use in your personal branding statement will define how much of an impact it will have on your audience is a big step in learning how to create a personal brand statement.
Given Mari’s experience, she could have easily stated that she would turn you into an expert or professional in social media. However, with the right words, she’s turning you into a master – and that’s where you know you have a personal branding statement which leaves an impact on the reader.
Mari teaches us a crucial part of personal branding – choosing the right words to leave a lasting impact on your audience and is therefore an important example in our listing of personal brand statement examples.
7. Carol Tice (“Practical Help for Hungry Writers”)
Right off the bat, Carol Tice makes it clear who she wants to help and the kind of help she’s providing. With her experience and expertise, she intends to help other freelance writers and guide them on as they start their own entrepreneurship careers. Moreover, she gives solid advice on how to write better and fosters the passions of a writer.
Each word in her personal brand statement serves the purpose of conveying his personal brand’s intention. She makes her audience clear and anyone from the writing community is immediately drawn in to see what she has to offer. And before looking any further, they immediately get their answer from the brand statement itself – she offers practical and actionable writing advice which can add immediate value to their writing careers.
8. Adam Cobb (“Move well, eat well, think well”)
Adam’s statement is simple and to the point. From Adam’s personal brand statement, you immediately know he’s going to sell you something related to personal well-being and health.
Adam Cobb is a reputed fitness and nutrition instructor, or more accurately fitness coach. He aims to improve lives through better eating, better exercise, and therefore better thinking. Therefore, his personal branding statement takes all of that and sums it up into one easy to digest statement. This gives us a lesson on how important it is to be concise and Adam does a great job here. If you can succinctly summarize everything you do and offer within your personal brand statement you can come up with a powerful brand statement.
Although the intended audience in Adam’s statement isn’t stated explicitly, it is heavily implied. Therefore, when writing your personal brand statement, a good place to start would to be ask yourself, “how am I helping” and “how”. From there, once you have your statement, you can chop off additional bits which don’t take away from the meaning of the message but only noise.
Final Words – Get Started NOW
You’ve seen great examples and the steps to creating a personal brand statement – now it’s your turn to step out there and develop your own catchy statement.
We’ve discussed eight of the best examples of personal brand statements. From here, we see that personal brand statements vary by a lot. That is, some are simple and others are more involved. However, they all have one thing in common – they get the point across what the clients and audience can expect from the brand. Therefore, if you keep that fundamental thing in mind when crafting your own personal brand statement, you will have an excellent one. Remember to infuse your catchy personal brand statement with your traits.
There is no single best way to craft your personal brand statement – it’s not a one size fits all. You should always seek to ensure your personality shines through along with the key message of your brand. In addition to the audience, your personal brand statement should resonate with you and the members of your team. Take ample time to develop your personal brand statement and focus on the inspiration of your personal brand statement.