Developing a solid personal brand is an absolute must for any entrepreneur or influencer. If you’ve been trying to build a reputation for yourself or your business in your niche, you might be asking yourself – why is personal branding important?. So, today we’ll be focusing on what makes a personal brand so important and why you should focus on developing it.
If you manage to establish a solid foundation for your personal brand and continue to grow from there, you should be able to reach a larger audience and get in touch with industry business leaders. Moreover, once you establish the trust and reputation associated with a good personal brand, your reach will increase to a massive client base.
Personal branding is essentially important because it lets you achieve a prime goal all businesses strive to do – communicate properly with your customers or target audience. If your online persona, or personal brand, isn’t well-established, it makes it hard for audiences to connect and relate to you. Therefore, it’s very important as a business owner and influencer to stay up to date on the latest personal branding tips to ensure you understand the benefits of personal branding.
Today, we’ll be taking a detailed look at the main reasons you should work on developing your personal brand and what makes personal branding so important. At the end of it all, you should come out with the motivation to start developing your personal brand.
What is a Personal Brand – Let’s Dig Deep
Before jumping into why personal branding is important, let’s take a moment to understand what is personal branding and look at some personal branding tips.
To give a concrete definition, a personal brand is a combination of traits, attitudes, values, and beliefs you actively present to your audience with the greater goal of building trust, reputation, and partnerships. Often, people associate personal brands with influencers, however, the scope of a personal brand ranges from entrepreneurs to large-scale businesses. That is, no matter the size of your organization or business, developing and maintaining a personal brand is well within your interests if you wish to grow. Therefore, it goes without saying, effectively investing time and effort into personal branding is a good way to foster growth, both on a personal and business level.
The goal of establishing a personal brand is to provide your target audience with a good representation of yourself or your business. As a result of this, other businesses are more likely to get into deals with you and your audience will be able to connect with you on a deeper level. As you continue to spread a message that resonates with your target audience, you will quickly see that your personal brand has allowed you to extend your reach to a massive customer base. Therefore, greater outreach is one of the major benefits of personal branding.
Related Article: What is Personal Branding? 5 Examples of Personal Branding Success
How Do You Tell a Good Personal Brand Apart from A Bad One – Handling Your Personal Brand Properly?
With continued effort into personal branding, you should be able to establish a brand that helps your audience visualize you as someone they know personally – even if they have never met you personally or talked directly with you. That is, your personal branding efforts should result in a feeling of familiarity from your audience and potential business partners. Therefore, let them “know” you before they even get a chance to know you. As abstract as that sounds, that is the main goal of personal branding and is the key to building lasting business relationships. As a result, this serves as one of the biggest ways to tell a good personal brand from a bad one and is why personal branding matters so much when connecting with your audience.
What Are the Things You Need to Remember When Developing Your Personal Brand?
Before divining into personal branding, you should spend some time as an onlooker and think from the perspective of your target audience. Doing so allows you to create a relatable personal brand while staying in touch with what you want to achieve as a business. Therefore, once you start thinking from the mindset of your customer or audience, you can envision messages and other important nuances about your personal brand that you can work on and improve.
Finally, if you take it from the perspective of an audience you are more likely to go through an authentic personal branding process which helps ensure long-term loyalty, acceptance, and outreach.
What Are the Core Concepts in Personal Branding?
There are some key aspects you need to pay special attention to when developing your personal brand. Forgetting to take special care of these points will nullify any progress you make with your personal brand. Therefore, to have a glance at everything you need to remember when you work on personal branding here’s a list:
- Aim to stay authentic and genuine
- Stick close to your core beliefs and highlight them as values of your brand
- Be consistent throughout all your social outlets
- Highlight the problems you are actively trying to solve and why they are important
- Establish yourself as the prime expert in your niche
Want to create a Personal Brand? We have a step by step guide on how to create a personal brand.
10 Reasons to Focus on Your Personal Brand
Now that you know what a personal brand is and what it entails, here are the top ten reasons you should focus time and effort on your personal brand. This should give you a good idea of why personal branding matters and thereby allow you to apply best practices when it comes to personal branding and reaping the benefits of personal branding.
- Building a Large Client Base – Attract More Clients with A Good Personal Brand
- Freedom – Preserve Your Reputation and Experiment with Your Career
- Personal Branding Fosters Confidence
- Greater Opportunities – how personal branding allows you to grow as a business and a person
- Network Growth – how personal branding plays into organic business growth
- Gain Customers’ Trust – why personal branding matters when building trust and relationships
- Prove Your Authenticity and Work Through Your Personal Brand
- Get Distinguished – standing out from the crowd
- Reputation and Fame – Solidifying yourself as a leader in your niche through a personal brand
- Polish Skills at Every Step – Build Skills and Confidence with Your Personal Brand
1. Building a Large Client Base – Attract More Clients with A Good Personal Brand
If you manage to develop a proper personal brand, you will undoubtedly be able to attract more clients to your business. This is where ensuring that you are both relatable and authentic comes into play. Rather than playing a persona to befit the masses, focus on highlighting what makes you an individual, and highlight your qualities through your personal brand.
Authenticity is particularly important here as it’s extremely tiring for someone to hold up a fake image for a long time, and as you continue to grow and interact with a larger audience or business partners, whatever you’re hiding will start to come through the cracks. Therefore, right from the start, stay genuine, and avoid going through the trouble of putting up an image.
Attracting more clients also brings in a competitive advantage over other businesses. With a strong personal brand that resounds with your target clientele, more people will reach out to you as opposed to other businesses that serve the same niche. Therefore, unsurprisingly, if you have a personal brand that stands out from the rest of the crowd, you’ll bring in more clients and reach a larger audience.
Finally, putting yourself out there shows your customers that you are someone they can rely on with your brand. Without active effort into maintaining your personal brand, you run the risk of losing customers and clients.
Therefore, in terms of a client base, these are the benefits of personal branding:
- Larger client base and reach
- Client trust and recognition
- Authenticity and reliability through your services and interactions
2. Freedom – Preserve Your Reputation and Experiment with Your Career
With a well-established personal brand under your belt, you can get the freedom to experiment more with your career and business ventures. Freedom to experiment is one of the great benefits of personal branding. Additionally, it’s more liberating as well. For instance, if you actively engage with your audience, there is a very high chance you’ll come across disagreements and naysayers. With an established personal brand, you leave little room for people to form their own baseless opinions about you or your business but rather serve up a good reference point – that is your personal brand. And so, personal branding allows you to take control of how people perceive your business and its image.
Therefore, as a concrete way to highlight why personal branding is important, people often use the example of career freedom.
3. Personal Branding Fosters Confidence
Developing a personal brand for yourself or your business serves as a massive confidence boost as well as a morale boost. This is partly due to the struggles of going through the trouble of building a personal brand. Therefore, as you work through the hurdles of developing a personal brand, learn every lesson, and use that to build confidence within yourself and the business.
The best way to gain confidence when building your personal brand is by defining what the personal brand should be. That is if you know what your brand stands for and values, you can confidently stand by decisions you make for yourself and the business. Therefore, when you make your mind up to start a personal brand, you need to set out a specific set of attributes about your business.
To sum up, for personal and business growth, you need to define yourself. By going through the journey of personal branding, you can find those answers, affirm yourself, and build confidence.
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4. Greater Opportunities – how personal branding allows you to grow as a business and a person
An accessible personal brand dramatically increases your reach on your audience and clients. More importantly, it opens your world of opportunities. With a personal brand, you are more likely to get access to speaking engagements, broader networking opportunities, promotional offers, partnerships, and clients.
A personal brand is what serves as the building block for your personal growth, and your company’s growth. With better opportunities and bigger challenges down the line, you’ll be forced to grow and adapt and thereby improve your skillset along the way.
Therefore, a personal brand is important because it empowers you with greater opportunities which in turn provides multiple chances for you to grow yourself and your business. With these in mind, strive to create a good personal brand that leads to opportunities that force you to grow and improve.
5. Network Growth – how personal branding plays into organic business growth
Having a personal brand to present is a great way to nurture organic network growth. Never underestimate the power of “word-of-mouth”. In this case, if your audience or clients believe in what you’re selling and doing, chances are they’re going to mention you some time to people they know. From there, that person might want to look you up and get a feel for what your brand stands for. Having a personal brand set up for this allows them to quickly establish an image of you and relate to your business while making it easily accessible for others to share and learn.
The end goal here is to ensure that, while your primary contacts will talk about you to their business partners, having a solid online brand to look at is what will set you apart from others and helps the network grow organically. After all, having something to look at when you search up a business or a name is the perfect way to let them get in touch with you and potentially strike business deals.
Therefore, another reason why personal branding is important is it allows you to grow your network naturally and have a greater reach than you would without a personal brand associated with your name or business.
6. Gain Customers’ Trust – why personal branding matters when building trust and relationships
Sharing your values through your brand and staying true to them is an excellent way to build trust with customers. Rather than word of mouth, they can rely on what you do when making a judgment call on whether to trust you. Therefore, having a personal brand greatly impacts the trust of your customers.
You should not underestimate the importance of trust in the context of your business. As an entrepreneur, building lasting relationships with trusted clients is the key to success. Therefore, through a personal brand that highlights your skills, portfolio, values, and actions which corroborate those actions to build trust with investors, business partners, clients, and customers are arguable of the best ways to build trust. If you know who you’re dealing with, you’ll have a better time closing deals or making new deals. And that’s the mindset potential clients will have when you have a personal brand associated with your name or business.
Share your story, be cognizant of the things you do, and strive to build trust and long-lasting relationships with great clients. As down the road, client trust is what will keep your business running, even through tough times.
7. Prove Your Authenticity and Work Through Your Personal Brand
It’s hard to believe someone if they do not have proof of work. The biggest advantage that comes with a personal brand, and therefore the main reason to develop one, is the power to authenticate your claims and prove to your clients that you are what you say you are. This is also why personal branding is important for your business.
Through a personal brand, you will actively engage with your audience, develop and work on your skills, prove your skills, and continue to build an authentic portfolio to share with the world. When potential customers or business partners look you up, they’ll be greeted with a lot of information about your accomplishments, previous dealings, and way of work. This not only helps seed trust into them but also allows them to witness for themselves what you’re capable of and what you’re doing.
While selling your skills, it’s important to ensure that you do not end up overselling yourself. If you overcommit to projects or inflate other skills, there’s a very high chance you’ll eventually fall short and be labeled as a fraud, thereby ruining all your attempts to remain authentic.
Your personal brand statement is an important factor. Here are the steps to create a crisp personal brand statement.
8. Get Distinguished – standing out from the crowd
What’s the best way to stand out from the crowd and highlight your skills and product? – the answer is to simply have a reliable personal brand your audience can refer to. When your clients are looking for the skillset you offer, and if the first result they get when they look up the services you provide is you, you can consider yourself a success in personal branding. Therefore, it’s vitally important to have a personal brand to help your customers distinguish you from the rest of the pack.
Being a distinguished brand also allows you to highlight:
- Commitment to clients
- Professionals skill sets
- Ability to cater to the needs of that niche
9. Reputation and Fame – Solidifying yourself as a leader in your niche through a personal brand
A personal brand goes a long way to establish your reputation and particularly your fame. If you have a long list of clients who have been happy with your work in the past, make sure to consult with them and add them to the list of satisfied clients under your personal brand. When new clients look you up, they’ll see that you are a reputable and trusted company they can rely on. And so, they are more likely to approach you with business propositions.
Another great aspect of a personal brand is fame. With a bigger following and greater reach through a personal brand, your target audience can relate to and recommend, you will quickly grow in fame as the best in your niche. As a concrete example, if you’re a marketing expert and you have a large fan base, both in terms of audience and satisfied clients, it’s likely that more people will come to you for your marketing expertise.
10. Polish Skills at Every Step – Build Skills and Confidence with Your Personal Brand
Having a personal brand ensures that you always strive for personal and professional growth. Unless you polish your skills every step of the way and continue to grow, you will quickly fall out of touch and lose to your competition. While polishing your skills it’s important to define your motivations for those skills. Therefore, another reason why personal branding is important, is that it allows you to build confidence through skills and affirming your goals. Some of the most important facts you should reassure yourself with when developing your personal brand includes:
- Values – you need the identify the values you and your business stand for
- Priorities – once you get your values and beliefs in order, you need to prioritize how you’re going to bring them to life
- Align your strengths with your values
- Be vulnerable and tell the truth about your weaknesses
Going through these steps solidifies what you and your brand stand for. Therefore, all of this serves as a great confidence-building exercise. Everything about your businesses’ values and beliefs is reinforced through the process of building a personal brand. And so, when you interact with clients or your audience, you can easily stand by what you’ve already started and established in your personal brand. This in turn ensures that you are more confident in your actions, and your business is purposeful. Finally, it helps your attempts at polishing and improving your skills and services more deliberate and whole-hearted.
Conclusion
Is personal branding important? Yes, it’s definitely important. Personal branding serves as the foundation on which your business can grow. Moreover, it serves as the platform where you actively challenge and improve yourself to grow as well. Therefore, as you reap the benefits of personal branding, you will quickly come to terms with why it’s so important.
Remember, a personal brand goes beyond vanity and self-promotion. Its purpose is to serve to connect with your audience and clients and to provide them with a rich source of information about you. With a personal brand in place, new clients will be more likely to engage with you, offer contracts, and conduct business with you. Get the benefits of personal branding to help your business grow. It’s simply a matter of trust. The more you expose through your personal brand and market about your skills, beliefs, and values, the more likely you are to reach a wider audience and gain their trust.
In addition to trust and belief, a personal brand enables you to stay consistent with your business and actions. You’re always providing your customers with a service they can rely on. As you continue with your journey of developing your personal brand, you will come across many more benefits of personal branding. And so, as you learn more personal branding tips, you will get a better understanding of why personal branding is important.