Businesses create vision and mission statements. Creating a personal brand begins much the same way with creating a personal vision.
Personal Branding is the process of developing a “mark or uniqueness” that is created around your name or your career. You use this “mark and uniqueness” to express and communicate your skills, personality, and values.
We all have the ability to be a brand and cultivate our power to stand out and be unique. This uniqueness draws people to our product, our services, or even just our message. Your personal brand should be about who you are and what you have to offer.
Your life’s vision should include how you see yourself in 10, 20 and even 50 years. Consider the elements in life that would make you happy—a family, a beach house, a challenging corporate job?
Why Personal Brands are for everyone
Personal brands should be important to everyone. Personal brands are not only for the entrepreneur that owns their own business. It is the secret ingredient that can make you stand out of a stack of resumes.
Developing your personal brand is the proactive way of managing your life conscientiously with commitment to achieving an overall vision of who you are and would want to be in the marketplace.
A strong personal brand will impact your ability to get the right jobs, promotions, and increase your ability to attract talent and capital. So, let’s look at these tips that can help you in creating your own personal brand:
1. Identify Your Uniqueness and Your Strengths
Think about the characteristics and strengths you’ve got. If you are stuck thinking about that “one thing” that everyone says you rock at. If you’re still stuck, ask others if you don’t know.
2. Own a Place or Platform:
If you are going to have a personal brand you will need a platform like website, group or sphere of influence. Your platform must be the type that you have total control over. You will also need social media accounts that represent your brand. You will use these platforms to share the three (3) powerful ingredients of branding – Be seen, Be Heard and Create an Enduring Experience.
3. Master Your Art.
Once you’ve identified your uniqueness and strengths, perfect them.Learn all that you can and become the expert in that area. You can never stop learning. Read, absorb, and teach.
4. Share Your Knowledge
It’s not enough to learn it; you have to communicate it currently, consistently and share your knowledge by helping others. Do this through videos, social media, and writing both online and offline. This is where you prove you know your stuff and gain exposure from doing so. Use every available space to communicate and share who you are.
5. Be Yourself – Persona Branding
Find your own style. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing and just follow the crowd. Use your style and uniqueness to attract the jobs and clientele that you desire. Find your own style and create a new set of footprints for others to follow in. Do what you love to do with fun.
6. Identify Your Values and Set Your Priorities
It’s important to have a clear picture of your personal and professional goals, both short and long term. This will help you to not only identify the most important things to spend your time on but will also have something to align new projects with. Use your values and priorities as a compass that guides you both in action and your decision-making process.
The Bottom Line
Use these exercises to create a strong personal brand persona that you can always refer to when it comes to creating materials that support your brand.
The need for a personal brand will continue to increase. It’s the one thing that no one can take away from you and it can follow you throughout your career. It’s a leadership requirement that lets people know who you are and what you stand for.
Aruc Limited is brand strategy consultancy that can help define and align your brand strategy with communication activities to maximize value.
Through our brand positioning consulting services, we work with clients to define, differentiate and position brands to maximize customer relevance and competitive differentiation. We then identify specific brand action plans, including communication objectives, strategies and plans, delivered across the many points of brand contact to improve positioning appeal.
Aruc Limited Brand Positioning Approach
· An internal and external brand audit is conducted by our branding consultants to confirm the current image and generate potential identity and positioning platforms
· Focused ideation is then used to create potential benefit-based solutions for delivering on the customer requirements
· Our brand consultants then develop alternative positioning concepts which are then optimized with customers in “real time,” to maximize relevancy and differentiation
· Brand action plans are then developed to identify clear, specific action steps for bottom-line impact.
© Aruc Limited – richanyanwu@gmail.com
