How to build a successful personal brand as a business owner
Building a successful personal brand is an extremely valuable tool for building trust and credibility as a business owner and cultivating powerful connections for your business. In this blog, we talk you through what personal branding is, how to build a successful personal brand, what makes a successful personal brand and why it's so important for growing your business.
Everyone has a personal brand whether they choose to or not, whether you are a celebrity, influencer, business owner or employee. But are you making the most of yours? When people think of a brand, the first things that may come to mind are a logo, slogan and a distinct visual identity, whether that’s through packaging or digital outputs like social media, however, a brand is so much more than this.
A personal brand is all about your story as an individual and is separate from your business’ brand identity; it communicates your values, skills and knowledge to existing and future professional connections and prospective customers in your community.
It exists both online and offline and is unique to you and your lived experiences so far in your career as well as your personal life. Having a strong personal brand helps your target audience find out more about who you are as a person, what you stand for and ultimately why they should choose you over your competitors.
1. Define your niche
When it comes to marketing, whether that's marketing yourself or your business, targeting everyone is a waste of time and resources. Establishing your niche and specific area of expertise early on can help you build a strong brand reputation and become known as an expert in your area among your audience and connections.
Sticking to your niche and core brand messages will also make it easier for people to recognise you, as well as help you come up with content ideas more easily. If you search for your favourite A-List actor online you will likely find that they have their own niche carved out in terms of roles and genres. For example, Liam Neeson is well known for his role in the Taken movie franchise and for acting in action thriller films.
2. Maintain a consistent online presence
Maintaining a consistent online presence on your selected platforms is crucial for building brand recognition as well as spreading brand awareness to prospective customers and connections. Ensure your tone of voice and brand image are consistent everywhere you post or interact with your audience to craft a memorable identity that people will immediately associate with your brand.
Try keeping to a regular posting schedule and decide what platforms and formats you want to focus on. For example, are you going to focus on posting thought leadership articles and article reshares on LinkedIn or blogging on your website and sharing them on the platform instead? It’s best to focus on two core platforms when doing this.
3. Define your brand’s key characteristics
There is more to your personal brand than just your niche and how you earn a living. Think about what key characteristics you want to be known for and what unique perspectives you can bring to the table that nobody else can. What makes you unique?
Answer the following questions to get you started: What drives you? What causes do you care about? What tasks do you enjoy and what tasks drain you? What do you find easy/rewarding and what do you struggle with? What do you receive a lot of compliments on? If you can’t think of your strengths straight away, ask someone you work with or a family member or friend what they think.
People care about people, which includes your values, beliefs and causes you support and talk regularly about. Consider what really drives you and gives you purpose. Is there an issue that you are extremely passionate about? Then make sure you talk about it. For example, common topics of interest are sustainability, climate change, equality including women's, and disabled people’s rights and racial equality.
Certain topics will gather more interest than others, but it’s important that you remain authentic in your brand identity and what you talk about in order to attract your audience as it will become apparent that you’re not an “eco-warrior” sooner or later, and you will lose your audience’s trust. Most importantly, be sure to show off your personality through everything you do.
4. Tell your story
There is a huge difference between posting on social media and actually telling your story. Storytelling is a vital component of your personal brand and is what will make you stand out against your competitors and make your content more engaging to your target audience. At the end of the day, nobody else out there will have had the exact same journey as you, and that’s something you will want to utilise.
Effective storytelling can be done through various mediums and formats including written content such as blogs, social media posts, newsletters, case studies or videos, both short form and long form, on social media sites TikTok, Instagram or YouTube.
Video has become a particularly favoured medium for storytellers over the last few years as it gives you the power to connect with your audience on a much deeper level, as well as build brand awareness and direct traffic to your website. Data shows that people watch an average of 17 hours of online video content a week and that it's the most shareable content type, with 51% of users being more likely to share video than any other content type.
5. Create and share timely, relevant and valuable content
If you’ve never posted about your personal brand on social media before, it can seem like a really daunting task, but building a personal brand is all about confidence. A great way to start building your confidence is by reposting articles or news articles that align with your niche on social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and adding a few lines of your thoughts/perspective.
To really stand out against your competitors and increase your chances of gaining more interest and engagement from your audience, ensure your content is timely, relevant and backed up by research. Ensure you also speak like your audience and be relatable to maintain their attention. If you set yourself a goal to do this once a day or a few times a week, your confidence will start to grow and slowly but surely, your personal brand will too. Then in time, you may even feel confident enough to write your own social media posts or thought leadership posts.
If you are really stumped on what to post, gather inspiration from celebrities or influential people who have a highly visible brand and high engagement from their followers on the platform you want to post on. Remember, it’s not about copying exactly what other people are doing, as that defeats the whole purpose of having a personal brand, so use others' accounts as inspiration only.
6. Network, network, network
Now that you have identified your personal brand’s niche, values and target audience, you can use this information to network with those in similar fields to you and who may want to work with you/ become customers in the future. It’s important to note that it’s not about how many followers or connections you have on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, but real human connections and people who are actually interested in what you have to say.
A great way to start building your connections is by engaging with their content and adding meaningful and authentic engagement to their posts. This doesn’t need to be anything groundbreaking, but a few lines or a short paragraph to show you have engaged critically with their post will show that you’re interested in what they have to say. In turn, they may be more likely to take a look at your profile and see that you are aligned in a similar way and want to connect with you.
Why is having a personal brand so important?
1. Builds trust
There are several benefits to having a successful personal brand, and one of the most noteworthy is that it helps build trust. When it comes to having loyal customers or clients, trust is everything. By building your personal brand and frequently posting and telling your story, you are more likely to gain your audience’s trust than if you were to post directly from your business account.
People trust people more than they do businesses and by having a platform to showcase the person behind the business, customers will feel more connected to you and therefore be more inclined to trust you and what you’re selling.
2. Boosts brand awareness and recognition
As well as building trust, having a personal brand helps increase your brand awareness and brand recognition, allowing you to stay ahead of the competition. In today’s world of increasingly short attention spans and businesses and creators fighting for eyes on their content, it’s a must-have to be consistent as well as offer valuable, timely content if you want your audience to remember you.
Ideally, you want your brand to be on the top of your audience’s minds when they are thinking about a specific product/service or solution they require. Look at what platforms your customers are using and focus on these to make the most of your building your brand awareness and recognition.
3. It helps build new opportunities and relationships
A lot of things in business are temporary, but building long-term relationships with potential customers or business partners is paramount to ensuring the future success of your business and career. This is great for business as over time you will gain more recommendations or referrals from others that you have worked with.
4. Improves your authority
Building trust and authority go hand in hand, and you can’t improve one without the other. If you want to be seen as the expert in your field or industry, then you’ll need to do more than just be visible on social media. Search engines automatically sort through the millions of content on the web and organise which websites will appear at the top of your search results according to their authority.
If you want to establish authority offline and on social media, you’ll need a personal brand in order to do this. Define your authority according to your niche, whether that’s the B2B food industry or sustainable beauty. Well-known, authoritative and trusted brands have the power to generate more sales and increase their pricing. .
5. Grows your audience
Your personal brand opens you up to new opportunities by exposing you to new and larger audiences who may not have heard of your business or brand before. They also may be more likely to check out your business page, blog, videos or offerings if they like what you are about and the content you create, further increasing your brand awareness. As well as this, you will be more likely to grow a long-term community of engaged followers who want to hear what you have to say.
As a business owner, it’s a no-brainer to build a successful personal brand if you want to see better results for your business, from building valuable long-term business relationships and partnerships to establishing trust with your audience and building brand awareness and recognition.
To find out more about our bespoke PR services, which include managing your personal branding for you, send us an email at hello@squirrelsandbears.com