Unlock the secrets to building, growing, and elevating your personal brand strategy with this comprehensive guide.
Learn proven strategies to enhance your online presence, expand your influence, and achieve lasting success.
IE 412: Mastering Personal Brand Strategy: How to Build, Grow, and Elevate Your Brand Identity
Understanding the Basics of Personal Branding
What is a Personal Brand?
Personal brand is the combination of your skills, experience, and personality.
Many of you have heard me talk about how important your positioning is to your overall business.
I speak largely about this in my book, Influencer Entrepreneurs: The Four Step Framework to Building Your Audience, Growing Your Business and Making Money Online.
It is part of my four step framework.
The very first part of this is your positioning, understanding how you are different, why people would want to come to you over someone else that’s talking about probably the same topic.
It’s that personal brand connection that people are going to make to you so that you are the one that stands out for them.
You want people to continually come to you because of your brand authenticity.
It is going to provide you with an opportunity to stand out in a competitive industry, in a niche that we may see as saturated.
You want to be able to have that personal brand strategy in place so that people can trust you and will refer you, to their friends, families, and others because they see you as the expert in that industry.
Why Personal Brand Strategy is Important
When we’re talking about a personal brand strategy, there has to be an importance that you place on your personal brand because of today’s digital age.
Everything that we see that is out there, whether it is a social media platform, podcast, blog content or YouTube, you have to have that personal connection to your business and it needs to come across when you are creating your content so that your audience can actually feel a connection with you.
No longer can we hide behind logos and expect that there is no unique value proposition that we are offering for our business.
Our audience needs to feel a connection with us and in order for that to happen, you have to have an effective personal brand strategy that can help you stand out, grow your influence and actually achieve long term success because it’s an audience that is going to continue to come back to you.
Building Your Personal Brand Identity
Identify Your Core Values and Strengths
How do we go about building your personal brand identity?
There’s a couple steps that we need to take for this.
The first step is that you need to identify your core values and strengths.
You have to be able to understand and be able to articulate your unique strengths.
What is it that you are providing your audience with that no one else is going to be able to do the way that you are able to do it?
You have to be able to give them ways that they can see your skills, your passion, and your expertise.
Many of you may have heard me talk about the fact that I’m a former inner city school district teacher.
This is how I introduce myself.
It is also one of my greatest skills that I have, is that I am an educator through and through with a master’s in education and literacy.
I understand how to teach anyone how to do something because I have this unique set of skills.
Being able to show that to my audience gives them an opportunity to connect with my personal brand and show.
My strengths, as well as where my core values lie, because you know, if I was a teacher in the inner city, I obviously love to be able to work with those that are in need.
Therefore working with female entrepreneurs that are small business owners is only an obvious next connection and why I after leaving the teaching industry, I decided that this was my calling.
You also, when you are looking to build your personal brand identity,
Define Your Target Audience
Your second step is to make sure that you are defining your target audience.
Who are you ideally looking to work with?
This is where we often talk about the fact that you don’t want to go after that red ocean.
You want to find a blue ocean.
Where you are specifically in on who the right people are for you so that you’re not trying to capture everyone.
You’re niching down to the perfect little big pumpkin that is ideally your person and who you would want to work with.
You do this because it gives an opportunity for your unique personality value proposition to actually resonate with your audience based on your messaging.
They are going to find ways to connect with what you are offering because they feel that you are speaking directly to them.
It’s so important to make sure that you define that target audience.
Craft Your Brand Message
The third step is going to be to craft your brand message.
You have to be able to create consistent and authentic content that is going to communicate your value.
You are going to provide them with content that shows that you are able to solve the problems that they have, that you understand those problems and have a solution that you are going to be able to provide them with.
This is going to be so important in the way that you give them your key messaging elements.
Where are you talking about your personal stories, your testimonials of those that you have helped, the tone in which you talk to them?
Are you speaking to them as an educator?
Are you speaking to them as an advocate?
What does that look like when you are creating your content?
These are all important ways that you can craft your brand message.
Establish Your Digital Presence
The fourth important step in building your personal brand identity is to establish your digital presence.
You have to make sure that you are choosing the right platforms for your audience.
Now when I say platforms, I’m not specifically talking social media.
What should come first and foremost are the things that you are going to own.
Your website and where you are going to be creating your initial content.
Many of you have heard me talk about the fact that you should be repurposing your content.
If you’re going to start with a podcast, make sure that you are taking that podcast and creating it into a blog post.
That you then send an email to your email list.
Your subscribers with that content.
All of this should be ways in which you know that your audience is looking for that content.
For example, I know that my audience is podcast listeners but I also know that part of my audience wants to read and click so I’m making sure that I’m repurposing it for both types of my audience, as well as providing an opportunity to be found through other podcast listeners and providing an opportunity to be found via Google with my audience.
Taking SEO into importance when I’m creating a blog post, as well as making sure of course that I’m doing the keyword research before I create that content.
If you’re going to start with video, maybe you’re going to start with YouTube, repurpose that content.
Make sure it is on a platform that you own.
Another important detail in making sure that you establish a digital presence in the platform that you choose is you have to make sure that you are creating an email list.
Where are you providing your people a chance to get an onto your list?
What are you giving them in exchange for their email?
What platform are you using in order to do that?
Then when we take a look at social media, I want you to really think about where is your audience.
Are they on Pinterest?
Are they looking at Instagram?
Are they on LinkedIn?
Are they on TikTok?
You do not need to be everywhere.
I am giving you permission to choose the right platform for your audience.
If your audience is in their 50s and older, You’re not going on TikTok.
Why would you spend time there?
You’re not there looking for their answers to their problems.
They are potentially on Facebook or LinkedIn or listening to podcasts.
You want to make sure that you are choosing the proper platform for your audience.
Growing and Promoting Your Personal Brand
Leverage Content Creation
We need to think about how we are going to be able to grow and promote that piece of personal brand.
First we want to make sure that we are able to leverage the content creation that we are putting out there.
When you are creating that content, you are making sure again that you are solving the problem for your audience so that it can reflect your expertise.
You also want to make sure that when you are leveraging that content, that you are consistent.
You don’t want to drop a video once every three months.
If that’s where you’re consistently creating the content, you have to be consistent with it.
Pick one platform to which you are going to deliver.
Whether it’s going to be that blog post, it’s going to be a podcast, or it’s going to be potentially a video, so YouTube.
You need to be producing content at least once a week.
This goes also with making sure that you’re continuing to engage your email list.
You have to be emailing your list at a minimum of once a week.
In order to stay top of mind and relevant to them.
Network and Collaborate
Other ways that you can grow and promote your personal brand are going to be to network and collaborate.
We’ve talked about this quite a bit.
Different ways that you can collaborate with others that have a similar niche or similar audience to you.
That would potentially find your content valuable to their audience.
There’s opportunities for you to do podcast interviews, for you to do a list swap, to do a summit, or a giveaway.
All of these are great ways to connect and collaborate with others, so that you have the opportunity to be able to get in front of that audience consistently.
Engage with Your Audience
You also want to make sure that you engage with your audience.
It is so important that when you are looking to have an audience that you are continually engaging with them and showing them ways in which they can interact with you.
So whether you are providing them an opportunity to engage with you on the DMs, on Instagram, or through your email list by hitting reply, or telling them to leave a rating and review on your podcasting app, telling you the, their favorite episode and their biggest takeaway.
These are all ways that you are interacting with your audience and understanding their needs.
Elevating Your Personal Brand for Long-Term Success
Evolve with Industry Trends
The last piece of this once we have built this personal brand strategy is to make sure that we are taking our personal brand and looking for long term success.
When we are doing this we want to make sure that first of all we are evolving with the industry trends.
Let’s say for example on Instagram and now all of a sudden they’re pushing out reels in a certain format.
You want to make sure that you are continuing to do that.
You again also want to make sure that when you are doing this that you are finding a way to get them onto your email list so that you can continually engage with them.
Seek Feedback and Continuous Improvement
You also want to make sure that you are seeking feedback, feedback and continuous improvement.
This goes for your website as well.
I just spent last week doing a deep cleaning on my website.
I went through every single page of my website to make sure that the messaging was meant for that ideal person so that we could see, you could all see yourselves in the copy that I was creating for you.
So that you could see I am not someone that is a blogging coach specifically that is looking to help you grow your page views.
That’s just not what I do anymore.
At some point, I might have been very interested in making sure you understood the latest social media marketing strategies.
The industry has changed and I know that the most benefit for all of my listeners is to make sure that you are professionally representing yourself with a website, an email list, and starting to think about how you can create a product and service of your own.
You have to be willing to change and make continuous improvements.
You have to stay within industry trends, but also staying within the way that your audience is evolving.
We all know that online digital space has changed over the years and in order to stay relevant, you cannot be doing things the way that things were done five years ago.
You have to make sure that you are representing yourself as an expert.
Personal Brand Maintenance
You have to make sure that you are representing yourself as an expert.
This is going to be a big piece of making sure that your personal brand is It’s up to date and you have a strategy behind it that is going to be able to continue to grow over time and to be maintained by yourself.
